You can get a print AND help me build my studio.

As many of you know I have had studios all over the city of Boston.  This also means that I have moved around a lot over the course of my career here.

I had a studio I loved in Hyde Park for many years, a condo I bought into.  The developer was, well let’s just say he was motivated by something other than trying to create artist housing.  People had varying or non-existent commitments to contemporary art practice, so there was no dialogue about art, a hallmark of a thriving artist community. The 10+ year lawsuit took its toll on friendships, my art work and my health and once I was able to get the building’s roof fixed (it used to rain in my studio) I decided to sell the place and move.

I have a great realtor (thanks Larry) who was patient, smart, and knew what I needed was a place for a studio.  He helpded me find a house in Dedham that belonged to a retired stonemason. It wasn’t in the best shape (neither am I) but the structure was good and more importantly, it had an above grade basement with a carport that I could turn into a studio.

project

The goal here is to turn the existing basement and carport into a working artist’s studio with appropriate lighting, access, storage, and ventillation. To do this:

1. Upgrade electrical system to code and replace electrical panel to allow for the use of a variety of power tools.
2. Remove and replace inefficient (and gigantic) oil-heat furnace and water heater with wall mounted gas models that with smaller footprints and better venting to increase working space.
3. Remove walls, reinforce joists, remove existing chimney, and regonfigure space to create work areas and storage.
4. Close off, insulate, and build out existing carport to increase working space.

The wonderful Patti Seitz of Seitz Architects has drawn up plans for how this could work.  I’m deeply grateful to her for her excellent work and patience. (Click to enlarge)

The orange outline is what I am currently using for my studio.  The blue is the space that will be available after the project is complete. (Click to enlarge)

funding

I am funding this studio rebuild through my work.  The current politcal and financial moments in this country make accessing credit markets and capital extremely difficult for artists-even those of us with tenured professorships.  The lenders I have approached have advised that waiting for credit markets to relax may result in more favorable lending terms.  Unfortunately, I need a place to work now.

I created a new print project based on the image below.  There are risographic prints, silkscreens, etchings and dye sublimation prints available. These can be viewed here.

There are 12 x 12 inch water colors that are available at a reduced price. These can be viewed here.

I am still represented by Samsøñ.  If you are interested in paintings or sculptures, you can connect with them here.  They know that I am trying to build a studio and would love to work with you if you are interested in purchasing works.

Lastly, I know that my work is not everyone’s cup of tea and I understand that.  So if want to help me raise the funds for my studio and don’t want any of my work, you can connect with me on Venmo and send funds directly.

Feel free to share this link with anyone you think would be interested.  Thanks so much.

I lucked out with Elaine Reichek.  She was in town for the unveiling of her facade project for the Gardner Museum.  It’s taken from the correspondence between Mrs. G. and Henry James.  David and his crew had just finished installing the piece when I met up with Elaine for a talk in the Living Room.  Elaine was the first artist to have a residency at the Gardner Museum and she produced the award winning MADAM I’M ADAM CD rom project there.  I still use the piece with my students. It gives another kind of vision to Mrs. G’s house and sort of foretells the augmented reality phase that is happening now.

Elaine is one of my favorite artists.  I first heard of her when one of my professors showed her work in class.  It was White Brushstroke 1 from the exhibition AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD.  In my education, it may have been the first time that I saw a white artist directly and confidently address their position of whiteness.  I was kind of stunned by the way she just turned all these things that were in the air at that time (appropriation, feminism, craft, text, history, erasure, race, and whiteness) on their heads with a cross stitch.  I remember going to the MFA Bookstore and looking for all the texts I could find about her.

In 2004, I was working as Dean at Skowhegan and Elaine was one of the resident faculty.  We became very close that summer and we talked a great deal not just about art, but about life, loss and the importance of community.

It was rainy when we started talking, but it cleared up.  Elaine and I talk about a lot.  We discuss her move to Harlem, gentrification, whiteness, maintaining a career, loss, love, food, galleries, and a bunch of other stuff, if you can believe it.  We went way over time, but it was worth it.  I love Elaine a great deal.  At this time in my own studio practice when things are so unstable and fraught, it was good to sit down with a friend who knows how to keep the work moving forward.

