My American Dream: This Land is Your Land

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon, 2016–2017

Oil on linen 48 × 60 inches

This work is part of a larger, decade and on-going narrative work My American Dream which I have been creating since 9-11.

The Grand Canyon at Sunrise concentrates on this great park and therefore nature in general, in context speaking through the narrative allegory to bring symbolic meaning to the works in our perilous times.

Grand Canyon at Sunrise, is part of a larger body of work regarding this great American national park, and painted from my own photo from one of several trips I took there with my husband Andrew Madrid, I hope to depict the sublime aspect of feeling a small part of a big thing when regarding the immensity of nature, the famous El Tovar hotel standing in for humanity.

Like the transcendentalist belief of we are part of nature and all of nature is alive, I’m hoping to build on the American landscape tradition, but painted with exactitude, like the Hudson River School, to depict micromanaged aspects as realistic as possible. However, I’m also hopefully allowing, like the school of American Modernism (that regarded nature with allowing one’s own subjective outlook bring to new life an abstraction of reality from what one sees) to form an aesthetic work that goes beyond reality to a more synaesthetic and spiritual realm.

As in Japanese screens and poetry throughout the world, Spring stands for renewal, hope, and growth. This picture was taken on a journey with my husband and family, on a trip moving West to California to live and teach at USC after two decades in New York City.

After Duccio, The Temptation of Christ in Washington D.C., 2021

Oil on panel 17 × 18 1/8 inches

This painting is based on the original by Duccio di Buoninsegna at the Frick, The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain (1308-11), one of my favorite paintings in the world. Originally part of a giant commissioned altarpiece, the infamous Maestà, for the Siena Cathedral, it was just one small panel of illustrating from birth to passion of Christ, that was also amongst larger panels by Duccio of the Madonna and Child, the death and glorification of the virgin, in an epic graphic-novel like sculptural huge freestanding high altarpiece. The Maestà is arguably one of the best and most beautiful panel paintings ever created, and was known throughout Italy in its time, parts separated in 1771 and this panel was brought into the Frick collection in 1927.

On my many visits to the Frick building (also one of my favorite museums in the world!) I would always make time to pause and take a moment with this little treasure of a painting and say a little prayer. Even though I’m not religious, I consider myself spiritual, and this image works like a Byzantine Icon painting in that it Duccio was working within a similar tradition and is able to imbue such life into the work as if to seem like it was talking to you (as probably when he was painting, he was channeling the spirits and angels in each of the works he was composing!). In the Bible, this image illustrates the scene, after Christ’s 40 days and 40 nights in the desert fasting, when devil appears and offers Him “all the kingdoms of the world” if Christ will worship him (Matthew 4:8–11)” Of course Christ rejects him and exiles him. In the original Duccio, there is this amazing “toy town” that resembles his native Siena and the hillsides surrounding them, giving symbolic weight by the exaggerated size of Christ and the devil over the scene. Later, experts think that the angels behind Christ were added in by some unknown artist to help balance out the panel.

When I think of negative things, I sometimes think of this image, casting out the negativity with a mental graphic image. This works when meditating to Buddhist Thangka paintings, who act as a meditative cosmological structure you are supposed to suture into by relating your inner mind to the iconic characters of the buddhas represented, like in an RPG game allowing them to become your avatar as you transcend into their world in order to learn to emulate from them peaceful ways of being. Similarly, in Byzantine times, a monk might paint a spiritual entity thinking they were channeling the original spirit, like an aesthetic cell-phone call into another spiritual plane. The figure they were painting would come alive in their mind and speak to them. Byzantine soldiers going into battle might have an icon on their shield, and they would pray to that icon as if it could hear them and was alive, like characters in a Harry Potter-world painting. The first great Master of the Sienese school, Duccio’s art represents the culmination of the Italo-Byzantine style in Siena and was the foundation for Sienese Gothic Art. But also, Duccio serves as the bridge into the Renaissance given the warmth and compassion that comes through his brush—these weren’t merely cookie-cutter icons, but images that seem to breath and be alive, the warmth and “realness” of the Renaissance to make figures feel and look more human.

The original painting works for me (even more than the incredible Duccio Madonna and Child, which I’ve also learned greatly from by appropriating this image some years ago. When I meditate towards the image, it can wish away negative thoughts just as Christ dismisses the devil, but also seems like the figures are almost living beings, like the shrunken people in vials in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein.

Jan. 6 2021 was a vile day for America and the world, the culmination of Trump’s evil, the would-be uprising that nearly succeeded (and is still a threat) of a fascist coup. Shaken by the last four years of this devil and wanting to vanquish him and his minions mentally from America, I painted this work. I collaged into the image iconic architectural landscapes of New York City, starting from the Empire State Building on the right, through Washington D.C. (with Christ’s feet standing on the Capital dome), as He banished the devil in this case past Los Angeles and San Francisco on the very left out of the country (and hopefully the world!). I left in Duccio’s mountains, including his Mount of Temptation and bits and pieces of his Siena-style Jericho, which surprisingly blended into easily, graphically and metaphorically, our America.

I listened to the (James Earl Jones!) narrated audiobook version of the New Testament, along with the soundtracks I grew up with (my way into the knowledge of Christianity, as I am a half Jew—dad side—and half Baptist—mom—and we are agnostic but spiritually friendly) Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, rock albums with Christ related themes (Tommy, etc.) and contemporary spiritual pop creators. Sufjan Stephens was my main contemporary soundtrack to train my mind into the feelings I wanted to project in this image. Duccio is transcendent and impossible to beat—the Madonna and Child had so many angels dancing on the pins of every micro-managed moment—there were even graphic hieroglyphs in the M.C. Escher like 3D proscenium of that image. Here, too, surrounding Christ’s halo, etched into the gold gilding of the original background, were strange forms, letters, and symbols that my artist friend Celeste Dupuy-Spencer mentioned might be talismanic gateways into other realms. The devil’s face was near impossible to figure out—not only was it weirdly scratched around its head, in the chiaroscuro of his visage one can make out—sort of—eyes, nose, and mouth, but these seem constantly vacillating and moving in the push-pull of scrutinizing succinctly such tiny and purposefully obscured moments (it must have been terrifying for Duccio to paint, thinking he might be “alive”). Christ on the other hand had ineffable attitude, stern but somehow caring and compassionate. On my off time I watched the best of the Jesus films, especially including the terrific Scorsese “Last Judgement of Christ”, where Dafoe captures Christ’s attitude in great contemporary fashion, Pasolini’s masterpiece “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew” and the amazing Zeffirelli 1977 tv series Jesus of Nazareth, where Ken Russell favorite (and Tommy star!) Robert Powell makes a powerful Jesus come to life, belligerent and punk, but with glowing eyes to die for (that don’t blink in the entire film).

