The store manager followed me for the third time down the same aisle, and finally he stepped in front of my cart and said, “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. We reserve the right to refuse service, and frankly, people like you make our regular customers uncomfortable.”
People like you.
I looked down at myself. My paint-stained jeans, the ones I wore because I’d come straight from the studio. My old flannel shirt. My gray hair pulled back in a clip, no makeup, sneakers that had seen better decades. I looked exactly like what I was, an old woman who didn’t care much about how she looked when she was working.
What I did not look like, apparently, was someone who belonged in a high-end art supply store where the paintbrushes cost forty dollars each.
“Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
And I left my cart right there in the aisle, full of the expensive supplies I’d been gathering, and I walked out.
The manager had no idea who I was. And the gallery owner three doors down, who would have fainted to see how I’d just been treated, had no idea either, not yet.
My name is Marguerite Toussaint. I’m seventy-four years old, and this is the story of the day I was thrown out of an art supply store for looking too poor to be there, and what that revealed about who sees us and who doesn’t.
Let me tell you who I am, because the store manager certainly didn’t know, and that’s rather the point.
I am a painter. I have been a painter my entire adult life, through decades when it made me no money at all, when I waited tables and cleaned houses and did whatever I had to do to keep myself in canvas and paint. I painted through being ignored, through being told that my work was too this or too that, through the particular invisibility that the art world reserves for women who don’t fit its idea of what an important artist looks like. I painted because I could not not paint. It was the organizing fact of my life.
And then, in my sixties, after forty years of obscurity, something happened that almost never happens. I was discovered. A gallerist saw my work at a tiny group show, a real one, someone with an eye and a reputation, and she understood what she was looking at. She gave me a solo show. It sold out. She gave me another. The critics, who had ignored me for four decades, suddenly decided I was a major talent, a discovery, an important voice that had been overlooked. My paintings began to sell for sums that would have struck my younger self as hallucinations. Museums acquired my work. I became, in my old age, after a lifetime of being nobody, somebody. Rather a significant somebody, in the art world.
I want to be honest about what that success did and didn’t change. It changed my bank account, dramatically. It did not change me, or not much. I still lived in the same modest way I’d always lived. I still painted every day in a studio that was really just a converted garage. And I still dressed, when I was working, like a woman who didn’t care about clothes, because I didn’t, because I was too busy caring about the painting. The success had come too late to teach me to perform wealth. I’d spent too many decades being poor and being fine with it.
So on the day in question, I drove to the fancy art supply store in my old car, wearing my paint-stained work clothes, because I’d run out of a particular cadmium red that I liked and the fancy store was the only place in the city that carried it. I was, at that moment, quite possibly the wealthiest and most successful artist in the building. I was certainly the most accomplished. And I looked, to the young manager who began following me the moment I walked in, like a vagrant who’d wandered in off the street.
He followed me from the moment I entered. I’m old, but I’m not blind, and I’ve spent a lifetime being watched in exactly this way, the watching that poor people and shabby people know intimately. He hovered at the end of aisles. He appeared, suddenly, whenever I picked something up, as if he expected me to slip a forty-dollar paintbrush into my pocket. I ignored it, because I’ve had a lifetime of practice ignoring it, and I gathered my supplies, the cadmium red and a few other things I needed, good supplies, expensive ones, because I could afford the best now and I’d earned it.
And it was precisely because my cart was full of expensive supplies that the manager’s suspicion curdled into something worse. Because in his mind, an old woman in paint-stained clothes could not possibly be gathering hundreds of dollars of premium art supplies legitimately. The very evidence of my ability to pay became, to him, evidence that I was up to something. And so he stepped in front of my cart and asked me to leave, and said the thing about people like you making the regular customers uncomfortable.
I want to tell you why I didn’t simply tell him who I was.
Standing in that aisle, I could have said it. I could have said, young man, I am Marguerite Toussaint, my paintings hang in museums, the gallery three doors down represents me and sold a canvas of mine last month for more than you make in a year, and I could buy this entire store without noticing. I could have watched his face collapse. Part of me, the human part, wanted to.