In this talk, Jen and I discuss the trajectory of her career, but we also get into teaching, learning, the role of advanced degree study and the importance creating the space for conversation.

I hope you enjoy this show.

PS: It must be said that Jen makes the best barbecue sauces I’ve ever had.  Ever.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a Living Room and because they are and have been so wonderful to me and many other artists, they have allowed me to come to Mrs. G’s house, and sit in the Living Room and have talks with artists and whomever else. This is my first one and I could not have chosen a better guest.

Maggie (not Margaret) is an artist, educator, curator, and the mind behind, within and through out Alter Projects.  Because of her varied ways of participating in the art world I thought it would be great to talk to her about publics, practices, Boston, and engagement.

I loved talking to her.  She’s brilliant.  I hope you enjoy the show.

On my way to get a burrito before work, I was detained by the police.

I noticed the police car in the public lot behind Centre Street.  As I was walking away from my car, the cruiser followed me.  I walked down Centre Street and was about to cross over to the burrito place and the officer got out of the car.

“Hey my man,” he said.

He unsnapped the holster of his gun.

I took my hands out of my pockets.

“Yes?”  I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Home.”

Where’s home?”

“Dedham.”

How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

He was next to me now.  Two other police cars pulled up.  I was standing in from of the bank across the street from the burrito place.  I was going to get lunch before I taught my 1:30 class.  There were cops all around me.

I said nothing.  I looked at the officer who addressed me.  He was white, stocky, bearded.

“You weren’t over there, were you?” He pointed down Centre Street toward Hyde Square.

“No. I came from Dedham.”

“What’s your address?”

I told him.

“We had someone matching your description just try to break into a woman’s house.”

A second police officer stood next to me; white, tall, bearded.  Two police cruisers passed and would continue to circle the block for the 35 minutes I was standing across the street from the burrito place.

“You fit the description,” the officer said. “Black male, knit hat, puffy coat.  Do you have identification.”

“It’s in my wallet.  May I reach into my pocket and get my wallet?”

“Yeah.”

I handed him my license.  I told him it did not have my current address.  He walked over to a police car.  The other cop, taller, wearing sunglasses, told me that I fit the description of someone who broke into a woman’s house.  Right down to the knit cap.

Barbara Sullivan made a knit cap for me.  She knitted it in pinks and browns and blues and oranges and lime green.  No one has a hat like this. It doesn’t fit any description that anyone would have.  I looked at the second cop.  I clasped my hands in front of me to stop them from shaking.

“For the record,” I said to the second cop, “I’m not a criminal.  I’m a college professor.”  I was wearing my faculty ID around my neck, clearly visible with my photo.

“You fit the description so we just have to check it out.”  The first cop returned and handed me my license.

“We have the victim and we need her to take a look at you to see if you are the person.”

It was at this moment that I knew that I was probably going to die.  I am not being dramatic when I say this.  I was not going to get into a police car.  I was not going to present myself to some victim.  I was not going let someone tell the cops that I was not guilty when I already told them that I had nothing to do with any robbery.  I was not going to let them take me anywhere because if they did, the chance I was going to be accused of something I did not do rose exponentially.  I knew this in my heart.  I was not going anywhere with these cops and I was not going to let some white woman decide whether or not I was a criminal, especially after I told them that I was not a criminal.  This meant that I was going to resist arrest.  This meant that I was not going to let the police put their hands on me.

If you are wondering why people don’t go with the police, I hope this explains it for you.

Something weird happens when you are on the street being detained by the police.  People look at you like you are a criminal.  The police are detaining you so clearly you must have done something, otherwise they wouldn’t have you.  No one made eye contact with me.  I was hoping that someone I knew would walk down the street or come out of one of the shops or get off the 39 bus or come out of JP Licks and say to these cops, “That’s Steve Locke.  What the FUCK are you detaining him for?”

The cops decided that they would bring the victim to come view me on the street.  The asked me to wait. I said nothing.  I stood still.

“Thanks for cooperating,” the second cop said. “This is probably nothing, but it’s our job and you do fit the description.  5′ 11″, black male.  One-hundred-and-sixty pounds, but you’re a little more than that.  Knit hat.”

