When you were a child, you likely didn’t watch “Gigi” on the TV in your parents’ townhouse with the Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell, as New York City’s brightest social and creative lights rang in the new year on the floors below. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut probably didn’t take a liking to you at a social gathering, showing you off to guests as if you were his very own 3-year-old. And it’s virtually certain that even if you did call your own father by his first name, and even if that name happened to be “Don,” your dad was decidedly not the legendary artist Donald Judd, nor did you live in a cast-iron building turned permanent Minimalist art installation in the heart of SoHo, at a time when the neighborhood was not a tony shopping destination but a kind of frontier village — albeit one with loading docks and factories instead of vegetable patches and chicken coops.
Though they might have something of the enchanted quality of a fairy tale, these experiences did, in fact, happen to (respectively) Patricia Herrera Lansing, the daughter of the fashion designer Carolina Herrera; to Zoe Jackson, scion of the actors LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson; and to Flavin and Rainer Judd (named after their father’s fellow Minimalists and friends, the choreographer Yvonne Rainer and the sculptor Dan Flavin). And they happened, crucially, in 1980s New York — a time and place that allowed for an eccentric and productive sociocultural cross-pollination that seems, with every passing year, as the city becomes more expensive and more staid, less and less likely to recur.
For these now-adult children — born at different stages in their parents’ lives, they range in age from 27 to 53 — often first-generation New Yorkers growing up in the then still-gritty, still-weird, still-in-flux East Village or SoHo or TriBeCa or Harlem or even Park Slope, life was significantly not about (or not just about) having famous parents. Rather, it was about witnessing culture making at the closest range possible — from within the family unit — and learning along the way how to become culture makers themselves. And while the privileges that come along with a proximity to glamour and, sometimes, resources, cannot be denied, these children were often exposed to something far rarer and more expansive. They learned at a young age that family could widen to include friends and co-conspirators in both celebration and creative work. And they gathered from both their parents and their parents’ associates that creative work was neither magic nor a chore, but something you never stopped doing, a matter “of passion and choice,” in the words of the writer Nadja Spiegelman, the daughter of cartoonist Art Spiegelman and editor Françoise Mouly. Cultural work was an occupation that was just as, if not more legitimate than, say, practicing law, like those “funny people with briefcases who carried papers,” as Flavin Judd says.