For Her, Talent and Art Comes Out in the Wash

Slater Barron is into lint. Like human vacuum cleaners, she and her friends scour America’s clothes dryers retrieving the stuff.

“People mail it to me,” she said. “They bring it to parties. They stop by the house with bags of it.”

She, in turn, makes the lint into art. Barron, a 56-year-old grandmother from Long Beach, is probably the country’s best-known lint artist.

“It’s accessible because it’s pretty,” she said of her favorite medium. “People don’t have to be afraid of it. I draw them in with the prettiness and novelty, then hit them with the concept.”

The concept: Things are not always as they appear to be. That beneath a seemingly ordinary surface lies something awry. That, like lint, life’s fabric is fragile.

Soft Look of Impressionism

It is a theme that runs through most of Barron’s work, which has been featured in major art exhibitions and has attracted widespread media attention. Consisting primarily of large, three-dimensional “environmentals” and smaller portraits all made from lint, the work speaks of nostalgia, disintegration and death. Her art “has the soft look of Impressionism,” she said.

Barron has not always been a lint artist. Or any kind of artist at all, for that matter. The former wife of a career military officer, she spent much of her life raising four children in the four corners of the world. But in the early 1960s in France, she said, she humored a friend by taking a class that changed her life. It was a course in oil painting organized by the local officers’ wives club. And from then on, she said, her passion was painting.

The artist’s interest in lint emerged 10 years later when she was desperately trying to paint while accomplishing her many chores as a housewife, which included doing the family wash. “Every time I’d start to paint,” she recalled, “the dryer would buzz” signaling the end of its cycle. “So I decided to make a positive thing out of it. I didn’t mind going out to change the wash if it would help me make art.”

In 1975, after the breakup of her marriage, Barron earned a master’s degree in fine arts and eventually went to work at Brooks College in Long Beach, where she teaches color theory and design. That same year she sold her first lint piece, a work called “Rosalie’s Jeans,” for $17.76. She has sold other works, some for as much as $800.

Mural Made of Lint

Her works range from gigantic conceptual environmentals--such as a 17-by-27-foot room in which figures of her parents sit on a couch watching television--to portraits of various family members that include a series of five-foot-high depictions of her elderly mother’s gradual deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease. One of her favorite environmentals, Barron said, was a work titled “Ladies’ Luncheon,” in which a group of lint women sit on uncomfortable looking lint stools eating food made of lint.

“It was about my fear that life could turn into a series of ladies’ luncheons,” she said. “That nothing would be left” but staleness.

Barron’s current project is a frog commissioned by a collector in New Jersey. Using a dried frog carcass that she found as a model, the artist is carefully fashioning its likeness from the gobs of lint she keeps stored in a stack of boxes lining the studio behind her house. “I want to make him an L.A. frog,” she said, “with lots of bright, flashy, new-wave colors.”

In fact, she said, California is a good place to be a lint artist because of the brightly colored clothing favored here.

“A woman on my mother’s street used to go door to door collecting lint for me,” she said, alluding to the army of friends, admirers and students who regularly check their dryers for the sake of her art.

After receiving their offerings, Barron painstakingly sorts them by color. Sometimes, she said, she finds traces of the contributors’ lives in the fluffy mess. Ground up theater tickets, human or animal hairs, grass cuttings, clothing labels, bits of tissue paper or wire or matches--all contribute to the richness and color of the material, she said.

“It’s unique,” said David Bradshaw, who prepares exhibits at the Long Beach Museum of Art and has seen Barron’s work. “What I really appreciate is that she collects it from so many people. People don’t normally think of their lint, and she brings it to their attention.”

Josine Ianco-Starrels, art coordinator for the city of Los Angeles and director of the city’s art gallery where Barron’s work has been shown, said she is attracted by the artist’s preoccupation with the past. “She addresses certain experiences that have to do with nostalgia, with memory, with very human feelings,” Ianco-Starrels said. “The material has a kind of kinship to dust and dust is about memory.”

For Barron, however, the future is still of concern. “I would really love for a museum to buy a piece,” she said during a recent interview in her studio. “Every year I say to myself, next year at the Whitney. I guess it’s just difficult to sell lint.”