But I didn’t, and here is why. Because in that moment I was so tired. Not physically. Tired in a deeper way. Tired of a world that sorts people by their surfaces, that decides in an instant who belongs and who doesn’t based on the cut of their clothes and the state of their shoes. I had been on the wrong side of that sorting for forty years, and I had learned something about it that the manager would never learn by having me humiliate him with my credentials. I had learned that the problem was never that the world had failed to recognize my particular importance. The problem was the sorting itself. The problem was that the manager would have been perfectly happy to throw out an old woman in paint-stained clothes who was exactly what she appeared to be, a poor old woman who liked to paint, and would have felt entirely justified. And that woman, the genuinely poor one, the one who saved up to buy a single good brush, deserved to be in that store just as much as I did.
So I didn’t pull rank. I left my cart, and I walked out, and I kept my identity to myself, because announcing it would only have taught the manager to be more careful about whom he humiliated, not to stop humiliating people. It would have made it about me being special, when the truth was the opposite. The truth was that I wasn’t special, that I was just an old woman who liked to paint, same as the poor version of me would have been, and that neither of us should have been treated that way.
But the story didn’t end in the parking lot, because of what happened next, which I did not orchestrate.
The gallery that represented me was, as I said, three doors down from the art supply store. And as I walked to my car, I passed the gallery window, and Vivian, my gallerist, the woman who’d discovered me, happened to be standing in her window arranging a display, and she saw me, and she waved, and she came out to say hello.
Vivian is a force of nature. She is sixty years old, impeccably dressed, and possessed of a ferocity on behalf of her artists that is legendary in the art world. She took one look at my face, because apparently I was not hiding my feelings as well as I thought, and she said, “Marguerite, what’s wrong? What happened?”
And I, because I was tired and because Vivian is the kind of person you tell things to, told her. Not to make trouble. Just because she asked, and because it had rattled me more than I wanted to admit. I told her about the manager, and the following, and the cart, and people like you.
I have rarely seen a person become so angry so fast.
Vivian did not become angry the way the manager had been contemptuous. She became angry the way a mother becomes angry when someone has hurt her child. It was protective, and it was principled, and it was absolutely incandescent. Because Vivian knew exactly who I was, and she knew exactly what I’d survived to become that person, and the idea that some child of a store manager had thrown Marguerite Toussaint out of an art supply store for looking poor struck her as a kind of blasphemy.
But here is what I want you to understand about Vivian, and about what made her response the right one rather than merely a satisfying one. Her anger was not, at its core, about my status. She was angry about the status game itself. Vivian had spent her career fighting for artists the world overlooked, artists like me, artists who didn’t fit the mold, and she understood in her bones that the sorting that had thrown me out of that store was the same sorting that had kept my work in obscurity for forty years. It was the same disease. The manager judging my worth by my clothes and the critics judging my worth by whether I fit their image of an important artist, these were the same failure of vision, the same laziness, the same substitution of surface for substance.
“Come inside,” Vivian said. “Sit down. I need to make some phone calls.”
I want to tell you what Vivian did and did not do, because the distinction matters.
She did not call the store and threaten them. She did not organize a campaign to destroy the manager’s life, or get him fired, or ruin the store. She was angry enough to do all of those things, and she had the connections to do real damage, and I think a part of her wanted to. But Vivian is wise, and her wisdom won out over her anger.
What she did instead was more interesting. She called the owner of the art supply store, whom she knew slightly, because the art world of our city is small and everyone knows everyone. And she did not scream at him. She told him, calmly and precisely, what had happened in his store that afternoon. She told him that his manager had followed an elderly woman through the store, accused her by implication of shoplifting, and thrown her out for looking poor. And then she told him who the woman was.
And she let him sit with the horror of it. Because the owner, unlike his manager, knew exactly who Marguerite Toussaint was. My work had been featured in the very magazines his store advertised in. He understood, immediately and completely, that his store had committed not just a moral outrage but a spectacular unforced error, that they had taken one of the most significant living artists in the region, a woman who bought supplies constantly and could buy the most expensive things they stocked without blinking, and thrown her out for looking poor.
But Vivian, and this is the crucial part, did not let the owner make it about my status either. When he began to fall over himself apologizing, when he began to talk about comping my purchases and giving me a lifetime discount and how mortified he was to have treated someone so important this way, Vivian stopped him.