This helped me get into the spirit of the Jesus character while painting him—also as a teacher and Chair of the 2D department at the University of Southern California, I have a much humbler (obviously) leadership position, but in terms of the politics of school and the herding of kittens trying to inspire students, honestly Jesus is a non-denominational inspiration of the ultimate in caring and compassion (obviously). But most of all, I was thinking of America, the tragedy of the Trump era, also the conservative path we have been walking forever, but most pronounced for me in my generation, what began in the Anita Bryant anti-gay and Phyllis Schlafly anti-ERA/feminism movements gathering forces with the racists and fundamentalists in form the conservative party that ultimately bore Trump and his brainwashed minions, fighting for some kind of Trump worship, to bring down American democracy. As the quote from Hannah and Her Sisters goes “if Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he’d never stop throwing up”. I do believe the forceful power of good and evil, that evil is like a virus that gestates and gathers power, and it’s up to us to fight the good fight and rid our country of this fascistic, racist, misogynist, homophobic movement that uses false religiosity to gain strength from ignorant people to rise to overtake the good of the people. If we don’t recognize this and fight back and rid ourselves of the people who give in to greed and the promise to rule “all the kingdoms in heaven” then we are doomed. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminds us, “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice,’ and we need to do all we can to make this happen for the good of our country and our democracy.

Zitkála-Šá (after Gertrude Käsebier), 2021

Oil on linen 50 × 37 inches

This is from a photo of the great Zitkála-Šá (Lakota for Red Bird; February 22, 1876 – January 26, 1938). The original sepia-toned platinum print this was based on is from 1898. is from 19 Zitkála-Šá was famous in her time for many different reasons, but pertinent to this image, she was an exquisite musician, who performed her violin, after studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, at the White House for William McKinley. She also wrote the libretto and songs, and played Sioux melodies, which became the basis for the composition, The Sun Dance Opera, a collaboration with Anglo William F. Hanson, which was critically acclaimed upon its premier in Utah, and, traveled to Broadway (although only crediting Hanson). This is considered the first “American Indian” opera and featuring members of the Ute Nation in the cast, one of the few operas to concentrate on themes of indigenous people, where it focused on translating oral traditions into written ones…. The photo was taken, inspired by this part Zitkála-Šá’s amazing history, by Gertrude Käsebier, who herself was truly interesting. Käsebier (serendipitously born on the same day of the month as I, May 18—but in 1852, died October 12, 1934) was an independent minded (separated but financed by her husband?) photographer who first studied painting with the celebrated luminist and teachers Arthur Wesley Dow and Frank Drummond, and a follower of the arts and crafts movement, perhaps inspiring the floral motif. Käsebier revered the Sioux Indians and took many pictures of great leaders and friends from this tribe, but here had a session with Zitkála-Šá that rewarded many great images, holding the violin and books, and posing solemnly both in tribal and western dress. Käsebier, who hated living with her husband and therefore moved far away, seems almost in love with this amazing woman. She used a painterly gum-bichromate process for this image, recognizing photography as a great art form (she showed alongside and was supported by Alfred Stieglitz and Steichen, and more) making the background into a painterly gesture of what I perceived to be sunflowers and synesthetic content. I translated the original black and white image into color, with what I hope to be compassion and great respect to honor Zitkála-Šá (my husband Andrew is also part indigenous and is almost like a two-spirit type persona), and she has great meaning to us (and also an homage to this terrific photographer, who also fought for women’s rights and the rights of women to be artists and art photographers).

Zitkála-Šá was much more than a musician and composer (although she was famed for this, too). Zitkála-Šá was a tremendously important and influential writer, and activist leader for indigenous causes. She wrote about the needs and agency of indigenous peoples of all tribes, from a political and contemporary point of view, but also from her own deeply personal and incredibly complex background. These were published in the most well-read publications of her day, such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harpers, and published essays of her autobiography in magazines that were later reprinted in her lifetime in books. She also was a prolific author of children’s stories and Native American tales for children, much of which are still in print, and that I listened to while painting this portrait of this fantastic woman.

She was born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and was a Yankton Sioux woman of both native American and white ancestry (she was also known as Gertrude Simmons). She wrote movingly of her own story, growing up on the reservation in a happy, utopic life amongst her community, and then being convinced at age 8 to follow Quaker Missionaries upon their beckoning (like a scene from Pinocchio where children are trapped and sent to an island), to come to a Quaker missionary-run boarding school with the philosophy of “Kill the Indian, and save the man”—educating youth to become more white, stripping them of their identity and heritage, and conforming them to be fellow Quakers. In devastating stories like “The School Days of An Indian Girl: The Cutting of My Long Hair,” she writes eloquently of how she was tricked to come to the school along with all her friends, and the symbolic castration of having her hair cut upon arrival (a symbol of power for them) and other abuses, made with stupid malevolent so-called benevolence of the colonizers. She has a conflicted relationship, however, with schooling, as that she ultimately excelled at the school as a leader, debater (where she won awards and traveled the country) and grow her love for music to study as a violinist at the New England Conservatory of Music. After her success there, and as a musician, she went back to teach at the very school system she was brought up in, thinking that she could bring good to those children by representing who they were in a successful fashion, and teach music. However, when she went back to her home, to recruit on the part of the school more children, and to see her mother and family, who had sunken into an economic and spiritual depression, she turned against the school and its ideology, and instead rebelled against that system, by leaving and then becoming something of a whistle-blower, writing about the genocide of her and all indigenous people, the abuse of the system that she was brought by, and ultimately to become a political leader.

In 1913, Zitkála-Šá started to lobby for the U.S. citizenship, voting, and sovereignty rights for indigenous people nationally, and was appointed the secretary of the Society of American Indians, the first national rights organization run by and for American Indians. She edited their American Indian Magazine and became even more involved when, along with her husband, she co-founded the National Council of American Indians, lobbying for the power and preservation of American Indian Heritage and traditions. She and her books were famous—Helen Keller even wrote a poignant letter to Zitkála-Šá to congratulate her on the artistic success of her work.

