I had made a demo with Gabby, my bandmate. So the whole time I was doing music I was doing painting and drawing, and I really didn’t know which was going to be the thing that I would pursue.Īfter college, I was like, “Should I try to make it in visual arts, or should I try to make it in music?” Just randomly - well, not so randomly - the music thing just started rolling. Then I went on to college, and that was sort of my minor, I guess. Then I went to high school at LaGuardia School Of The Arts in New York, so I started formally training in ninth grade. What’s your background there?ĬUNNIFF: Well, my mom was an artist. STEREOGUM: I understand that, in addition to being a musician, you’ve done visual art your entire life.
We called up Cunniff for a conversation in which we covered a little bit of everything: her art, what to expect during her exhibition’s opening night (Cunniff has an exclusive acoustic performance planned), what’s next for Luscious Jackson, and getting “a nightclub education” - i.e., club-hopping around early-’80s New York City with the teenage Beastie Boys.
And much like her music, Lyric And Word Paintings is heavily inspired by pre-Giuliani New York City, where graffiti, street art, punk, and hip-hop flourished and no one thought to check for ID. This is so satisfying, this one’s ready to go out to the world.’ That’s how I felt about these paintings.”Ĭunniff’s newfound efforts have paid off: Come September 20, she’ll launch her first exhibition of original artwork, titled Lyric And Word Paintings. When we finished our first song for In Search Of Manny, ‘Daughters Of The Kaos,’ I remember putting it on my old stereo system and sitting there and going, ‘All right. “For the first time, I felt really excited about my paintings in the same way I had about music. “After, I made really big watercolor paintings for some friends,” she says. It was around then that Cunniff started focusing on visual art - something she’d studied since childhood but never actively pursued as a career. In two years’ time, they dropped a crowd-funded LP, Magic Hour. With some help from neighborhood peers the Beastie Boys, who signed the quartet to their label, Grand Royal, Luscious released four critically beloved discs - 1992’s In Search Of Manny EP, 1994’s Natural Ingredients, 1996’s Fever In Fever Out (home to the grooving staple “Naked Eye”), and 1999’s Electric Honey - before splitting in 2000.Īfter parting ways, Cunniff put out a solo full-length, City Beach (2007), and later reunited with Luscious Jackson in 2011. New York isn’t just Cunniff’s home - it’s also where she formed alt-pop mainstay Luscious Jackson in the early ’90s. “Every time I’ve come here over the last 10 years I’ve been like, ‘Yeah, I could move here.’ For various reasons we never did, but I thought, ‘God, if I was 10 or 20 years younger like didn’t have all this stuff established, I could see myself doing that.'” “There’s something cool about LA,” she muses. She even admits her relocation fantasies. Like many other Brooklynites (Cunniff currently resides in Park Slope), she’s openly fascinated with the City Of Angels, specifically its sprawling mid-century architecture and seemingly stuck-in-time road signage. But today the Luscious Jackson frontwoman and founding member is in Los Angeles visiting her brother, who, naturally, works in TV. Jill Cunniff is a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised. Tracking Down is a Stereogum franchise in which we talk to artists who have been out of the spotlight for a minute.