My American Dream: This Land is Your Land

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.

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.

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…”

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 …”

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.

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.

To me, cartooning is really close to puppetry. The Muppets are just dolls, and it’s Jim Henson’s hand up Kermit’s butt that makes it animated and alive. This reanimation is what you do with cartooning—and now for me as an adult, painting and drawing. This image is obviously Kermit as the Blue Boy appropriated from Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 original, now at the Huntington Library, but it also is from a Muppet calendar and book that I grew up with, Pictures from the Kermitage Collection, where the Muppets posed as famous paintings. It was done by the National Lampoon people as well as the Muppet people. It was extremely well done—with their collective talents, the wardrobe and everything was spectacular and hilarious for each of their appropriations. But instead of merely translating the photo of a dressed-up Muppet in front of a staged, or backdrop painted background, as I’ve done in a few of my appropriations from this series, I transpose their fake backgrounds for my analytical appropriations of the real source painting. In this case, Gainsborough, behind the appropriation of The Blue Boy, I wanted to paint through the irony of it. For it to work, it must be, hopefully, a really great painting, in that it’s about an appropriation of an appropriation. And as it’s Kermit the Frog, it could be a joke—but I strive to turn the joke image back into a new “master painting.”

Instead of Kermit’s face being just flat and iconic, I hoped to bring out three-dimensionality, soft and material of the antron (Muppet!) fleece, caring for him and trying to cherish him by a ton of different layers—using cremnitz lead white, which gives you that texture that Rembrandt used, but also listening to a lot of Muppet skits and the Muppet Movie soundtrack, and Muppet soundtracks, and thinking a lot about Jim Henson.

To me, Jim Henson—kind of like John Lennon or the Beatles—is the ultimate artist, in that he was incredibly popular and successful and yet he didn’t sell his soul for rock & roll. It was still about the great ideas that he had to bring forth, both in terms of entertaining people in an unexpected way, and reanimating puppetry through the TV lens. He turned the puppet stage into the actual parameters of the TV set itself. But also, how he was able to drive that spirit—and he was also a very spiritual person. He was raised Christian Scientist, but he had his own wonky religion where he believed that, like Fraggle Rock, there were entities. Or like the American Transcendentalists, which I also love, like John Muir who believed nature was alive. He really felt like there were a lot of different secret, enchanted worlds within our world that were alive.

Although there were other avatars of himself in the Muppet universe, Kermit the Frog was Jim Henson in so many ways. And that he could make that animated and alive, and that the character—like a great opera character or something—extends beyond the creator. Jim Henson created him, but now obviously Kermit is still very much in our popular culture and alive as a character.

Frank Oz, who performed Miss Piggy, said that she was like a truck driver who wanted to be a star. Even though hypothetically, they weren’t gay, I always wonder what killed Jim Henson, because he passed during the AIDS crisis from a mysterious pneumonia. Maybe it wasn’t HIV-related, but … Henson and Oz were like Laurel and Hardy, a great duo. There’s the Ernie and Bert gay couple thing, which is obvious and “out there,” but the same is true of Kermit and Miss Piggy. They were a gay couple. And maybe Miss Piggy was trans.

For me with the Muppets, it’s not just nostalgia, their work has content. Even watching the old Sesame Street episodes. Guy Smiley was one of my favorite childhood characters, and I was watching a lot of Guy Smiley skits, and they were hilarious! So funny! But also full of wisdom, allegorical wisdom. The Muppet Show was literally art for the people. Especially when Henson & Co. were in charge, where they were making popular entertainment, but very mindful about—obviously in Sesame Street—how they’re making the world a better place. Then, the Muppets were almost auteur created. And obviously The Muppet Show was turned down by a bunch of people. Lord Lew Grade gave it the green light, and they went to England, and they made the show. It fumbled a little bit in the first season, but then it became the most popular show of its time worldwide. And then when Henson died it was a world moment of mourning.

It’s because it was art! And it was of that moment. Especially in the ’70s and the ’80s, when we really needed a genuine popular art. Henson did try a lot of experimental things afterward, he was always into art, he was always following his direction. He’d wanted the Muppets to be sold to Disney—at least the characters that weren’t the Sesame Street characters—so he could move on to more adventurous projects. Of course, he died, and now that Disney has them, they’ve never been able to get the spirit back.

It’s like the lesson of the documentary Tim’s Vermeer, where an inventor believes he has learned the magic trick of the old master, to project his image from real life onto a canvas surface and copy—but he does so laboriously and without life. One can have the Muppet characters now—and they do live a life of their own—but they don’t let the fantastic synergy of the players happen, where they had full control of the content and what was going on. There were so many heads, and so many bureaucratic things, and it’s all about money in return. It killed the spirit of it.

In some ways, the Muppets are nostalgic for me for the era heralded the auteur in films and television more than today, but also as a queer place. Because I think the Muppets—kind of like RPG video games, some of my students are gaming students and many of them are trans or LGBTQ. And one of my theories is that one, you’re isolated, maybe you’re growing up in an environment that doesn’t understand you, so you’re playing a lot of video games. But also, obviously, suturing into avatars as a video game that can be any gender or being, was also true with the Muppets. Because the Muppets, they’re all oddballs. They’re all queer in an Eve Sedgwick kind of way; they don’t fit into any kind of order. Even Kermit the Frog is this kind of hapless, sensitive guy who may or may not be straight, who goes out with a pig, who’s a drag queen or a trans person. He’s finnicky, he’s kind of bossy, and he’s arty.