When I painted this portrait, along with all the audiobooks, podcasts, and panels, I played her articles and stories the most. They were incredibly well written, and political, personal, visionary, and full of feeling. Her articles were fascinating, both for the history of what she and her people had gone through, but also for the firsthand information of day-to-day life, told from the point of view of both she in her current times, and allegorized as when she saw the utopic life of her tribe as a child. Her children’s stories were also perhaps the most poignant—using the soft-revolution vehicle of children’s stories, meant to entertain (and historicized and bring from spoken to written word native legends of sprites and spirits, but with political bite and some phantasmic scenes that rival Rimbaud. Her “Dance in a Buffalo Skull” about dancing mice unaware of a wildcat who appears in a fiery hallucinogenic glow against the skull of a Buffalo, sending them to their doom—or their escape to safety, perhaps a discourse of how her people were led to possible demise—but also their resistance and strength.

I also played traditional music of indigenous peoples, and the intense music from live Pow-wows. But in trying to be understanding her conflicted background that conflated cultures, violin sonatas and compositions that she might have played as a musician or enjoyed, trying for early recordings that perhaps she might also have heard in her lifetime. Honestly, I also played a lot of Joni Mitchell, who I felt had the right emotive tone for the melancholy, but also brilliance and power of this strong female protagonist. I had just had a dog die from a rare disease, but also was nursing their sister dog, who was in Stage 3 and then Stage 4 lymphoma, and another dog soon to pass of old age. Like all the works I paint, I live through the painting, and Zitkála-Šá, who spoke with great wisdom, was also, like all the figures in this exhibition, a philosopher activist, and a poet. She wrote much of sunflowers poignantly (which I love too, growing up in the planes of Colorado–and of course the Sunflowers—and other fauna—like the peach trees of Van Gogh). This painting helped to us to mourn our loss, the vehicle of the painting like a talisman for keeping on the good fight for what is important and optimism and hope.

Zitkála-Šá wrote many great passages, here was one that particularly struck me while painting (from “The Blue Star Woman”

“The times are changed now,” she muttered under her breath. “My individual name seems to mean nothing.” Looking out into space, she saw the nodding sunflowers, and they acquiesced with her. Their drying leaves reminded her of the near approach of autumn. Then soon, very soon, the ice would freeze along the banks of the muddy river. The day of the first ice was her birthday. She would be fifty-four winters old. How futile had been all these winters to secure her a share in tribal lands. A weary smile flickered across her face as she sat there on the ground like a bronze figure of patience and long-suffering…”

Dr. Martin Luther King and Family, 2021

Oil on linen 60 × 63.5 inches

This is from a snapshot taken of Dr. Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, and their family (clockwise, Dexter (3), Yolanda (8), Bernice (11 months), and Martin Luther King III (6) on the bear rug), taken in their Atlanta, Ga, home, probably in 1964. I love this family and everything they stand and fight for, and have painted many images of Dr. King, including a painting of the whole family at the piano, (in the same house and wallpaper!) during the presidential debates between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton in 2008, when they were both invoking their legacy. That work was entitled “Drum Majors” as from his famous last speech “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” I hope that we all are part of the family of civil and human rights, that with each generation, we can follow the great man’s legacy to fight for justice and civil equality, using the methods of peaceful, non-violence that he inherited from Gandhi. In the too short span of his activism, from 1955 to 1968, he and the civil rights movement were able to change America and the world, however much of what he strove for is currently being threatened in our tenacious times of conservative and fascist, racist leaders and uprisings.

While painting this work, I listened to the Clayborne Carson books of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King Jr. on Leadership, The King Years by Taylor Branch, YouTube videos of his speeches, and wonderful YouTube videos of Coretta Scott King’s interviews and speeches. Obviously, Dr. King is a giant, and from children in grade school to seniors in homes, amateur and professional artists all around the world have and continue to depict the great man, and this portrait of he and his family are just one grain of sand in a sublime beach of humanities homages to their hero. I was born in 1966, and he and his work have permeated wonderfully my existence through my life, and I know that personally I wouldn’t be the same person, enjoying my interracial marriage with my (Latino and part Indigenous) husband without his enormous influence and power for change. He was a fantastic orator, and his glorious speeches are incredibly moving still today, and gave me hope and courage during the painting of this work in. Also, the eloquent Coretta Scott King gave me edification—listening to her autobiography of her and her family gave me further insight to their home life—that was also threatened by Klansmen, their home bombed, etc., during the time of this photo, and her and her children’s enormous courage as the stood by their father and husband during his long battles for justice.

In this home, there was this fantastic wallpaper, of an ornate floral theme that for me was a talisman to the terrific energy surrounding them, and almost heavenly realm that swirled surrounding them, almost as if they were Serafin angels alit in another cosmic dimension. This was a snapshot, that had been thumbtacked (and torn), the thumbtack became like a brilliant light—sun or moon—beaming in the ether surrounding them. I paint expressively, but as Ms. King had mentioned to her husband, to always make sure that his actions and words were geared towards the greater good beyond himself and towards justice, I hope that as much as my unconscious mind might be driving my brush along with my conscious observations looking at this blissed out, patinaed-in-time Kodachrome snapshot, that I pay homage to the man and the family more than any expressionist zeal that was inspired by them and the movement.

While living, Coretta Scott King was an activist with the Women’s Movement, in addition to civil rights, and founded the King Center, and also fought against apartheid and for LGBTQ rights. She originally was a singer, and while painting I also listened to her and the gospel of their favorite singer Mahalia Jackson and the incredible music and spirituals of William L. Dawson, that also gave me solace. King’s surviving children continue to work to bring their father’s message of racial equality and nonviolent resistance to the world. Together, they’ve switched off as leaders of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and have spoken out on important issues, including racial injustice, gun control, and climate change, and Yolanda Renee King moved the nation recently at just 9 years old, giving her own “I have a dream that enough is enough,” speech at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington D.C., in 2018 protest demanding gun control.

If Rosa Parks hadn’t demanded her own agency when asked to move from her seat, the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in 1955 might never have had called upon the Baptist minister Dr. King as it’s leader and to begat his role, however his genius would have found its way. He was a saint who sacrificed all for what he believed in, but also with the love of his family supporting him was able to move the mountains that he did. It’s important to remember just how radical he was—opposing the Vietnam war when this was a hugely unpopular move, and for his activism and leadership that extended to all human rights, against fascists of Capitalism, and his major “Poor People’s Campaign” that strove to create “a multiracial army of the poor”. He was ultimately assassinated when he was protesting on the behalf of black Memphis sanitation workers, and never rested his engagement with fighting for the agency of all kinds that are suppressed through Capitalism and the extreme domineering white, straight patriarchy. He and the movement set the wheels in motion for what I hope continues to be a soft revolution, working towards the freedom and agency happiness of all peoples. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most major influences on my personal life and ideology—his philosophy helps to guide me every day in my humble missions as a Chair, teacher, and artist.