“Michael,” she said. “Listen to me. You’re apologizing for the wrong thing. You’re horrified because you found out she was important. But your manager didn’t know she was important, and that’s not the point. Your manager threw an old woman out of your store for looking poor. If she had been exactly what she looked like, a poor old woman who loved to paint, it would have been just as wrong. Do you understand me? The apology I want, the only one worth anything, is not to the famous artist. It’s to every person your store treats this way who doesn’t happen to have a gallerist three doors down to make this phone call.”
There was a long silence on the phone, I’m told, and then the owner said, quietly, that he understood, and that he was ashamed, and that he thought she was right.
What came of it was this. The owner came, personally, to the gallery, to apologize to me. And to his credit, he’d heard what Vivian said, because his apology was not the groveling of a man who’d offended a celebrity. It was the genuine contrition of a man who’d been shown something ugly about the business he’d built. He apologized for how I’d been treated. And then he said that he’d been thinking about what Vivian told him, and that he was going to change how his staff was trained, that he was going to make it a firing offense to follow or profile a customer based on their appearance, that he was horrified to realize how many people his store had probably treated this way over the years, people who hadn’t been important enough for anyone to make a phone call.
I told him that this was the only apology worth accepting, and that I accepted it. And I meant it.
The manager was not fired. I want to say that, because I think it matters. I asked that he not be fired. I did not want a young man’s livelihood destroyed as a sacrifice to my wounded dignity. What I wanted, and what the owner agreed to, was that the manager would be part of the retraining, that he would have to understand what he’d done and why it was wrong, not because he’d humiliated someone important but because he’d humiliated someone. Whether that understanding took, I don’t know. You can’t force a person to see. But you can give them the chance, and destroying him would have given him only a grievance, not a lesson.
I did go back to that store, eventually. I finished my shopping. The cadmium red was still good. And the manager, when he saw me, went pale, and then he came over, and he apologized to me directly, and I could not tell you whether he’d truly learned anything or was simply afraid, but he said the words, and I accepted them, and I bought my supplies and went home and painted.
Here is what I have carried away from that day.
I have been, in one lifetime, both the invisible poor woman and the celebrated artist, and they were the same woman, wearing the same paint-stained clothes, and the only thing that changed was whether the person looking at me happened to know my name. And that has taught me something about the whole apparatus of who we see and who we don’t. The manager who followed me through his store was not an unusual monster. He was an ordinary person doing what our whole culture trains us to do, which is to read a person’s worth off their surface, to decide in an instant, based on clothes and age and bearing, who matters and who can be discarded. He was wrong about me in a way that happened to be dramatic, because I turned out to have a name that made his error expensive. But he is wrong in exactly the same way about every shabby, ordinary, un-famous person he profiles and follows and makes uncomfortable, and those people have no gallerist three doors down, and their stories don’t get told.
The thing I want you to take from this is not that the manager should have recognized me. That’s the shallow lesson, and it’s the wrong one. The deep lesson is that it should not have mattered whether he recognized me. The poor old woman I appeared to be deserved to shop in peace exactly as much as the famous artist I turned out to be. They were the same person. They are always the same person. Every nobody is a somebody whose name you haven’t learned, and more than that, every nobody is a somebody even if you never learn their name, even if there’s no name to learn, even if they are exactly as ordinary as they appear. The ordinariness was never a reason to treat them as less. That was always the lie.
I’m seventy-four. I’ve made my peace with most things. But I have not made my peace with the sorting, the endless sorting of people into those who matter and those who don’t, and I don’t intend to. I paint, these days, a great deal about invisibility, about the people the world looks past. The critics say it’s a new direction in my work. They don’t know that it comes from being followed through an art supply store by a boy who thought I was nobody.
He thought I was nobody.
He was righter than he knew, and more wrong than he could imagine. I was nobody. I was just an old woman who liked to paint. And that was always, already, enough to deserve better than what he gave me.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
Lila earned her degree in History and Archival Studies from the University of Edinburgh, where she cultivated her passion for documenting the past and preserving cultural heritage. Her expertise lies in combining traditional archival techniques with modern digital tools, allowing her to create comprehensive and engaging collections that resonate with audiences worldwide.
At TheArchivists, Lila is known for her meticulous attention to detail and her ability to uncover hidden gems within extensive archives. Her work is praised for its depth, authenticity, and contribution to the preservation of knowledge in the digital age.
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