I am now Chair of 2D at USC, and me being chair has been really this intense process, where I’m trying to help this program and start a narrative art program. I feel like Kermit in The Muppet Show, where I’m the guy trying to keep order, and I have all these people around me who are all their own artists … I think the Muppets, in their own way, celebrate agency, and they are all wonderfully talented at being so amusing and funny. Painting Kermit helped me. I’m channeling Henson, I’m channeling the Muppets, but I’m also definitely trying to garner from that channeling a sense of my own self.

Like the Beatles, innovation, popularity, and artistic integrity, hopefully the spirit of the Muppets can be replicated again in a different format or form as they brought it on in the spirit of ingenuity and creativity. Henson wanted The Muppet Show to be popular, but at the same time, while bringing entertainment to the masses, not losing their spirit or their soul in doing so. The history is that there was Punch & Judy and Kings & Queens kind of puppet shows before them. Part of Henson’s innovation was he made Muppets individuals that weren’t these stock characters. Neither Jim Henson nor Frank Oz really wanted to be puppeteers. They just found themselves doing it. But they were performing as artists, and they realized that they could do it through this medium. They were always resistant to calling themselves puppeteers, it’s weird. It’s like a cartoonist who wants to be an artist and not a cartoonist. I think they were self-degrading in that way.

Frank Oz, after Henson died, didn’t do puppetry. He was a film director—and still is. But while in their heyday, the whole team was bringing EVERYTHING into their work … And it is an eclectic group of all different kinds of characters, and many of them are gender-queer. I mean, most of them are—they’re anthropomorphized animals! I think also how it works with Duccio too, is that it’s about bringing good spirit—in the ’70s and the ’80s—to squash out the negativity of what the ’60s became after Monterey and “Helter Skelter” and Charles Manson and all that stuff. And the dark elements of drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll in a negative way for entertainment.

The Muppets—even though Henson was always a business guy who just happened to have the long hair and beard and be an artist—had, not necessarily a hippie, but there’s a lot of hippie-isms embedded in the Muppets, in a kind and gentle way. But just like Disney took over The Muppets and ruined it, capitalism took over a lot of those ideas and sensibilities. They brought it into the mass marketplace, and by commodifying everything about it, killed it.

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” talks about how capitalism at one point will give everybody the ability to communicate with one another, or feel the communication that’s happening, in order to kill the resistance. Because you feel like you have a voice, you might not feel the need to act on the underlying forces behind your discontent to affect change. If you watch the Muppets blow themselves up, even as humor, then maybe that’s cathartic for you—you don’t have to really blow up something …

However, in the end, the Muppets helped to create the Gen X generation ideologically, and Kermit was their grand leader. In this image, I like how he takes center stage, with all pomp and circumstance, but innocent wisdom, of the original Gainsborough, who himself was a dandy. I played a lot of Roxy Music and Bowie to get under the feeling of this, glam rock, T Rex, the New York Dolls and the Smiths added to the royal frenzy while painting. Gainsborough had a successful life, like Henson in some ways, as he never lost his agency as an artist even while painting the gentry in the seaside resort town he lived in to hobnob and gain their interest in portrait commissions. He was fast, but focused, and his backgrounds bliss out into otherworldly landscapes. I tried my best to concentrate on him and his masterwork, especially not just in the landscape, but how he might have handled painting the satin on Kermit the same as his original figure. Along with Sir Joshua Reynolds, they both are late eighteenth-century British masters, and their figures and spirit live on just as Henson & Co. to inspire new generations of the future.

I was listening to Leaves of Grass repeatedly, anything I could get by Walt Whitman or about Walt Whitman while painting this work. Obviously, he’s the great poet who wrote “I Sing the Body Electric” and other poems that helped to define American Poetry and vernacular spirit. And obviously, culturally speaking, he was out as a gay man. He was a pioneer politically in that he was a very popular, nationally or worldwide known figure who was very proud for who he is. He changed language, in terms of his poetry. Leaves of Grass, for me, with the My American Dream series, is similar, where he for decades worked on this anthology of poems. He would change and put in things, and edit, and so on… But also, poetry is really close to painting, because it’s about two or more things—in poetry’s case, words—put together that create new meaning. And so, all of that I’m thinking about, but then I’m looking into this old sepia-toned photo taken of him, which was his favorite, one he called his “Lear photo.” For the last anthology of Leaves of Grass, it had this frontispiece of him as a dapper young man, which he turned against in his old age. He wanted this image to create an etching for the frontispiece of the book. I thought I would honor him by choosing his favorite photo of him. But then in this fuzzy daguerreotype, there’s all this weird stuff that’s happening in his beard, and happening in his hair, and happening in the aura around him that I want to bring out—there’s tons of faces and forms and figures in there. I would start seeing them as a painter, but then I didn’t want to literally describe them, because that would be sort of cheesy, to have all these people crawling around his beard. I want, obviously, to give him his prominence, but also immortality.