Cesar Chavez, 2021

Oil on linen 50 × 38 inches

This painting is of the awesome Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American civil rights leader and activist. My husband Andrew Negrete Madrid is Latino (and part indigenous) and his cousin George Negrete was a Stanford University grad student took time off and worked with Chavez and lived with the leadership of the group in Bakersfield CA, and has many stories. Andrew and I are both 55, and in our youth we both have strong memories of Chavez as a public figure, and the Boycott Grape movement, as it was in our supermarkets our mothers took us too when we were little. Later in life (Andrew grew up in Southern California, I grew up outside of Denver, Colorado), the Coors boycott, which the United Farm Workers and Chavez were heavily involved with, reverberated to my generation, where we didn’t purchase 3.2 Coors out of allegiance and against Coors notorious conservative policies.

All the figures in the show are philosopher activists, and none more so than Chavez. Although he dropped out of school in eight grade to work in the fields full time he was quite well read, and studied philosophy and history, inspired as much by Gandhi as he was Dr. Martin Luther King (and Jesus!). He dedicated his life for the struggle of farm workers in the United States, by organizing protests, and with help of crucial partners, such as fellow organizer Dolores Huerta, negotiating contracts with their employers to improve their working and living conditions, working from early beginnings as a precocious community organizer to ultimately form the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers, making many important victories from the 60’s to his death in the 80’s with perseverance, faith, and genius and incredible leadership.

He led with visionary insight, able to ideate a better world for workers, by creating actions and events, working the media, building thousands of followers of all ethnicities and class levels, getting the support of presidents and at crucial moments, people like Bobby Kennedy to come and fight alongside him for the workers. I read audiobooks of his biography, and learned much in my own humble way of how to lead as Chair of Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking at the University of Southern California, where I am also creating a Narrative Art Program to have students go out and fight the good fight in culture in an even more broad way than all too rarefied world of Fine Art. We were also going through transition in our personal lives—during this painting we had to put my 4-year-old dog Georgia to sleep, as she had been suffering through Stage 4 lymphoma, alongside my blind, toothless poor 15 year old toy poodle, Michelangelo. Not to undermine the giant of Chavez and his accomplishments by personal stories, but as I strived to continue through my existence through incredible mourning and the tenacious politics of academia, which also keep me up at night while trying to transform a whole program, listening to the biography and words of Chavez gave me much needed solace and guidance that I desperately needed at the time.

In addition to his Catholicism and his love for St. Francis of Assis, like Dr. King, Chavez was inspired by the nonviolent civil disobedience espoused by Gandhi. He was able to train his followers to unite in action, and the country to boycott the produce of the egregiously exploitative white owners of the farms and companies that grossly suppressed both Latino and the Pilipino worker communities. He worked with white people in the religious communities, priests that also fought the rights of workers who helped to mentor him and surrounded himself with a multi-cultural cast of lawyers, advisors, family, students, and celebrities and more to get their message to a national front. When at the most crucial times their struggles needed to come to success, Chavez went on long hunger strikes, the third of which put him in such poor health he never quite fully recovered and died two years after.

The 1965 grape boycott grew strong across the country, and finally after a 340-mile Sacramento to Delano in 1966 and a 25 day hunger strike in 1968, it finally ended in 1970, with increased workers’ pay and right to unionize, when the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) was born. When Chavez finally broke his fast (when Kennedy visited), Chavez declared

“I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice,” Chavez declared, in a speech read on his behalf when his first hunger strike ended. “To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us be men.”

With the nonviolent techniques of strikes and boycotts, the UFW continued leading the union efforts, and. Thanks to them, California passed the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, which successfully negotiated for better wages, working condition and rights. In the 1980’s Chavez final hunger strike was to highlight the dangers of pesticides for farm workers and children. He was only 66 when he died, largely due to complications of this strike and his long life of struggle. Bill Clinton awarded him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the “Yes, we can: campaign of Barack Obama was born, in homage to Chavez, from his slogan “Si, se puede”!

For many and to myself, Chavez was a saint, but even he realized that some of the most wonderful saints were also all to human, which was the thing to struggle against to become saintly

“We work so hard at not being human, so hard at being something other than ourselves. The whole idea is that you have to be what you are and let other people be who they are. We don’t have to change people to change the world. Because there are enough of us; we don’t need a whole majority to do it. We have to find people and help them to act. Without action, you’re kidding yourself.”

Chavez was able find hope where there was none—in his own calm non-erudite way he was able to make connections both small and large to fight what he believed in. Works were paid pinnies and lived in shacks and shanty towns, he helped them organize and found them homes. In his compound in Burlington, he had a post office, a church, a meeting hall, and a place for his workers to sleep. He insisted that no one would be able to get paid more than $7 to get the fees down for everyone and started his own lending corporation for the works and even had a post office. While he had his faults, and his own ego that led sometimes to accusations of autocracy, Chavez was a giant.

In our times, the very things that Chavez fought for and won (and for the battles that he didn’t win) in this Trump era are at grave threat, minority rights for Latinos are the worse they have been since Chavez’s time, and workers exploited, especially during the pandemic, to horrific degrees. For me painting this work, his smile, his benevolence, and his strength helped me greatly. If there is a heaven, Chavez would obviously be like a Serafin angel, closest to god for all the good work he did here on earth for others, he did sacrifice himself, literally, like a saint. The grape vines and flowers behind him in this uncredited image were blurred, and blissed-out in early 70’s filters—it was inspiring to see through them, to be able to negotiate positive and negative space and find the otherworldliness of nature beyond this saint. His shirt, after describing using my grid the design for a neat shirt seemed complete as it was, it was only after that it felt like one of those nets they keep grapes in—that are so solid together that all they need to hold together. I felt after the fact that Chavez and his legacy seem like that, a heralded giant, with holidays and streets named after him, yet all he and his movements have struggled for are still at a threat, gaining so much, but that could be taken away by the suppression from corporate forces, and the racist and class oppression of the far right and conservatives. But this painting gives me hope, and hope that I hope to convey to viewers, that this one man who had the vision and tenacity to fight and win victory for generations of people through faith, strength, and nonviolent vision, empathy, and compassion for the workers of America.

