November 2025
Katy Martin talks with Bob Huot about his friend, Hollis Frampton, focusing on what each of them were doing and how their art, teaching and everyday lives overlapped. Bob and Hollis met each other, in the 1960s, in the vibrant, burgeoning art scene in downtown Manhattan. Later, they owned farms within a few miles of each other in upstate New York. Katy also lived downtown and knew both artists by the mid-1970s.
There was an aesthetic, widely shared at the time, that art should be made of common materials and grow out of the rough and tumble of everyday life. Bob’s memories and reminiscences give substance to this, and describe a context for dialogue among artists and for their creative work.
Katy Martin: Going back – “It all started” – when and how did you meet?
Bob Huot: Okay, well, we met at Dave’s Corner.
KM: We love Dave’s Corner!
BH: Dave’s Corner was a 24/7 diner, a greasy spoon at the corner of Broadway and Canal.
KM: The southeast corner! I knew it well.
BH: Exactly. Carl Andre introduced us. Carl and I were in a show that Eugene Goossen did called 8 Young Artists – it’s said to be the first minimal show – it was around 1965, probably fall or winter. We sat and drank coffee and bullshitted and seemed to get along. Hollis and Carl and Frank Stella were all Andover boys[1] and I was a punk from Staten Island.
When I went to Wagner College[2], I studied chemistry, but I’d been making art pretty much all my life. I had a teacher who was a 10th Street artist[3], a guy named Tom Young, and I got to be pals with him. I came into New York to openings and met a lot of the 10th Street artists. I was already an accomplished painter and I had started making little films.
Hollis and I befriended one another, and he let me use his rewinds and his Maier-Hancock hot splicer. He was working as a dye-transfer technician at night, so I had access then. I had been accumulating found footage from trash barrels on Canal Street, and I started putting it together, making little minimal films out of leader and found footage. Hollis, at this moment, had started making films. He was also shooting pictures for artists like Frank Stella and James Rosenquist.
At Hunter College[4], our chairman had a sabbatical. A young artist, Georgia Rave, got the job of programming, and she and I were good pals. I said, okay, why don’t we have film and photography. So we created a film class and a photography class. We hired Hollis to teach photography and I taught film. So I’m going to take credit for getting Hollis started in his academic teaching career.
KM: Cool. And at that point, he’s still mostly taking photos, more than making films?
BH: Yes. He had started, he had made two little films, one called Information[5] and the other Process Red[6].Information was basically a multi-exposure of black and white, maybe Tri-X, with different light flashing around. Process Red was a chemical procedure done to film that he’d shot, which was a lot of puddles, puddles in the street from rain.
Hollis was very meticulous, a real craftsman, and he started making some really interesting films. He shot some beautiful stuff. He’d show me his reels, and I said, well, that’s really nice. Why are you going to chop it all up?
I was not very much help to him with that comment …
KM: Well, that’s the direction you took in your Diary films.
BH: Yes, exactly. Whatever I shot was in the film. In my first diary film, everything was as is. I didn’t cut anything up. Whatever it was, whatever was shot, was the film, and in sequence as I shot it.
KM: As for your comment, I’ve noticed artists do this, and it is helpful. We all make our own work on top of whatever work we’re looking at. That’s a studio visit, right? Everybody makes their own work on top of yours, and you just process that, and go thank you, and somehow it sticks in some way, shape, or form.
But I think your approach to structure is very different than Hollis’s.
BH: Totally.
KM: Hollis was already scripting. Early on, he was thinking about structure and structural films. He was an encyclopedist, in a way. He had these big structures in mind that he would eventually live out. You have an encyclopedic approach too, but it’s different. In other words, it’s a conversation. You can say it was helpful or not helpful, but it seems you two were in conversation.
BH: Oh yeah, I think so. You hinted at the idea that we were traveling through time and space together. I think we were supportive of one another, but we were each on our own journey. How do you describe being close and working at your art and being a friend, and yet, you’re not exactly influenced by each other. You’re traveling parallel through time and space, you know?
KM: Well, I’d put it that you’re in conversation and you’re also absorbing the bigger conversation. You already mentioned James Rosenquist, Frank Stella …
BH: I was already very involved. I was making film and painting. And I was also dealing with Twyla Tharp[7]. I was doing sets and costumes for her and (laughs) she was very high maintenance. And I was teaching and going to pretty much every party and every opening.
KM: Right! There was that.
BH: My life was just packed with art. It was very exciting really.
KM: I’m going to pause here to describe the landscape downtown. There had been this art ghetto formed, below Houston Street, because that neighborhood was cleared out, ostensibly for a road that was supposed to come through, and the old manufacturing buildings were going to be torn down. Then the artists moved in and some years later, after a big fight, the road was stopped. But it was this crazy ghetto where city workers and civil servants came during the day, and then at night, it was empty. Dave’s Corner was one of the few coffee shops for miles around. It was empty.