His figure is kind of coming together. It’s concrete, it’s there, but also, it’s effervescent. His words are coming out of his mouth or his beard or his chest, or like little butterflies. They’re all combining to create the spell of

what he was doing to me when I was listening to the poetry! I listen to it like music. And then you just keep listening repetitively. Sometimes when I don’t get things, I’ll rewind it until I totally get it, over and over and over again. I was mesmerized and taken away, and then suddenly, the muse leaves you. At this point I was like, I can’t do anymore on it, if I do anything else I’ll mess it up, that it won’t be real. It won’t be a primal experience of being enchanted. Then I would be illustrating the thing. It would be redundant, or I would be fixing it in the taskmaster working mode rather than feeling the moment and keeping me alive.

For several years before I moved to Southern California to teach at USC, I took pictures every day as I passed by the Empire State Building and posted on social media as a kind of prayer.  My husband and I love New York City and lived there for 25 years before USC brought me out to be a tenured professor and now Chair of Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking.  This was an image from Tuesday, June 7, 2016.  I’m not sure what was happening in the city that night that made the Empire State Building’s people decide on the color scheme, but for some reason this particular image always struck me.  Looking back at that date in the New York Times, Donald Trump Jr. was said to have “sent an email to confirm meeting with a Russian Lawyer,” who had “incriminating information about Hillary Clinton) and that “three hours later said in a speech he would deliver a major address” that detailed Hillary’s “corrupt dealings to give favorable treatment to foreign governments, including the Russians”.  This was also a time of transition for me personally, as I had recently (on my 50^th birthday!) accepted the job at USC, and was teaching my last summer in NYC.  I don’t remember the occasion of taking this image, as I did them every day, but when I got a good view, on my bike, or walking, or from a cab window, I would aim and shoot.

I love Warhol’s Empire film, so stately and conceptual, fills me with a melancholy but also power, like watching the original King Kong when I was young, seeing Fay Wray being carried up this art deco masterpiece is truly sublime.  I also appreciate all the early photography of the city, and Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s film Manhatta (and their photography and painting, and ideology behind it…).  To me, the Empire State Building has never lost its luster, and I’ve painted many scenes of the towering skyscraper, but this was my first from afar, thinking about that time and where I’m at now—when painting this, my 3-year-old Anatolian Shepard dog had been terribly ill, and actually died while I was in the act of painting the work.   I love this film Rembrandt, from 1936, directed by Alexander Korda, staring Charles Laughton as Rembrandt—and he really looks like a loving version of the Old Master.  In this also stately, melancholic film, with snowy white landscapes, and windmills expanding out to the horizon, Rembrandt loses his beloved wife Saskia, a woman he truly loved (and loved to paint).  In a terrific scene in the movie, Saskia has just died, and her funeral is happening up the hill from Rembrandt’s studio, where he is furiously painting away a portrait of her.  His friends come bursting in, and exclaim “Rembrandt, why aren’t you at Saskia’s funeral?” to which Rembrandt replies “Go away!  I want to paint her while I still remember her!”.  This happened once before, when I was painting a picture of Google Earth from space when I lost a German Shepard, and I couldn’t stop painting, but put everything I was thinking and feeling into the painting.  Here too, I was working on deadline, but also thinking of power, and the Babylon Tower-like idea of this great building reaching towards and scraping heaven’s roof…. So here, I was thinking of wherever my dog (his name was Jasper Johns!) would be—in addition to all the others who have recently passed away in our lives-and during Covid, our collective lives.  Perhaps if there was a ideation of Heaven that could look like a heaven’s gate or building (or rocket!) it could be something like this.  I love translating pixels from the glitchiness of cell phone pictures, and seeing through those forms to find other forms, like the distortion becoming a portal into a different world.  If this is like gates of heaven, perhaps the windows are like souls, parts of the lights became like skulls piled together at the top like in the catacombs in Rome…

Another great Empire piece is the Carl Andre stack of bricks on the floor of the Donald Judd Foundation in Soho, where Judd used to live and work.  Manifest Destiny, from 1986—8 stacked used bricks that have the word “Empire” (their manufacturer?) stamped on them.  To me, this is just one of the great “minimalists” sculptures, based on my bias for narrative and allegory).  From the corner of Spring and Prince (I used to live on Prince between Thompson and Greene streets and would walk by this almost every day) you can see the Empire State Building from that corner.  The old, used, but stately and fantastic bricks are unstable and leaning, kind of like the luster of America, and the power of what America used to truly stand for—and everything that the original Empire State Building was about, built with willful triumph in 1930-31 in heroic time and optimism when everything felt the bleakest during the Great Depression.  Although it took some time for the offices to fill, and the Kong movie to use the skyscraper as a magnificent, meaningful and symbolic prop to popularize this great building of American iconic culture.   Recently, there was an article in the Times about how, post-Covid, many of the spaces are now empty, the most since the building first opened, as people have found working at home better, the high rents, moves made during the pandemic and so on.

