ART & ACTION: Closing the Gap

Holding a piece created in support of opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline

In working on the seventh of my PAPER series of monographs entitled PAPER: Social Practice, I came face to face with the recognition – a long time coming – that my extracurricular activities in business, teaching and community activism were not disconnected from my process-based art practice and were, in fact, an essential part of it.

I spent over 15 years beginning in 1996 engaged in the revitalization of the Historic Core of downtown, Los Angeles. I acquired a real estate broker license and opened DownTown LA Realty in order to implement a re-tenanting and redevelopment of architectural icons and historic neighborhoods, dedicating my efforts to leverage the rich inventory of architectural landmark properties in support of the entrepreneurial and creative spirit befitting the heart of Los Angeles. I developed a vision for the reuse (new tenants and owner/custodians) of these aging architectural gems that would dynamically change all of downtown…and it did. (My papers from this period are archived in the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles collection.)

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Expanding my artistic vocabulary, I turned to photography to produce a collection of carefully framed elements of these buildings which I used to inspire those who had long disregarded the area: Downtown Up and Bradbury Building.

When I did return to studio practice full time (around 2012), I continued along the familiar lines of my formal inquiries, incorporating temporal subjects such as the refugee crisis, the climate crisis and social injustice – continually pushing the envelope of what paper and paper manipulation techniques can do to express them.

Then, in 2016, with the election of Donald Trump, I felt we were at the brink of an existential crisis. I could barely keep up with the daily revelations of his obscene abuses of power long enough to develop an artistic vocabulary for them. For the first Women’s March in downtown LA, the day after the inauguration, I quickly put together a window display in the storefront of a friend’s gallery. There was no time to agonize about the manipulation of materials, methods, and techniques – instead I employed a process outside my usual way of working.

Now, with COVID-19 upon us, it has hammered home for me the systemic inadequacies in our country: income inequality and lack of opportunity for upward mobility, ethnicity and gender-based suppression, lack of health care for all, an unstable food supply, growing climate crisis, the abuses of wealth, power and influence that had been sustained even under more benevolent leadership, were now exposed. As an artist, I had to consider if I had the tools to respond with the speed and to the scale that these subjects deserved.

During quarantine, I paused to reflect on other times I have been called into action, artistically, to address an urgent concern. I took a fresh look at work I produced that had been atypical for me and the methods I employed at the time.

Years ago, when going through a personal family crisis, I found expression in the Crucifixion Series, literally exposing myself. This first self portrait in this series served as a point of reference for the Angels, (available as a monograph).

In an early effort to augment my technical toolbox, I produced a video and an interactive installation for my open studio event on the Venice Art Walk of 2014: A Post-Apocalyptic Memorial

Perhaps, these were all seeds for more spontaneous and involving formats.

In order to bring my art practice closer to the demands of my conscience, I decided to challenge myself by accepting requests to produce work that was typically outside my norm. In 2019, Juri Kohl, Founder and President of ViCA (Venice Institute of Contemporary Art) and a champion of Venice artists, asked me to participate in a History of Venice exhibition. The challenge for me was to create a narrative around a historical event – my community project to save the Venice Walkstreets from demolition – that was not only informative but that was also an art piece.

Most recently, during the pandemic quarantine, I received a request to do an art piece for a project of the Jewish Women’s Theatre, Los Angeles called Holy Sparks: Celebrating 50 Years of Women in the Rabbinate.

I decided to try to stretch my vocabulary once again to produce a work about the first woman rabbi in England, Jackie Tabick. My research took me to her TED talk where, like many rabbis, she interjects a parable about a man’s inadvertent good deeds and his acts interpreted by the rabbi as the man’s deeds functioning as the hands of G*d. Her bio also speaks to her interfaith work in the refugee community. So, I decided to bring together these two themes while experimenting with combining some techniques: a new photo transfer method where I selected a compelling newspaper photograph of Syrian refugees and printed it onto an art paper with a preexisting image (clouds on a sky). In order to push the work into the viewer’s space, I created a three dimensional element by employing a casting technique I had used many years ago.

I am hoping, in these kinds of explorations, to stretch my reach and develop a visual vocabulary to meet the fast changing situation on the ground.