America (from Google Earth, January 1st, 2021,12:00 noon), 2021

Oil on linen 76 × 48 inches

This image is from a screen shot from Google Earth on January 1^st, 2021, at noon. I was thinking of this tumultuous year, what we need to get accomplished in order to survive as a society and as a democracy. I had done a different version of North America from outer space years ago, as I had a dream of painting an American without borders, and upon waking remembered how Jasper Johns supposedly a dream had about painted a flag and then woke up the next day and made the painting, and in so doing, changed art history! I realized that Google Earth had the image that I had dreamed about and created the work. I’ve painted another, from outer space, and now this one, over a decade later, from this image…. It’s interesting to go back in time on Google Earth, I don’t know how the archived the satellite images that comprise the landscape that is composed into Google Earth, but it goes back several decades, and it’s startling how the landscape changes—it’s easily apparent how global warming has tragically devasted the green away from the nation, making it more light umber, desert rather than green, with each passing year.

What we have access to that the Hudson River School painters and J.M.W. Turner didn’t, is high-res photographs and satellite imagery! I’m thinking of this as a kind of Manifest Destiny, hopefully somewhat sublime landscape painting, but by using contemporary means to depict our wonderful land—here from multi-layered satellite images from space! I love getting into the micro-managed detail—the secret of the sublime is micromanaging to the macro-managed whole—if you look at a Da Vinci landscape, he has figured out the golden ratio dimensions between each vein in each leaf to each flower, to all the flowers in a garden and its relation to the land above it and the sky and the figures. Same for Van Gogh: in the wicker-like weave of how he acknowledges and paints the ebb and flow of each cypress tree, etc., he studies and acknowledges the “tooth and comb” of each stroke describing the nature he is observing. I think the activates what for the viewer might synaesthetically reminds them how we observe and experience as children: when we are at the proverbial “picnic in the park with your parents”, you might perceive how everything is alive, how the wind is blowing through the trees and moving the leaves, like one of those peg puzzle boards you have as a little kid—where the cloud is a panel that fits into besides a sky panel, next to a mountain, etc. When a painter works on a landscape, hopefully they think of the interelatability of all things—how all these things connect and activate it by perceiving and then painting it—by doing so they activate with their touch what we perceive in those sublime child moments of objectifying oneself as one of many that makes the sublime effect occur…

When painting this work, I was listening to the top 500 Rolling Stone Albums of all time—something I like to do as to hear all the classics—new and old—while hopefully painting something that will be classic about a classic theme. Our America is so split apart with the infighting so great; it is like a great cancer has overcome our world, and the politics of good vs. evil hopefully surmount and beat the darkness that is threatening us and our democracy. While I hope my American landscape seems buoyant, as it breaks apart into other worlds that bring about the anguish of our landscape politically. I love Cézanne, and there is always something I call a “Cezanne hole” in the center of many of his canvases—an inversion of the landscape, as he is perceiving what I described above, whilst also thinking one’s interior thoughts, I think in the act of painting the painter can consciously, but also unconsciously what they are perceiving. Cezanne, while painting Mt. St. Victoire, might have been thinking of his childhood with Zola, or how he had a troubled relationship with his father, and he gets lost in the meditation, he projects his unconscious thoughts with his perceived notions and the spaces break into otherworldly figurative abstractions. My favorite painting Cezanne at the Met is “Rocks in the Forest,” (1890’s). In this great masterwork, the more you look the more you see, the spaces bliss out in the interior of the rock into dream like other worlds worthy of Odeon Redon’s landscapes. When I’m painting my landscapes, I think of this, I always try to activate my unconscious by playing music meaningful to me, something that has to do with the subject matter of the work, but also something that I might have current affinity towards that will help keep my brain focused on the work.

With this painting, I was thinking of our all-true troubled situation of Democrats vs. Republicans, but also the good people of America of both parties vs. the egregious forces of fascism that are threatening to take over our democracy, and with this, the unleashing of the negative forces that are creating the tumult of the environment. Although I’m following very closely the micro-managed details of what I’m perceiving and striving for accuracy, my unconscious is also coming through, and the anthropomorphized landscape, a recording of how I’m thinking about the country and our time, is the result—hopefully a visionary landscape of the America of our sublime moment.

Grace Lee Boggs, 2021

Oil on linen 33.5 × 40 inches

This painting Grace Lee Boggs, who was this great black power theorist and leader and philosopher who then became re-recognized in the ‘90s, when she was an older woman, and in the 2000s, by the Asian American community, realizing that she was a great, powerful leader and a philosopher and activist, like the rest of the great leaders represented in this exhibition. Boggs and her husband James Lee Boggs (who was African American) were civil rights leaders and activists in Detroit during the Black Power moment. James Lee Boggs was a worker and self-taught, and maintained his day job while a night writing, publishing, and organizing a movement for not civil rights and human rights, coming from Marx, for the uprising of the proletariat. They wrote profusely with texts and lectures still taught in college and that are still influential, and were the organizers of important marches and speakers, including for Malcolm X, who was a close friend and colleague.

Boggs loved Hegel and dialectic thinking. She wants you to think philosophically, dialectically, and always be an activist. Perhaps more than most of the leaders represented in the exhibition Boggs was truly an activist philosopher.

The dialectic, to me, aesthetically in painting, is the representative in the abstract of what’s not represented.

When I painted these figures, obviously the dead ones, I am channeling them to some degree, although not in an act of ventriloquism, but rather a conversation with the spirits–or my unconscious mind as it consorts with thoughts of the great personas while I’m having visual conversation with them by painting them.

With Grace Lee Boggs, I was watching tons of videos of her on panels and symposiums, everything I could get from YouTube. At the end of the painting, I was listening to this last symposium—one of the best ones—for the third time out. While I was painting, there was a fly that kept bugging me, and I thought, “Maybe I should stop, the fly is telling me something.” But I continued. And then, finally, the painting came off the easel and bonked me in the head. I butted heads with Grace Lee Boggs’s head! Then I kind of heard her (obviously, it could be just my unconscious phantasm), saying, “This has been great, but I’ve had enough. I’m tired. You’ve done this portrait of me, and I’m done.” It was as if when, as an old woman at the panels where she would say to the moderator, “I’m really tired” and I need to go now.”

There’s something to it! Aesthetically in the background of this painting, I was also thinking about a Harriet Tubman portrait I painted, of a picture of her at her retirement home. When she became an old woman, she created the Harriet Tubman Home for Old Women, and it felt like there were all these spirits around her. In the sepia toned daguerreotype, all the plant life around her seemed to have a spiritual noise, seemingly almost like figures you can perceive in the foliage behind her.