With the emotive blight of our moment, where democracy has seemed to be saved, but just barely and still very much at threat, the feelings of this work hopefully translate in the same manner as to how it felt to mourn my poor dog’s passing.  With hope and resilience, all things ultimately to whatever creator, and we must do our utmost to make the most of what we can in this moment, to help others and the broader communities, no matter how they may vote.  I still love America for all it can mean for hope and optimism, the creative spirit, the ideation of better worlds that come to fruition for all people.  New Yorkers, hit the most by Covid than many other denizens in America, suffered horrible losses and much during this time, but hopefully will come back stronger than ever, like we did during 9-11 and how it always survives and thrives, ultimately, under pressure.  Hopefully the sun is setting on the what is bad about the American Empire, but in the hope of a new tomorrow, where we can squash fascism at home and bring about a more democratic, pluralistic and equitable future for all its people, we can fight the good fight and build new tomorrows, like they did back in the original days of the Empire State Buildings history (which was also built by the extraordinary capable hands, of the indigenous iron workers who built the great skyscrapers, the Mohawks).

As a storyteller, one of the things I’ve painted a lot of images of my life with Andrew from my own photos, inspired by how John and Yoko allegorized their own lives by making music in the first-person persona about themselves, loves, and concerns.  I think The Beatles were very postmodern because they always spoke through allegory, kind of like what we were talking about with storytelling. It wasn’t them who was lonely, it’s Eleanor Rigby, until John Lennon broke out.

I think that’s what Yoko taught him. By making great music about their own lives, the personal is political and they were able to talk about their own worlds in a way that accessible, relatable, and inspirational to all… They could sing about their own life with such meaning that you politically think that it transcends.

These are also New York-themed paintings, this and the Dylan work in the show, from the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan—about these great artists and the women in their life in NYC. Obviously, both things happened because they met up with these powerful, amazing women. But also, they showed up in New York. For John, coming to New York, meeting Yoko, who was obviously a tremendous artist in her own right, and businesswoman, and incredible performer.

I saw her in Central Park perform once. It was so amazing to see this woman who—at that point in time, she must have been in her early ‘70s—but she was doing her screaming and yodeling. And I’m like, “Oh my god this is a multimillionaire or billionaire businessperson, who’s also an incredible artist, who’s also a well-known public figure worldwide, etcetera, who’s doing this avant-garde art, that’s screaming.” I think that she really taught John Lennon how to be an artist.

I remember I was on the swim class in high school, my freshman year, and I was on the bleachers, I remember, the moment I heard that John Lennon died. Even as, whatever I am, twelve years old, thirteen years old—it totally hit me like a ton of bricks. Anyway, I love him, and I love her.

To me, they and the Beatles are the pinnacle of art, in that way. You can be an avant-garde artist or an unknown artist and make incredible art, and maybe very few people understand it, but it’s still incredible quality and changes things. And you can be a super popular artist who makes cheesy art that nobody cares about, and it’s only good for its time. But The Beatles had everything, in that they were super popular—couldn’t be more popular—globally helped to cultivate a movement, or capitalize in a positive way on a movement, and then always challenged themselves, never selling out. And musically, being really challenging, but at the same time super accessible. They had their cake and ate it too. They were super popular without compromise.

To me, it’s like the best of what a popular artist could hope to be. Yoko and John never sold out. And they’re still a work together, like the Wedding Album that was so visionary and beautiful… My parrots loved the wedding album. Because it has all these natural sounds. They sang along to the music—or they cackled along with it—the experimental albums, the Wedding Album, and the other first one that was totally experimental, Two Virgins. The parrots were going crazy! They loved it! I’m like, “Oh my god, this is still totally avant-garde and really good!” And then of course the Plastic Ono Band, the primal scream therapy album where he’s just singing about himself and it’s so intense, and Yoko. It resonates, not just his biography, but allegory. You get it for the music, but it totally still resonates politically.

Although Imagine is transcendent, the Plastic Ono Band is sublime. I find that that album is simultaneously almost impossible to listen to, but incredibly cathartic and incredibly moving, and so raw, and so direct, and so personal. I can only hope to paint in the same way that they create. You can have total empathy and relate, but also have compassion for them as living beings. It is a push-pull. I think that’s very Manet of them. In their work together and his solo work, it’s like the personal is political, their making it happen. And doing it in a musically adept way that makes you feel something. As well as his voice, too.

The Bed In for Piece is perhaps the best performance art happenings in the 20^th Century. It is still discussed in popular culture, with its fundamental meanings intact as a discourse of how love can save the planet—simultaneously it gave us the populist song “All We Are Saying is Give Peace a Chance”, still song at rallies around the world.   And when I hear Imagine, especially around Christmas time, how wonderfully subversive it is to hear an anti-religious song espousing Jesus’s ideals, to a world that can absorb that contradiction and understand—and be inspired with loving compassion. John and Yoko are giants–and human beings—as an interracial art couple, my husband Andrew—who is Latino and Native American—are also in love with them as people and as a couple!

Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene was this great book that I read when I was in college. I was at Brown from ’84-’88, and it was published in 1986. The book had Kenny Scharf on the cover, but this was the image was on the back, a photograph now famous by the amazing 80’s artist Tseng Kwong Chi. It is a fantastic early group “selfie”, Kwong Chi is the Hong Kong-born American photographer who took great (and queer) conceptual and political pictures of himself in a Mao suit throughout America and the world, among other bodies of excellent works—sadly he died of AIDS-related causes in 1990.  He also was an important part of his community, fellow traveler friends with the East Village, Warhol, and fashion worlds and more, and took their photos in addition to pictures of himself with his colleagues and other stars.  Here, it is his community, the same that made me realize what it could mean to be free, queer, and an artist and compelled me to become what I am today.

Art After Midnight was a great, chatty, tell-all book with a lot of photos. It talks about the punk rock revolution and CBGB’s, and how Ann Magnuson, who’s in the front of the book, started her Club 57, where Keith Haring and Scharf and John Sex would hang out. Then there’s McDermott & McGough, who completely inspired me as an artist when I saw the 1996 Whitney Biennial, they were first in, as totally out, queer art–that you could do that. And Joey Arias, who’s still around and doing incredible performance. This was the book that, in college, made me want to come to New York and be an artist. Or be a cartoonist and be secretly, hopefully, an artist too. I would look at that image over and over again, dreaming about coming to New York. The original image was cropped in the book–this is from the original photo that had the backdrop on it, and the wall, and the tiled ceiling. This is one of those paintings that are raw, but it kind of had a life of its own, and I didn’t want to mess with it. I was very instantaneous, like the moment they took the photo. When I was painting it, it felt like they all had their tongues out, like they’re licking their lips. I wonder if Tseng Kwong Chi said to them, “Okay you guys, lick your lips and smile!”  I’m thinking the picture was taken in a flash of an instant and they’re all camping. They were the ones that inspired me.

After graduating, I did come to NYC, where I first worked for an art magazine Contemporania, which lead to a job at Robert Miller, back when it was an excellent gallery on 57^th, and Cheim & Read were the directors. When I was working at Miller, they showed McDermott & McGough. I worked the front desk, and they would always flirt with me, and they invited me to a dinner at The Ritz. They were friends with the chef that was featured in Interview Magazine, and we had dinner in a screened-off portion of the hotel’s kitchen. It was a totally vegan, twelve-course meal. Incredible. And then we walked down Fifth Avenue as they kindly tried to seduce me into coming back to their East Village apartment. And I politely declined.

Well, we became friends, and fast forward from 1989 to 1999, when Andrew and I lived on 46^th Street where we had a meltdown because our dog died, there was a brothel underneath us and we had to move out. it was totally depressing. But our friend Chivas Clem ended up living in the apartment underneath us, and our mutual friends McDermott & McGough ended up living in our old apartment. It’s one of those neat things about being an artist is that you could champion people and then you actually get to know them and hopefully be their friend.

Apprenticeship. The East Village ‘80s, to me, was the ultimate. And then when I graduated–it was that recession with President George senior had just come into office–and the East Village was over by the time I came to New York. And so many died because of AIDS, so many people, tragically. But then the ones that are still around, like Peter McGough, he’s amazing, but I treat him as an elder. In a good way—not for his age, but for his experience

Because of the 1987 Whitney Biennial, with the painting “A Friend of Dorothy,1943,” that had the sissy/pansy words and then the “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Three Boys… and One Tub, 1937” paintings that were so totally out, and very, very queer. And really, I was in high school, thought, “Oh my god, you can be totally out and be a popular artist and do all these things in a deeper, more intrinsic way than Hockney.” I was so happy to get to be friends with him. I’m sad I never got to meet Keith Haring or Basquiat, or all those other people. It was amazing to end up working at Robert Miller Gallery—because I also remember when Mapplethorpe died. I was traveling around, right before I came to New York. I remember distinctly being in Rome and opening up a Vogue and seeing that, “Oh my god, Mapplethorpe is gone.” Basquiat had just died. I ended up working the front desk for the gallery that had Mapplethorpe and Basquiat, and I got to meet his dad, Gerard Basquiat, all these people that made we want to become an artist—and then I became one!

Painting this famous album cover, I was playing all the Bob Dylan canon, and then it ended on “My Tambourine Man.” On one, I ended it, I was going around and around, and the word “free,” it was finishing the word “free” with “Mr. Tambourine Man” playing. And I’m like, “Oh my god, that’s what this is, that’s the key.” Dylan, hypothetically, is free. Or they, as a couple, are free. And he is Mr. Tambourine Man. So, I was thinking I should call it “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

I felt with a lot of these popular images that we’ve seen them again and again, thinking about how Warhol and how he made people into posters, stamps, and icons. I always thought growing up Elvis was “Fat Elvis,” that he was a joke, but at one moment, watching the famous ’68 “Comeback Special,” I realized, that this was a real person, a real person who helped to change culture (even though he colonized culture and it was based on the blues music and all the bad politics of it!). But I think Elvis was in general a good person–Amazing Grace.