It was also ours! We were thrown together and it was pretty much just artists, recent college grads from all over the country. It was a really rich time, in terms of access, and we all went to everything. It was very interdisciplinary. It was heady, and I think there was a sense that, hey, we’re making history.
BH: I had a loft on 136 West Broadway.
KM: And Hollis lived over on Walker Street.
BH: He lived at 84 Walker.
KM: That’s close by where you were. So it was a real neighborhood.
BH: It was kind of invisible and yet, we were all working away. And of course, we would be off to Chinatown once or twice a week, and so yeah, there was a whole culture that we were creating.
The thing I was going to say, looking at things from today and looking back, I’m this kid from Staten Island, and suddenly I’m involved with the art world, and I’m sitting in the Cedar Bar with people like Franz Kline, and I realize, this is me! This is where I belong. And so I became involved with the avant-garde and really embraced that, and that became my life and my identity.
Anyway, Hollis was very generous with me, and I’d help him and he’d help me. I remember being his assistant when he was shooting film of smoke and steam. I don’t recall what film that went into[8], but I remember helping him with that. Then he was doing a little package for the tail end of Fluxus, and he was making a pre-cinema device, and the image was me, bouncing a basketball[9]. For a shot that, I think, is in Zorns Lemma[10], I’m driving my old Plymouth Fury station wagon and Hollis is shooting reeds. I took him over to Oakwood Beach, and we cruised along and he shot out of the window of the car.
I’m just thinking of little bits and pieces.
There’s another shot[11]that he made of his then wife, Marcia Steinbrecher, and me, and the dog that seemed to come with the farm[12]. (laughs) The guy that I bought the farm from – his dog – that was his home. Walt would take him to his new home, and he would always come back. So there’s a shot of Marcia and me and Colonel, the dog, walking across the meadow toward the white pine plantation. That’s another image I was involved with[13].
Hollis came up to the farm a lot.
KM: When did you move up to the farm?
BH: I bought it in September of 1969 and moved in January of 1970.
KM: By then, you and Hollis were colleagues, not just friends, so you had a lot to do with each other. So you bought the farm, and he and Marcia came up to see you a fair amount …
BH: Yes.
KM: And then he bought a farm nearby.
BH: He and Marcia had gone to Chicago to visit Marcia’s mother, and Hollis said to me, if you hear of anything for sale, let me know. My neighbor knew of a place and I called Hollis and said, there’s this place in Eaton, and he immediately came right back, went and looked at the place and bought it. That was his home in Eaton, and it was very run down.
KM: (laughs) I know. Bill helped fix it up[14].
BH: So did I.
KM: I don’t know when Bill started fixing it up. But when I met Bill in 1974, fall of 1974 – match-made by Hollis Frampton, I will add – he had just moved to New York. He’d taught at SUNY Binghamton over the summer but was otherwise between jobs, so Hollis hired him to help fix up his house.
Anyway, back to your story. You’re in Columbus and he’s in Eaton.
BH: Yes, so anyway, Hollis would come and stay at the farm, and he helped me a bit around the farm and I helped him with the Eaton property. The barn was a total wreck. I think that eventually got torn down. The house needed an incredible amount of work, and I remember sitting with Hollis and Marcia at the Eaton house and – I’ll tell you a story. So she is sitting there with us, and she looks around and she gestures, does a pan gesture with her hand, and says, “Chartres of Eaton,” and I say, “You mean, shard of Eaton.”
KM: That’s funny. Shall we say Hollis, too, liked to play with words?
BH: Oh, yeah!
KM: I think we all did, but Hollis took that to another level.
BH: And he loved his beer.
KM: Yeah, he did (sigh). I think there was a period where he loved it a little too much.
BH: That’s right.
KM: But he managed, he somehow managed. I wanted to get back to what you were both doing artistically at the time. You talked about several collaborations you did. Were there more?
RF: At a certain moment, we worked together on making titles for our films.
KM: Yes, that was a big pain, back then, pre-digital.
BH: He was a very good technician. We did transfer-type lettering for the titles, so we worked together on those. And we both did gardening. I grew my plants from seed, and they were kind of weedy and not very impressive looking, and Hollis always had really nice started plants, and I thought how the fuck does he do this? And then I realized he was buying started plants from a nursery. I almost felt like, you’re cheating!
