Sumner Crane’s quiet years in Sunset Park

For more than a decade, Sunset Park was home to Sumner Crane, an artist, musician and thinker now remembered mainly for his role in downtown Manhattan’s “no wave” scene of the late 1970s.

Sunset Park residents may not have known much about the artist in their midst, but many knew his wife, Susan Lehman. Sue taught middle school science at John J. Pershing I.S. 220 from around 1989 until she retired in 2018. “Sumner didn’t know anyone in the hood,” she recalled. “I, on the other hand, knew everybody in Sunset Park. Thirty years, 150 students each year — that’s a lot of families.”

Crane was a founding member of Mars, one of the four bands represented on the compilation album No New York, produced by Brian Eno and associated with the experimental post-punk movement that came to be known as no wave. Mars formed in 1976 and performed publicly from 1977 through 1978, exclusively in Lower Manhattan. After the band broke up, Crane released John Gavanti, an album made with musicians from Mars and DNA that has been described as a “no wave opera.” He later continued making music privately in a blues style influenced by Delta bluesman Bukka White.

Though known as a musician, Crane considered himself a painter first, and his visual style changed radically several times over the course of his life. In the early 1980s, he formed a visual-art trio with Rudolph Grey and Arto Lindsay. The three made paintings and drawings separately but signed them all with the same name: Jack Texas. Lindsay recalled that a 1983 Jack Texas show at Danceteria was attended by a young Madonna and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Born Sumner Schoenwetter, Crane grew up in Queens and moved to Manhattan at 19 to study at the New York Studio School. He came to know, work and live with many artists and musicians who helped define downtown New York’s art and music scenes from the 1960s through the 1980s. They included painter Milton Resnick; artist Nancy Arlen, Crane’s partner for a decade and later the drummer in Mars; Mars members Connie Burg and Mark Cunningham; and Lydia Lunch, Ikue Mori, Arto Lindsay and Rudolph Grey.

Many people associated with no wave were in their early 20s or younger and new to New York when they arrived in the mid-1970s. In interviews conducted by Sobel for his Deep Convection oral-history project, they remembered Crane, a New Yorker and a few years older, as an initiator and mentor. Lunch recalled that after arriving in New York she “met my people,” including Suicide and Mars, and called Crane “a total outsider artist.” Lindsay described Crane’s influence as formative: “I really developed [as an artist] in conversation with Sumner,” adding, “Sumner’s idea of who I was helped me become that person that he thought I already was.”

Around 1990, Crane met Lehman, a California transplant who had been living in Sunset Park since the previous year. By 1991, he had moved in with her, and they married in 1995. Crane contributed to their income by painting apartments.

In my memory, Crane’s Sunset Park years were his happiest. He researched a book about Edward Simmons, an American painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Lehman helped with the work, and the couple traveled to New England and Washington, D.C., to see Simmons’ murals and stained-glass windows. The book was never finished, but they published four articles about Simmons in scholarly journals, including Art in America, The Smithsonian and Stained Glass Quarterly.

Crane was voluble and funny, eccentric and intense, and much loved by many friends. An autodidact who never finished high school, he read widely in Greek and Roman history and poetry. His influences ranged from comic-book artist Bob Powell and bluesman Bukka White to jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, and, above all, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

Crane stopped painting for some years while working on the Simmons project, but he began again during his final years in Sunset Park. Lehman recalled one night when he came to bed in the early morning hours, excited because he had completed a painting in a single night — unusually fast for him. It was a sleeping mermaid, shown here.

Crane died of lymphoma in 2003 at age 57. Since 2024, I, his nephew, have been researching his life, conducting oral-history interviews and writing about him through the Deep Convection podcast and newsletter, where I have also shared photographs of paintings that have rarely, if ever, been shown publicly.

Crane remains, in a sense, a resident of the neighborhood: his ashes are interred at Green-Wood Cemetery under his legal name, Sumner Schoenwetter.