Elvis was an artist who deals with ideas of appropriation, what Elvis liked is the cheesy song that he could recode and reinvent. He appreciated lyrics that are cheesy because they’re so accessible. But to me, it’s his voice! He was the crooner of the twentieth century, because it’s so moving. I love the Beatles, I love John Lennon, I love Bob Dylan. But Elvis, the music moves you. Judy Garland, same thing, where it moves you. She’s channeling like a method actor. James Dean supposedly saw Judy Garland perform live and was knocked on his feet. He was like, “How does she do that? I want to be able to do that! How can you do that?” Because she was channeling all of her life into it. Her life is “Over the Rainbow.” It’s always about getting to the other side; the hope is always there. She became that.

But with Bob Dylan, what I totally respect, is that he did change music in many ways from the Elvis and Judy Garland tradition. Coming from Woody Guthrie and folk singing, he’s the auteur who wrote his own music, performed his own music, wrote poetry as a visionary.  For Joni Mitchell, in a documentary I viewed about her, she mentions that he was the first singer songwriter who used the first-person pronoun—it was “I” about “you”—singing personal songs. It was the first time that she’d ever heard somebody say “I” about “you” and to be able to speak in the first-person about her own self in a song.

I grew up with this album, like everybody did. This was the spirit of New York and being a bohemian artist. Everything came from looking at that cover. The woman in the image is his girlfriend Suze Rotolo was also really embedded in politics and activism movements, and taught Dylan to be political, who, although following the tradition of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Guthrie and singing for the proletariat was never really that directly political. That was also about that collaboration, specifically talking about civil rights new stories and icons, and bringing that specifically into the world.

It was from looking at this cover while listening to Dylan that helped to form in my conscious the Idée fixe 

of moving to New York and becoming an artist, hopefully with a significant other who shared my bohemian artistic spirit.  As I used to walk through this same block on slushy, snowy winter days in my leather coat from Soho to the East Village to teach at NYU and SVA I would think of this cover, how it, and everything it represents, helped to form my life and my artistic ideology.   David Davis was a great art supply and stretcher making company, and I always thought their Maroger medium, and more was blessed from the legacy, and Karma, this wonderful gallery in which I am now proud to belong, also began in this area (along with Warhol’s loft Basquiat lived in, Rauschenberg’s studio and much more).   Sometimes dreams come true and looking at the warn album as a kid in my waterbed in the 70’s in Colorado, I could only dream that at one point and time I would be a successful artist, teacher, and activist who lived with his still-married husband for 25 years in New York City….

Also, listening to his oeuvre Dylan still serves as a living model of the greatest artist, who never sold his soul for Rock and Roll, who changed art and culture, and never compromised his art and politics that were fused into one visionary voice that keeps growing, despite ups and downs, mostly great “ups” after changing art history, winning a Nobel Prize, and still making amazing relevant and pertinent art and music.

I took this picture with my phone camera when I went to visit my sister on September 20, 2020, it was a Sunday during the height of Covid, on one of the last days warm enough to be able to comfortably run into the ocean if just for a few minutes.  I lived in Riverside Ca, in the Inland Empire, and although I’d been in CA for my professorship at USC since August 2016, had rarely if ever been swimming in the ocean.  I gratefully, like the folks in the picture, ripped off my mask, held my breath running past people on this crowded beach, and jumped exhilaratingly into the cold ocean water.  Wooh!  It was freezing, but so amazing to finally be outside, around people, but be able to have my mask off, smiling at my sister who was waiting for me with our stuff on the beach.  Later, as we were leaving, the sun was setting so intensely it burned my eyes with sandy tears, but I took this snapshot as a group of three friends were repeating the same action I had just performed.  It was a beautiful, yet melancholic and intense, almost post-apocalyptic scene, given our moment then (and now) with global warming, the state of politics, and the pandemic.  But the human desire to be free is ever present!

There is a boat in the background, and one of my favorite paintings of all time is the one above the Simpson’s couch in the famous cartoon.  Despite all their trials in their cul-de-sac suburbia of Springfield, they can gaze at that painting and yearn for a better future, able to transcend through the vehicle of the boat (like Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat) into a better or transcendent, at least for the moment, world.

Kant, who believed in the Sublime, which I try to teach to my students, wasn’t sure if humankind can create better than Nature the truly sublime—where one feels a small part of a much larger thing and is able to objectify themselves in such a matter they see the largeness of all things, and their interconnectivities to everything—the relatability of it all—  There have been many paintings by great artists trying to capture this moment, for which Kant also describes one can feel when gazing at the awesome ocean.  The symbolists also would embrace the spirituality of nature this way, the title character from le Comte de Lautréamont’s infamous chanteuse Maldoror has a lengthy espousal to the Ocean demanding its secrets, and here I yet again (I have painted a number of ocean works) the sublime feeling of that day.

One thing Turner didn’t have when painting his magnificent maritime scenes was photography, nor high-res digital photos, obviously, and printers.  Although my image was from a camera phone, and somewhat pixelated, it was joyous to be able to escape looking at the mini pixels in this much micro-managed picture.  I think the secret to the sublime is micro-managing to the macro managed whole, and I tried from within my grid to get the most flotsam and jetsam possible from every tooth and comb of the natural wave flow, mini sand dunes made from footprints, the tiny figures, and the incredible sky and intense sun.

