How art helped Lucy Degidon navigate a lifetime of change and resilience

Lucy Degidon is an 84-year-old singer and children’s art teacher at Park Reservoir Housing Cooperation’s studio. Decades ago, she was a “quietly wild” teenager from Brooklyn, she said, who found grounding in the arts.

She is also the artist behind Amalgamated Nursery School’s 8-foot bulletin board that is re-decorated throughout the year based on seasons. Within the past eight years Degidon has been designing, some themes included a flying train with animals and children aboard and a vibrant beach with scattered umbrellas. While her art has brightened the days of those who pass by, it has also been a source of resilience for the artist as she navigated challenges in her life.

“You find out what is at your core, something that really means something to do,” Degidon explained. “It doesn’t have anything to do with money, it has to do with love and passion.”

Degidon’s apartment walls are adorned with doodle cutouts and her own vibrant,  loose brushwork paintings. Her living room overflows with framed photos of loved ones, plants, books and knick-knacks — everything with a unique story attached to Degidon’s life as an artist, a singer, a teacher, a mother and a romantic partner.

Her interest in art began as a child, when she would create personalized greeting cards for family members. It grew from there into a focus on animals and people, with the aim of portraying a sense of personality.

Degidon was an aspiring actress growing up. As a young teenager, she was accepted into a performing arts high school in Midtown, but the exhaustion of a long commute and intense pressure on herself to succeed led her to develop bulimia. She changed course, enrolled in a local school, and started studying commercial art. Degidon felt accepted there.

“That was where I belonged,” Degidon recalled. “Artists don’t fit in any particular box. The people from the neighborhood who were similar to me — more or less — we fit together.”

At 17, Degidon was living in the West Village with a friend of a friend, waitressing and teaching an improvisation class. She took notice of a poet who would recite his work in local coffee shops, and quickly became infatuated — as did he. The poet proposed and they ran away together to Maryland to be wed, but annulled the marriage three months later.

“I was pretty wild — quietly wild,” Degidon recalled.

A few years later, she met a handsome actor who would become her husband. They settled down in the East Village, paying $40 for rent in a neighborhood with a bustling art scene. In the ‘60s, Degidon and her husband had a running puppet show in New Jersey called “Lucy Lou and the Lollipop Players.” Degidon was, of course, Lucy Lou.

By the time she was in her 40s, Degidon said her husband had become verbally and physically abusive. Thinking she may divorce him and have to support herself, Degidon went back to school and got a degree in graphic design from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Her graduation in 1989 was also about the time she got divorced.

For the next 18 years, Degidon worked as an art teacher at public schools across the city. Despite feeling like she was sometimes mistreated by staff and students, teaching served as somewhat of a lifeline. It also gave her a sense that she was in the right place in life, and capable at her job.

“I think teaching really kept me sane,” Degidon said. “You have to have something in your life that’s stable.”

In 2002, Degidon was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. She said she imagined herself as  a phoenix, rising from the ashes. Faced with survival, Degidon said something kicked in, and she asked herself, “Do you want to go on and recover or is this it?”

Recovery was depressing, she said, and she moved in with her cousin who lived at Amalgamated for support. Degidon read that volunteering helps improve mental health, and started giving her time to the Amalgamated Nursery School and nonprofits Jewish Association Serving the Aging and Van Cortlandt Park Alliance. With the alliance, she taught some of the program’s teens how to draw.

Art, Degidon said, was a way to rehabilitate herself.

“Art has always helped me,” Degidon said. While she was recovering in a rehabilitation center, Degidon said she told the staff, “Just give me a pen and paper.”

After retiring and moving into Amalgamated in 2007, Degidon took notice of a mostly unused art studio across the street from her building — formerly occupied by Amalgamated’s wave of artists from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, Degidon said. She started holding art classes for kids from Amalgamated, but also local schools and churches.

In her own work, Degidon said she tries to capture the character of the subject.

One of her paintings shows a woman with glasses and dark blonde curly hair next to a dog with the same hair color, as if they were “sitting and waiting to be served at a desk,” Degidon said. The inspiration came from volunteering at JASA, where a woman with special needs expressed her fondness of a volunteer for having the same color of hair as her service dog.

Another piece features a seagull against a dark orange background, “the mayor of Orchard Beach,” Degidon called the bird.

Aside from teaching at the Park Reservoir studio, Degidon also teaches kids weekly at Bronx-based nonprofit James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center. She often uses puppets to help the kids practice verbal skills and exercise creativity coming up with shows — a method she said likely dates back to her Lucy Lou days.