KM: (laughs) You’re the purest! But when I think of gardens, I think of Marion Faller. You talked about the early years when Marcia was his wife. But that, we know, ended. And then when Marion came along, it’s not only that she was a fabulous gardener but – maybe you were all doing this – Hollis and Marion were really game to explore local culture and rural life, not just as a city transplant, but to really delve into rural life. She had her whole photo series with Hollis, Rural Splendors. You became a political activist. You had your farm, your dairy business, your heifers, your political work. Did that link you for a while, just exploring where you’d landed?
BH: Well, what do you do with a farm? You farm it!
KM: (laughs)
BH: I got into farming, and I became part of my little town, and eventually served on the town board, and Carol – we haven’t mentioned Carol yet[15] – she became director of planning in the town. She did a lot of work for the town. She even worked on the Town Hall to keep it going before it got condemned, and I eventually bought it and dedicated it to her[16].
She was not a fan of Hollis.
KM: Carol wasn’t?
BH: She was not a fan of Hollis.
KM: (laughs and inaudibly shrugs) Well, Hollis had his off-putting qualities, you know, he could talk your ear off.
BH: Say that again?!?
KM: Let’s just say he could be very, very entertaining and he could also talk you into the ground. I don’t know how to say it but …
BH: Yeah, he could get on your nerves.
KM: Well, we all have our insecurities and Hollis had some of those.
BH: Yeah, he did – out the wazoo. That’s for sure.
KM: And I think some of that was that he was a poor kid from Ohio who landed at Andover There’s a story that I read in Wikipedia – I didn’t hear it from him – that he decided, on a dare with his boy chums, that he was going to pass his exams without cracking a book. Well, of course, he failed. He’d shoot himself in the foot sometimes.
BH: Hollis told me that they had a gym class requirement, and he refused to do that, and he said that’s why he never got his degree.
KM: Maybe it was that.
BH: That’s what he told me.
KM: I don’t know though. It was part of the ethos of the times, that you’re supposed to be this genius – which of course was very gendered, by the way. You had to live up to this myth of being an artist and some of that was pretty stupid.
BH: I was caught up in that.
KM: I think we all were. And women were sidelined …
BH: No, no, no! Well, yes and no. In my life – my first wife was Twyla Tharp.
KM: (laughs) She was hardly sidelined!
BH: Exactly. She started dancing with Paul Taylor, and she had a little part in a dance called Scudorama and she would upstage everybody!
KM: Good for her! She never held back.
BH: You know that about her! She never held back. She was wired to perform.
KM: And perform she did! Now tell me about Carol coming into your life and Marion coming into Hollis’s life – speaking of strong women.
BH: OK! Marion started teaching that photography class at Hunter. That’s how they met. And Hollis started teaching introductory art classes. So he began to get a decent income. He got enough classes to pay the rent. And he and Marion hit it off. Marion had a really good soul. And she was a really good artist.
KM: I can’t say enough good things about Marion. She was salt of the earth and a really good artist.
BH: She was a worker too. She pitched right in. That’s the way Carol was also.
KM: Wait, was Carol teaching at Hunter too?
BH: Carol taught at Hunter. When I started teaching at Hunter, Carol was the graduate department secretary. When I taught at Hunter, one of the first things I did was to befriend the art department secretary.
KM: Because that’s who gets things done.
BH: You got it, baby!
KM: So Carol was a good partner on a lot of levels.
BH: She was … oh, gosh! (laughs) She was the adult in the room.
KM: Yes.
BH: She tolerated me. I think she knew what she was getting. She said one of the reasons she liked me was because I didn’t want to change her. And I could say the same thing about her. She, once in a while, chided me, but she put up with me. She tolerated me. I was so fortunate.
In a way, Marion and Carol were similar in that they were both very talented and just hard-working, great partners. Marion was a great partner for Hollis, and Carol was for me. Hollis really lucked out, as did I.
KM: I agree.
BH: Hollis and Marion had a really nice boy named Will Faller, who is now an antique dealer. I’m skipping around …
KM: It’s fine.
BH: But anyway, around that time, we became estranged … We were estranged for quite a while, and that was sad. But then, toward the end of his life, when he became quite debilitated from his cancer, I went out of my way to call him and talk with him. He had discovered Bela Bartok, and I had quite a collection of records – I had just about everything that Bartok had recorded – so that was a nice connection. We renewed our friendship at the end of his life, which I was very happy about.
KM: Yes. Well, friendships are friendships. You get close to people, they have lumps.
BH: You know, he was like a brother. Scott MacDonald called me Hollis’s big brother, which in a way was true. We were important to each other. And it troubled me to suddenly be in turbulent waters. We were pretty tight. And then he got the chance to go off to Buffalo, and then eventually moved out there.