Our three-year-old dog had just died tragically before painting this picture from a rare disease, and his sister had what turned out Stage 3 Lymphoma, which quickly turned to stage 4, my parrot almost died giving birth to an oblong egg, all during the painting of this picture and just before.  I truly wanted to use the picture to escape, to transcend into it, like one is supposed to do with the coloristic machines like a Rothko, suturing into the avatars of the tiny, shadowed figures (like Casper David Friedrich’s silhouettes!), and dive into the world thinking of better tomorrows.

In fact, while painting this, we were stuck in the old house in Riverside, where the dog had just died wishing we could more.  My husband put the house on the market, and a gay couple—the new Dean of Humanities for UC Riverside, purchased the house (like us, too, they are multicultural, he is African American, his husband white).  Andrew found us an apartment in Laguna Beach—the seaside resort where we had first met each other and lived in the early 90’s, and we moved there, with an apartment overlooking PCH and the ocean!  All the while I was painting the picture of the same scene!

Sometimes when you paint your dreams, it helps them to become true.  I was able to hang this work, while working for them in the show, on the wall next to the sliding glass door that has a real-life ocean scene next to the painting of the same!  It was uncanny to realize, through the magic act of painting that perhaps serendipitously I was able to ideate a world that then manifest and came true!  Sometimes we do have Dos Ex Machina when we most need it, and we feel very blessed to be living our American Dream.

I live in Southern California, and its tragically not unusual to smell smoke from distant and not so distant flames, and to see mountains and hills on fire.

I couldn’t say it better than the great Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who age 16 gave this now famous speech at the final day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, eastern Switzerland in January 2019:

Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire.

According to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), we are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. In that time, unprecedented changes in all aspects of society need to have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50%.

And please note that those numbers do not include the aspect of equity, which is necessary to make the Paris agreement work on a global scale. Nor does it include tipping points or feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas released from the thawing Arctic permafrost.

At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed. All political movements in their present form have done so, and the media has failed to create broad public awareness.

But Homo sapiens have not yet failed. 

Yes, we are failing, but there is still time to turn everything around. We can still fix this. We still have everything in our own hands. But unless we recognize the overall failures of our current systems, we most probably don’t stand a chance.

We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people. And now is not the time for speaking politely or focusing on what we can or cannot say. Now is the time to speak clearly.

Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.

Either we do that, or we don’t.

You say nothing in life is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie. Either we prevent 1.5C of warming or we don’t. Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t.

Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.

We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.

That is up to you and me.

Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?

Here in Davos – just like everywhere else – everyone is talking about money. It seems money and growth are our only main concerns.

And since the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences on our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget, and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. That needs to change today.

No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics.

We are at a time in history where everyone with any insight of the climate crisis that threatens our civilization – and the entire biosphere – must speak out in clear language, no matter how uncomfortable and unprofitable that may be.

We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

A real protest, and not a riot, people with a just cause so important to our world and culture, fighting for truth, justice, equality and liberty, and against racism, repression and violence. Black Lives Matter and our culture of diversity and freedom shall prevail…

On what would have been his 81st birthday, remember the words of public servant, Freedom Rider, and civil rights champion, @repjohnlewis “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, do something.”

#GoodTrouble @billiejeanking from her tweet today

Rep. John Lewis at Black Lives Matter Plaza June 7, 2020
(from a photo by Gary Williams), 2020

—February 21^st, 2021

I was so inspired by @marchforourlives and the Parkland survivors, the kids who acted even better than the adults by creating the worldwide movement that reverberates today. This demonstration in 2018, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flooding the streets across the globe in public protests and in Washington D.C., lead by Emma Gonsalves, @davidmileshogg and their cohort was mighty and great, calling for action against gun violence after the recent massacre at their South Florida high school.

At the main event in Washington, one of the survivors of mass shootings said “Welcome to the revolution,” which is still happening today with the Dems finally bringing sanity to the nation.

I’m glad for Speaker Pelosi speaking out today, as per the NYTimes:

She “rebuked House Republican leaders for naming Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to serve on the Education and Labor Committee, despite Ms. Greene’s previous false claims that deadly school shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Newtown, Conn., were staged.

Ms. Greene, a first-term congresswoman from Georgia with a history of supporting the pro-Trump QAnon movement, wrote on Facebook in 2018 that she agreed with one of her followers that the Parkland massacre that killed 17 students was a “false flag” event, a term used by conspiracy theorists to describe an act committed by one group — usually the government — for which another group is blamed.

In a video posted on YouTube in 2020 by her campaign, Ms. Greene followed and harassed David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who was visiting Capitol Hill to lobby for gun safety measures. In the video, Ms. Greene demanded that he explain why he was “using kids” to advance his cause, shouted that she was licensed to carry a firearm, and called him a “coward.”

Ms. Pelosi expressed:

“when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when she has mocked the killing of teenagers in high school at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School…What could they be thinking — or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing? It is absolutely appalling”

—January 28

I am terrified of Global Warming, moreover our collective denial globally about it and refusal to act deterministically and immediately to end the swell of apocalypse by not reversing our global emissions nearly to the degree that it will take to stop the cataclysmic events we have been experience progressively over the last decades and years, and for us to wake up and immediately make extensive steps to stop what could be the end of the planet as we know it.

