Biography
I grew up as an artist in the privileged white suburbs of Boston. While in art school at Pratt in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, I experienced spasms of bliss as I learned that art could be anything. At the same time I was surrounded by the despair of the ghetto of 1980s New York. I was torn between wanting to create beauty for or save the world. I wondered how I could be an artist when there was so much suffering in the world. I didn’t see that art was directly alleviating anyone’s pain. My answer was to become involved in activist art. Carnival Knowledge was a group of artists who created a “carnival” of participatory artworks and performances addressing reproductive rights, homosexual civil rights and other feminist issues. We put on full scale carnivals and took pieces out to street fairs, nightclubs, and Coney Island. Our second incarnation was an art show at Franklin Furnace of feminist pornography called, “The Second Coming.” After spending the 1980s working on the Carnival and other activist art pursuits I started wondering if we weren’t preaching to the choir. I went into the studio and made paintings and collages having to do with nature and spiritual transcendence. Then I went to graduate school in southern California. My work at that time and after was an attempt to turn the body inside out. I worked with earth, pornography, photography, trash, clothing and bedsheets to make work which showed the marks of existence, or, in some way, who we really are. These were very visceral sculptures and performances which I showed at various places in LA. Then I took on a very labor intensive piece which is made of thousands of square pictures of skin which ripple when you breathe on them. That piece is still not finished, I worked on it for 10 years. I also got involved in environmental work and began practicing Zen meditation. I made several notebooks full of sketches for sculptures made from trash that I picked up as I walked back and forth from work. By this time, I had moved to Sacramento. I started this body of work made of and about trash. I am interested in reconnecting the trash to the human body, to popping the bubble of “away” (as in “throw away.”) I hope that this work is transformative - that it creates beauty and wholeness out of waste and alienation. (Trash to me is the most vivid sign of alienation from nature and from each other.) I also hope that it maintains some of its original ugliness, provoking us to think of ways to change our lifestyles and ways of doing business. And I want it to speak of the power of transformation itself - our ability to create solutions of the problems we face.
I have made my living as a teacher of English-as-a-Second-Language, a designer of ties and scarves for uniforms, a performance art teacher, and an organic gardener.
I grew up as an artist in the privileged white suburbs of Boston. While in art school at Pratt in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, I experienced spasms of bliss as I learned that art could be anything. At the same time I was surrounded by the despair of the ghetto of 1980s New York. I was torn between wanting to create beauty for or save the world. I wondered how I could be an artist when there was so much suffering in the world. I didn’t see that art was directly alleviating anyone’s pain. My answer was to become involved in activist art. Carnival Knowledge was a group of artists who created a “carnival” of participatory artworks and performances addressing reproductive rights, homosexual civil rights and other feminist issues. We put on full scale carnivals and took pieces out to street fairs, nightclubs, and Coney Island. Our second incarnation was an art show at Franklin Furnace of feminist pornography called, “The Second Coming.” After spending the 1980s working on the Carnival and other activist art pursuits I started wondering if we weren’t preaching to the choir. I went into the studio and made paintings and collages having to do with nature and spiritual transcendence. Then I went to graduate school in southern California. My work at that time and after was an attempt to turn the body inside out. I worked with earth, pornography, photography, trash, clothing and bedsheets to make work which showed the marks of existence, or, in some way, who we really are. These were very visceral sculptures and performances which I showed at various places in LA. Then I took on a very labor intensive piece which is made of thousands of square pictures of skin which ripple when you breathe on them. That piece is still not finished, I worked on it for 10 years. I also got involved in environmental work and began practicing Zen meditation. I made several notebooks full of sketches for sculptures made from trash that I picked up as I walked back and forth from work. By this time, I had moved to Sacramento. I started this body of work made of and about trash. I am interested in reconnecting the trash to the human body, to popping the bubble of “away” (as in “throw away.”) I hope that this work is transformative - that it creates beauty and wholeness out of waste and alienation. (Trash to me is the most vivid sign of alienation from nature and from each other.) I also hope that it maintains some of its original ugliness, provoking us to think of ways to change our lifestyles and ways of doing business. And I want it to speak of the power of transformation itself - our ability to create solutions of the problems we face.
I have made my living as a teacher of English-as-a-Second-Language, a designer of ties and scarves for uniforms, a performance art teacher, and an organic gardener.