KM: Hollis stayed with us a lot when we lived on Worth Street [1977-1980] which was a great pleasure. He was an incredibly funny and wonderful man. But then various things happened in our lives – we moved to Franklin Street and had to build that loft from scratch, and also Bill’s mother became ill – and I think Hollis left us alone. We lost track of him for a couple of years, and then we heard he’d been keeping to himself. We didn’t know he had cancer.
BH: He died in 1984.
KM: Yes. I know because he called us just before he died, and I was at that point about to have my first baby. I was close to my due date. And he said, are you going to name it Hollis? And we sort of went, what!?! (laughs)
We had no idea that he was dying. He died a few weeks later. And Jo, my older daughter – I always think his stars went into her. She shares a lot of wonderful qualities with him. So it was an I love you call. And I think that endures. I really do. It endures the ups and downs.
BH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
KM: I was going to ask another question. After Hollis bought the farm, he was still teaching at Hunter. Did he keep his place on Walker Street?
BH: He kept 84 Walker[17]. It was a place where I spent a fair amount of time. I shot Black and White Film[18]there and, of course, used his rewinds and splicer until I got my own. When Twyla and I separated, I used to spend evenings at 84 Walker. So it was an important place for me. 84 Walker, the building, was rented by Frank (Stella).
KM: The whole building?
BH: Yes. Hollis had the loft on the top floor. The second floor, Frank had a young man, Bob – I don’t remember his last name – and he painted the paintings, so it was like a factory. And then the next floor functioned in a variety of ways. Carl (Andre) stored some sculpture. He had made a few structures out of blue Styrofoam bars and after the show, he stored them there, and Frank got pissed off at him and threw it all out.
KM: Geez!
BH: And an artist named Arman had stuff there too. And I think he might have stayed there. 84 Walker was a busy place.
KM: That’s all my questions. Do you have anything you’d like to add?
BH: Well, I would just say that Hollis and I had an important friendship. I think it contributed to our lives as artists, and I thank him for his generosity to me. I thank him for his friendship.
KM: And you were also both part of a bigger group of friends, all up-and-coming …
BH: The thing of it is that we had kind of a community. It wasn’t anything official but …
KM: I was part of that, too. I’m a bit younger, and I can’t even remember when I met you, or how. But we also go back to that era, although not as close friends, for sure. That came much later but – back then, we all knew each other.
BH: Did you come with Bill to one of my parties?
KM: One of your three-day parties at the farm? Yes. And Anthony McCall screened Line Describing a Cone off your front porch. I think maybe that was the premier screening.
BH: Yes, we projected it out into the world on a foggy night.
KM: Exactly. We were there for that. We brought our little tent. It was quite a scene. And yes, we were all friends. I think that’s the point of the show, the way Anne Breimaier wants to curate it. It wasn’t so much that there was this towering influence of one or two people. I think what art history does is, it takes the most famous people and assumes that they were influencing everybody else. And it just wasn’t …
BH: This was not true.
KM: It was not like that.
BH: We were all working. We were all part of this really creative period. It was very exciting.
Bob Huot and Katy Martin are both artists who work in painting, film, photography and performance. They are both affiliated with Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris.
Katy Martin
Bob Huot
[1] Philips Academy, Andover is an elite private high school.
[2] Wagner College is located in Staten Island.
[3] At the time, Tenth Street was the epicenter of new movements in painting.
[4] Bob taught at Hunter College for 28 years, starting in 1963.
[5] Hollis Frampton, Information, 1966, 16mm, black and white, 4 minutes.
[6] Hollis Frampton, Process Red, 1966, 16mm, color, silent, 3:30 minutes.
[7] Bob’s first wife was the choreographer, Twyla Tharp.
[8] That footage went into the film, States, 1967, 16mm, black and white, silent, 17:30 minutes.
[9] The artwork Bob describes is Hollis Frampton, Phenakistiscope – Ball (Side 1), S.M.S. 4, 1968.
[10] Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma, 1970, 16mm, color, sound, 60 minutes.
[11] This shot is also in Zorns Lemma.
[12] Bob bought a farm in upstate New York.
[13] Bob participated in more films than he’s remembering here, including Manual of Arms, 1966, 16mm, black and white, silent, 17 minutes, and Artificial Light, 1969, 16mm, black and white, silent, 25 minutes.
[14] Bill Brand is Katy’s husband.
[15] Carol Kinne was Bob’s second wife.
[16] Carol died in 2016, and in 2018, Bob opened the Carol Kinne Memorial Columbus Center in the former Town Hall.
[17] Hollis gave up the Walker Street loft sometime around 1973, when he started commuting from Eaton to teach at SUNY Buffalo.
[18] Robert Huot, Black and White Film, 1968-1969, 16mm, black and white, silent, 8:40 minutes.