How to show this but as the intense, gargantuan monsters of hurricanes that have repeatably our shores? I was inspired by the satellite view of Hurricane Florence, a devastating disaster that landed in the Carolina’s on Friday, September 14, 2018.  I’ve also always been inspired by Da Vinci, and one of his obsessions in the last years of his life was to depict apocalyptic weather in drawings—the Deluge series, of which there are 10 drawings still in existence.  Ever the Renaissance man, he was fascinated by nature, and how weather works, but also for this series Nature vs. Man and his ultimate humbling defeat.  I’m also inspired always by the Kantian idea of the Sublime, which he attributes sometimes to nature, having such an experience the all-encompassing storms could lead to the Horrific Sublime—where one realizes their own subjectivity in an epiphany, in this case, by being encapsulated by such an enormous storm one might not be able completely comprehend in emotion or ideation the extent of it—like one might be humbled in a sublime way looking at an ocean, but by ferocious, dangerous huge storm instead.  Turner took his turn rendering storms with this very much in mind—his romantic but frighteningly awesome Snow Storm, Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, c. 1812 at the Tate Modern.  Turner, too, was fascinated and informed by advancements by science to understand nature and would employ what he learned from scientists directly into his painting, including here how wind and storms work.  What these masters couldn’t do, of course, is have high resolution photography to use as a source—much less, from a satellite, as this image is from, sourcing NASA space photography to capture the exactitude of the awesomeness.

And no generation before has had to deal with global warming—it’s been proven that the wrath of hurricanes has been greatly increased due to humankind’s abuse of the planet.  And now nature is having its revenge.  Hurricane Florence was a mighty storm, a long-lived Cape Verde hurricane, and was the first for the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, it reached its peak intensity on Sept. 11 (!) that year, an unexpected eyewall replacement cycle and decreasing oceanic heat content caused a steady weakening trend; however, the storm grew at the same time. Early on September 14, Florence made landfall  in the United States just south of Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane.  However the devastation was still horrible, by the time it finally dissipated September 18, there were 24 direct and 30 indirect fatalities and over 24.34 billion worth of damage, affecting West Africa, Cape Verde Bermuda, East Coast of the United States (especially the Carolinas), and Atlantic Canada.

Until we do something about Global Warming in comprehensive waves and do this fast, we won’t protect our planet from Nature’s wrath.  What is intense and amazing to me, beyond all the micro-managed moments of seeing how nature works from this fantastic height and high resolution exactitude is that the eye of a hurricane actually really does look like an anthropomorphized real eye—as if Nature was able to assemble itself in to a strange, giant corporeal body that has agency—whipping mankind like a God to remind them of their deep abuse, and to get rid of our species that has, like a parasite or a cancer, brought the globe to disaster.

As a super lefty liberal gay artist with a beard, I was so overjoyed when Biden and Harris won, that my husband, family, and I were over the moon with happiness and great spirit—something I wanted to capture in this painting.  I have had a habit of painting the image of the front page of the New York Times every time we have voted in a new president, starting with George W. Bush, and I was so excited and relieved that this time it was for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who I really believe in (and who saved America and democracy from perhaps becoming a fascist authoritarian government).

This is the image and the cropping for the front page of the printed New York Times from November 8^th, when they were finally able to announce that Biden won the vote the day before on 11/7/20.  The image is from when both he and Kamala were giving their victory speeches in Delaware after winning the 2020 US election that night.  Kamala had just finished her speech, and Joe came jogging out and they fist-bumped, looking into one another’s eyes for a split second of deeply meaningful interaction.  Behind them were screens that had an interesting multi-media light show—of animated flag-like lines and forms moving back and forth, that were also so inspiring to paint.  I love Rothko, and his early “cloud paintings”, and these forms, despite being a normally melancholic blue tone, gave gravitas to the feeling that although victory was theirs, its amidst the pandemic, economic and political woes, and a lot of mixed feelings towards the election at large and for our country.

They were an inspiring couple to paint—it almost felt like a dance but updated so much from a Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire musical, with obviously much more of an impact towards our culture, politics, and nation.  To know how hard they have fought, for how long, and to finally reach this point where they are able to devote all of themselves and their developing team to bring back America—as Joe Biden pledges—to be leaders for “everybody”–is so moving.  I listened to their “playlists” on Spotify—I don’t know how much these were sanctioned by them or how much they truly listen to this music, but Kamala has fantastic, and eclectic musical taste, and Biden, for his part, also has some fresh edge to his music, along with some heartening standards that make so much sense for his age and stature.  This further helped me to bring spirit to this work, along with listening to the news as I painted—looking fondly hopeful into the future!

It can be understated how much of a revolutionary impact their leadership will bring to the country—to have it on solid footing once again with the age and experience of Biden, but also with the positive, progressive hope with Harris—the First Woman and Woman of Color as our Vice President!  It was true pleasure to paint this picture at this moment while there is still “debate” about the legitimacy of the election, of course they won, and they have a huge job on their hands—but I know our future looks bright, thank goodness they won the election!