Part of the job of painting from reference photos is to hopefully make better, and at the very least different than the photo. I think after Richter, which hypothetically was about painting the surface of the photo, we can turn back and penetrate the picture plane of the reference photo. I look at the beginnings of photography and its influence for reference for art, from Vuillard and Bonnard where the all-over influence can be seen by being able to perceive each inch of a photo and paint with the same heartiness as the figure, to Muybridge and all his influence, capturing motion and in the case of Bacon, psychological emotion within the glitch of the blur of the movement of figures. Painting from black and white photos, that what’s neat about is I can insert color, and think in my mind’s eye what it might see in the blurs of out-of-focus imagery. I believe that Cezanne was painting his thoughts, using the map of representation for shapes and forms that he was perceiving in mountains, and sometimes painting through the rocks–like this terrific work at the Met., where a whole subconscious world opens as Cezanne projects his interior mind onto the map of his subconscious, with the forms and colors and atmosphere he is perceiving in real life observing nature en plein air. This is where I get into the surrealism and the collective unconscious and all that other stuff– I do want them to break into other worlds.

It was fun and empowering to paint Grace Lee Boggs, and I learned a lot. All these people, especially these cultural leaders, had to deal with not just the uber-politics of their time, but the politics within the movement, how they were able to deal with having a common goal to make the world a better place through their activism. She really helped with that. She was a great lady. She was in Detroit and just was fighting the good fight. She lived to be 100 and had a really active mind. She was a spitfire.

Boggs had a whole kind of cult around her. One of great YouTube panels included a bunch of people from Detroit, including her, who had come to the New School, where there was a panel. There was this great trans person in the group, who was young and cool, and thought “Who is this person?” I Googled them—their name is Invincible, and they are a Jewish gender non-conforming rapper and activist. There were many people taking care of her, helping to promote her voice and legacy, and she was still very active and engaged with community to her last days, becoming a legend for Detroit and the world.

Gloria Steinem, 2021

Oil on linen 35.5 × 40 inches

Gloria Steinem is eighty-seven now, and she’s still dynamically talking as a feminist civil rights advocate. She discusses how from the very beginning she spoke with great black women leaders, and that they were always part of the movement. And now, in her elder years, she’s become, to me, an American hero who travels, does college campus talks all the time with good energy, bon mots, and ways of being. I think these people all become the philosophers, kind of like Whitman in his time: public figures who are known for what they did as political leaders, but also as life coaches.

Not only is Steinem alive and well, but so are the issues she has been fighting for. The fight for the ERA is still ongoing, and tragically, Pro Choice, and the struggle for women’s rights more serious than ever–as I write this Row vs. Wade is threatened to be finally overturned within months. Steinem of course was on the contemporary vanguard and leaders of these movements, and as publisher of MS. Magazine, gave birth to a watershed movement that has grown with Me Too, Black Lives Matter and more. While painting this, I listened to all her audiobooks, and every YouTube video I could find of talks and panels, in addition to watching the streaming Ms. America tv series, and much more. As with all these figures I have painted in the show, I have grown up with them, they helped to shape my consciousness, none the more so than the great Gloria Steinem.

Her face is so intense. I worked on it for over a week. I normally bring it up all at the same time, but then I was going to leave them kind of loose and Andrew was like, “Come on, it’s such a balance of textures, and I bet it could be even better.” So, I forced myself to go into it over and repeatedly. I was worried about losing the painting if I went into the rest of it as much as I did the face. That would be too much.

Obviously, Manet’s barmaid us-looking-at-her-looking-at-us paradigm comes into play here because she’s looking at us so intensely, but because she’s such a dynamic woman. I would talk to students about what is—especially with talking about anime and manga in my comics class at SVA or my USC comics and fine art classes—we talk about what is “feminine power”, as a representation in the same manner we discuss the symbolism and power of what can be perceived as butch representation and presentation. Gloria Steinem, to me, is totally feminine in her way, but she’s also incredibly powerful. And genderfluid. Early in the 60’s and 70’s, she talked about genderfluidity and how codified gender is as a societal conditioning. Steinem was part of Marlo Thomas’s celebrated children’s show and book Free to be You and Me, which was also about genderfluidity. But I wanted her to have a power where you weren’t looking at her fashion as much as you were looking at the intensity of her face even though she’s giving you this whimsical look–I think she’s exhaling smoke from her cigarette. In one of the panels—she doesn’t talk like a sailor, but sometimes she has wonderful moments—she was saying something to a woeful audience member, “Oh, just tell the bigots to fuck off.” Z And then the student in the audience replies, “What if I can’t say to fuck off because they’re my boss or something?” if they’re saying something egregious or misogynist or whatever. Then she says, “Well, what I do is I say, ‘Are you serious?’” Or “You can’t be serious.” This seems to be what she is saying in this work, demanding her agency and that of all women and oppressed people—with eloquence and whimsy and great understated power, fighting the good fight for us all.

ACT UP, 2021

Oil on linen 48 × 35.5

When I was as a sophomore at Brown I was just coming out, literally, with my sort-of boyfriend, and intellectually. This was when, for the first time, I saw the “Silence = Death” logo spray painted on the sidewalk—it’s one of those moments I totally remember. Luckily my husband Andrew and I are currently fifty-five years old, so in some ways we just missed the bullet because we were coming of age after AIDS initially erupted. So, we were super, super safe. But then when I came to New York, I would go with my then-boyfriend to ACT UP meetings, and I went to High Holidays actions–I went to the march of the CDC, and so on. To me, it was revelatory because it was about community. With the AIDS crisis, one of the few silver linings of it was that it brought all kinds of people together. Not just gay white men, but women were very much part of it, and a diverse community were very much part of it. It was not just about sex and communing and disco—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but about the political charge of what the AIDS crisis brought about, and being in charge of your own body, of the health system.

I was hoping to capture the anger by depicting this action—this image was from, I believe, the April 6, 1992 ACT UP action zapping candidate Jerry Brown at Brooklyn Borough Hall. I was listening to ACT UP stuff and the music of the era and so on and thinking back at my own time during this era and participating in this movement. But also, all that pain—I did have friends who died. It was interesting being kind of on the coattails of this revolution. Most of the people were a little older than me. But as you say, it was a movement that was so smart—and obviously there are a lot of politics with that, too, because it was a lot of white, male, privileged people who have access to power and ingenuity, but it was also everyone.

But all the people involved did what they did best to move the movement to the masses—the press people did press, the designers designed, people did the research to understand the science to talk to the scientists and so on. And the people who were great political leaders—a lot of them from the feminist movement and the civil rights movement—coming in and helping them organize. And as my friend Celeste Dupuy-Spencer mentions, “the historic most revolutionary group of people that humanity really has is the lesbian movement, and they showed up in fucking droves! And gender got sort of interesting then! The lesbian community shows up—but then their trauma is surviving—they’re taking care of people that are dying, sort of in this rotation.”

It was an eclectic group of people who had this vision that were using emotion, as well as the agitprop and propaganda in a good way. And fusing that all together and having these moments having direct action, like the strategy of marching at the CDC outside. With, back in that time, Dr. Fauci being a bad guy, because he wasn’t allowing for more treatments than AZT, and everything. But they would have people on the inside, working directly with Fauci, that became the Treatment Action Group.

It was a really effective movement. I don’t think we would have—obviously AIDS hasn’t been cured yet, or HIV—but we wouldn’t have the treatments available that we do now if it weren’t for them. And also, just in terms of how it was building on a lot of other civil liberties movements, being able to capitulate something that really changed culture, in terms of talking about ideas of health for everyone, or treatment for everyone.

Reagan never said the word “gay,” or “AIDS.” For me as a young person, I had my own internalized homophobia—but seeing ACT UP in actions and TV and on the streets, in the bars, and with and being my friends, they were a total inspiration, finally a group I could identify with and also fight for what was an emergency.

Silence equals death. For me, too, I was a punk rocker when I was young, and I did not like Judy Garland and all the other stuff that’s supposed to be the gay tropes. But then, to see these cool guys and women in Doc Marten’s and jeans and leather jackets—you know, the whole ACT UP thing, which was way more like punk rock, progressive and queer. Queer! And this also I think is the beginning of the idea of recoding—before Eve Sedgwick—ideas of queerdom. And, too, the women were in with the guys, and the trans people, too. Everybody was together, and they were all supporting one another, even though there was a lot of infighting and politics.

With the ACT UP people, too, there were all different kinds of factions. I lived in a co-op in college, and so, I’m all about collaborative movements and being all together. But what was interesting to me, too… While painting, I listened to the book by Sarah Schulman “Let the Record Show: A political History of ACT UP New York, written by a woman, who is a reporter, and was part of the movement. There are a lot of memorials, memoirs from people—along with her writing/film documentary partner, she interviewed for over two decades many people and you hear everybody’s story. But they had all different view. There were the people of color faction, there was definitely the dyke faction, there were all different facets that would work on their own things with accreditation from the big group. They would read the reports of the at the Monday meetings. But then they would come together on the High Holidays and do their thing. And I do think healthcare is a right for everybody. I don’t know if specifically, exactly, but perhaps was a force that helped grow into Obamacare, and just the idea of owning your own body and not letting anybody tell you what to do with your body. Which, obviously, civil rights, human rights, and feminism was always about too, and Pro-Choice: not letting the government control your body. But also realizing when the government was hapless and not being able to give agency, literally, to the people who most needed it for their medical needs and demanding it. And then winning, in a way as so many people died…

I obviously don’t feel nostalgic for this era. AIDS so decimated the generation before us. But at the same time, the political activism and the togetherness is the thing that I feel like we most need now, especially in the age of Trump.

Harvey Milk, 2021

48 × 60 inches

I love Harvey Milk. I mean, I really love Harvey Milk, he was so cool, such an incredible human being and he was a saint. Harvey got around. He was in college to be a schoolteacher, went to the navy and came out, at least to his close personal friends and came to NYC and dated first one of the Warhol superstars—a hustler named “Sugarplum Fairy,” that Lou Reed mentioned in his famous ode to the Warhol crew “Walk on the Wild Side.” After this, he went out with who became the owner of NYC’s first gay bookstore, who radicalized Milk and made him shed the rest of his vestiges of the closet. He had been a successful Wall Street broker and realizing the bro-culture of that community wasn’t for him as an out gay man in the ’70s. Instead, along with his next boyfriend, became part of the producer teams for the amazing Broadway musicals Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar. I grew up with those musicals, danced to them and “mirror sang” to them, and performed puppet shows with them, embedding into my consciousness not just the lyrics but also the ideology into my unconscious and conscious. The spirit of well-being, the celebration of agency, the super-liberal politics of what I remember the Rolling Stone Record Guide said “what the squares thought the ’60s were about” were the musicals that helped to form my queer liberal consciousness …

When he moved to the Castro with his boyfriend Scott Smith and opened a camera store, the world was about to change. Becoming even more radicalized by the super-gay environment of the Castro, Smith and Milk had a new awakening. Revolting against the fervent wave of homophobic repressive forces, Milk began campaigning as the “Mayor of Castro Street” for civic office. Affable, whimsical, and brilliant, Milk was able to meet and become friends with hundreds of his constituents in his district in San Francisco, beyond the gay men, who of course loved him and what he stood for. Harvey wanted to represent ALL people, but had the gay community at his core, and felt it was the major responsibility for all LGBTQ people to come out—successfully predicting, after capitulating the gay movement to the major success story it is now in the twenty-first century.

When he finally won city supervisor in 1977, he broke all glass ceilings and became the first elected out LGBTQ official in all America, during a time that was particularly egregious for villains against gay rights. Anita Bryant had become a force in American politics, and like Phillis Schlafly, was able to organize conservatives across the US against gay rights. In the Bay Area, an opportunistic politician began an anti-gay campaign, against teachers, ostensibly to allow for the firing of gay people to be teachers and other employment, housing, and public accommodations based on sexual orientation. Although he was only in office eleven months, he was able to deliver a crushing defeat. He also campaigned alongside the teamsters against Coors beer (something I participated in later antecedents as a high school youth!), and waged human rights campaigns to help all people, especially for the elderly. Milk was a people person and had a huge heart and ability to spread empathy and compassion wherever he went and planted major seeds that helped to propel the gay movement where it has arrived, post-AIDS, today.

Dan White was a disgruntled bro-like fireman, all-American and white, who was jealous of Milk’s popularity, which compelled him in part to quit his job as elected councilman. When the conservative businesses and corporations that were supporting him for his payback, he tried to get on board as councilman once again, and wasn’t allowed by Milk’s friend and colleague, the then Mayor Moscone, White took revenge by breaking into the capital building through the window in the building and shot and assassinated both the Mayor and Harvey Milk, and calmly walked out before turning himself in. The city and country were in horror, with moving candlelight vigils and events, however the bias jury let White off, acquitting him from first-degree murder and instead given voluntary manslaughter, and got off in five years before himself committing suicide.

Although Milk’s life was cut short, and his time in office was short, the legacy and impact of Milk and his life has stood long in time and history. By being completely out and campaigning, after he was in office, against the Briggs initiative all across the country, Milk made a case for civil rights and the humanity of all peoples, most of all of course for the LGBTQ community that lasts through today.

When I painted this work, it also, like the images of all the civil rights leaders I have created, gave me hope and spirit. Even in this era, gays and other LGBTQ+ folk come across situations of homophobes trying to oppress us—the difference now is that we fight back, partly because of Harvey Milk.

While painting, I listened to the excellent and canonical Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts, which is excellent, and of course watched the like-minded and titled documentary film, which is still as moving today as it was when I first saw it in college. Milk was a huge opera queen, and it was neat to finally indulge again. Milk’s life was an opera, and although I couldn’t stomach too much Wagner, I listened to his favorite feel-good comedic opera, and Tosca, with Maria Callas, as he loved her and poignantly, he saw another production of this the night before he died. But he also dug Mick Jagger. I realized the secret of Milk was that he was actually a really sexy man—the contemporary pictures from when he was Councilman don’t necessarily reveal this, as he was an unusual-looking guy, but he was really fit until his end, and in early pictures, is a queer version of Frank Zappa, another long-nosed, unconventional big-eared hunky guy, as Milk was, who had no problem finding lovers and boyfriends in his day. Playing the Rolling Stones really fit, as I think he would have enjoyed being equated with, as he knew how to take the stage and spotlight. I of course listened to all his dynamic speeches, including most of all the hope speech, which was the light of all the spirit in this painting, the last of the show that encapsulates everything the show stands for …

His message was of hope, and his hope speech ends:

“The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us’es, the us’es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone.

“So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I’ve found one overriding thing about my personal election, it’s the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it’s a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope …”

The Rainbow Connection, 2021

Oil on linen 80 × 48 inches

I grew up with The Muppets. My husband Andrew and I are the right age because Sesame Street came in 1969, about when we were about four or five. Maybe we were slightly older than the regular toddler viewers for Sesame Street, but The Muppet Show I was definitely there for, when in 1976 it first premiered–I was ten, the perfect age, Then The Muppet Movie came out in 1979 when I was 13. I went and saw it a million times when it first came out.

This painting is from the was the last scene of The Muppet Movie, where the camera pans out after retelling—in a totally fictional way—their story with props in a soundstage and the Muppets are singing “The Rainbow Connection,” and there’s this deux ex machina where they’re trying to reinvent, with the set, what happened in the movie, but then the set collapses and there’s literally a hole in the ceiling in which a rainbow bursts through. And as they’re all singing the song, the camera pans out and shows all the Muppets at that time, including the Sesame Street gang. And with this painting I’m trying to capture the initial sublime woosh it felt as a child to see the whole Muppet universe, standing in symbolically for ours, when I was young and had an almost religious awakening at this moment.

It was fun going back into Sesame Street and watching it, along with many favorite Muppet Show episodes and the films. I know all the characters well. The reference photo for this painting wasn’t a film still, but was an outtake for the press or something, where they show the puppeteers. You can see, if you closely in the painting and the phot, that there are faces of the actual puppeteers manipulating the puppets. While painting, some of them came up unconsciously, and then some that were obviously there. But I love the idea the puppet being alchemized, brought into life, by the transcendent acting of the puppeteer. To me, cartooning is really close to puppetry. Because obviously with the Muppets are just pieces of Muppet felt that have Jim Henson’s hand up Kermit’s butt, who makes Kermit animated and alive. And that’s what you do with cartooning—the alchemizing of ink into characters and being, and now what I try to do when I paint, at least for iconic cartoon-like figures. For real life personas, I try to channel their energy and “talk” to them like a barber cutting their client’s hair, to spend time with them, learning and hopefully honoring them while I paint them, hopefully complimentary and respectful portrait, but also in this process, try to animate the scene as if they were alive and talking with the viewer.

I always tell my student that cartoonist Bill Waterson was just making Calvin & Hobbes with ink, but he’s thinking his thoughts and he animates Calvin and Hobbes like a puppeteer would. I think the same thing is true for a painter, in the way that we’re talking about. They animate something. So, it’s funny to me to create this image of all the puppets of the Muppets, but to also have the puppeteers projecting themselves into the Muppets to make them come alive. An allegorical situation—and the shape of their form that reminds me of the island of Manhattan and its people.

Fraggle Rock is in there, too, and Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas and more. This Emmet Otter gang are in the painting’s rawer moments, I want to leave them, because to me, it does spill into some weird, subconscious abstraction. But then where it coheres—where the light was better in the image—had some of the more popular Muppets. And then I realized, they must have had some sort of rainbow effect in the actual studio. If you step back and squint your eyes looking at the work, you see the rainbow where the colors are coming through with the more rendered characters. It was fun to paint.

My best friend from childhood died—my great friend, Dan Knapp. And sometimes when I’m trying to get to sleep, I think about him guiding me into what heaven might look like, and I try to go with him to some sort of Dante version of heaven by way of Durer. So, on the upper-right hand corner of the work is my little heavenly moment in the set, where it breaks into the little window of some sort of iconic heaven—perhaps there are little spirits in there.

Sesame Street and the Muppets were my entry into a larger cultural universe. Growing up in suburban Colorado, the ideology of the Civil Rights and Human Rights movement reached me at an early age through the vehicle of Sesame Street, which was born out of that moment, specifically to have the effect it did on me and most of Generation X. I feel that the empathy and compassion for all others, especially in Sesame Street that had a DEI cast of real-life actors on an urban set, gave birth and consciousness from a cultural point of view to my awareness of being within the world and wanting to care for others and environment. The major theme of Sesame Street was “cooperation,” which in a fundamental, base way to teach young children, is about working together with acceptance, tolerance, and love. This translates well into most Henson creations, the epitome of which is the Muppet Show, where a cavalcade of characters are within the community headed by the queerified “it’s not easy being green” Kermit the Frog.

I have always related to Kermit, all the more so now as the Chair of Painting, Drawing, Printmaking at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California, where I am also starting a Visual Narrative Art program. The politics of academia are well-known, and no need to go through them here—however this painting, as I truly live through my work, helped me through a rough patch trying to “herd kittens” in my job revolutionizing my part of our great art program. Children, college students, adults (and faculty!) have all our little super egos, battling for needs and happiness with manic persistence, much like Muppets who express themselves with gleeful anarchy. It was personally cathartic and edifying to regress a bit to paint this work, to spirit child memories and dreams and feelings and remember what I wanted to be when I grew up, which hopefully I now live, trying my best to make the world a better place in the humble way I can. While it’s not easy being green, green is all there is to be.