A little more than 160. Thanks for that, I thought.

An older white woman walked behind me and up to the second cop.  She turned and looked at me and then back at him.  “You guys sure are busy today.”

I noticed a black woman further down the block.  She was small and concerned.  She was watching what was going on.  I focused on her red coat.  I slowed my breathing.  I looked at her from time to time.

I thought: Don’t leave, sister. Please don’t leave.

The first cop said, “Where do you teach?”

“Massachusetts College of Art and Design.”  I tugged at the lanyard that had my ID.

“How long you been teaching there?”

“Thirteen years.”

We stood in silence for about 10 more minutes.

An unmarked police car pulled up.  The first cop went over to talk to the driver.  The driver kept looking at me as the cop spoke to him.  I looked directly at the driver.  He got out of the car.

“I’m Detective Cardoza.  I appreciate your cooperation.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sure these officers told you what is going on?”

“They did.”

“Where are you coming from?”

“From my home in Dedham.”

“How did you get here?”

“I drove.”

“Where is your car?”

“It’s in the lot behind Bukhara.”  I pointed up Centre Street.

“Okay,” the detective said.  “We’re going to let you go.  Do you have a car key you can show me?”

“Yes,” I said.  “I’m going to reach into my pocket and pull out my car key.”

“Okay.”

I showed him the key to my car.

The cops thanked me for my cooperation.  I nodded and turned to go.

“Sorry for screwing up your lunch break,” the second cop said.

I walked back toward my car, away from the burrito place.  I saw the woman in red.

“Thank you,” I said to her.  “Thank you for staying.”

“Are you ok?”  She said.  Her small beautiful face was lined with concern.

“Not really.  I’m really shook up.  And I have to get to work.”

“I knew something was wrong.  I was watching the whole thing.  The way they are treating us now, you have to watch them. ”

“I’m so grateful you were there.  I kept thinking to myself, ‘Don’t leave, sister.’  May I give you a hug?”

“Yes,” she said. She held me as I shook.  “Are you sure you are ok?”

“No I’m not.  I’m going to have a good cry in my car.  I have to go teach.”

“You’re at MassArt. My friend is at MassArt.”

“What’s your name?”  She told me.  I realized we were Facebook friends.  I told her this.

“I’ll check in with you on Facebook,” she said.

I put my head down and walked to my car.

My colleague was in our shared office and she was able to calm me down.  I had about 45 minutes until my class began and I had to teach.  I forgot the lesson I had planned.  I forget the schedule.  I couldn’t think about how to do my job.  I thought about the fact my word counted for nothing, they didn’t believe that I wasn’t a criminal.  They had to find out.  My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them.  My handmade one-of-a-kind knit hat was an object of suspicion.  My Ralph Lauren quilted blazer was only a “puffy coat.”  That white woman could just walk up to a cop and talk about me like I was an object for regard.  I wanted to go back and spit in their faces.  The cops were probably deeply satisfied with how they handled the interaction, how they didn’t escalate the situation, how they were respectful and polite.

I imagined sitting in the back of a police car while a white woman decides if I am a criminal or not.  If I looked guilty being detained by the cops imagine how vile I become sitting in a cruiser?  I knew I could not let that happen to me.  I knew if that were to happen, I would be dead.

Nothing I am, nothing I do, nothing I have means anything because I fit the description.

I had to confess to my students that I was a bit out of it today and I asked them to bear with me.  I had to teach.

After class I was supposed to go to the openings for First Friday. I went home.

This is the third in a new series of poems and writing commissioned for Art and Everything After.  Poets and writers chose from a selection of new drawings called companions. Ms. Abendroth selected the image above.  A full size image can be seen here.

According to Taste
By Emily Abendroth

You were not a prominent man, per se, but you had about you the more than trace swagger of one who has been trained to hold court and to never abort a chance for managerial dominance. Nor for targeted flirtatious banter. You did not regard these advances on your part as unsolicited, despite the ubiquitous non-presence of anything resembling a request, since a lifetime of received affirmations had provided you with ample evidence that your advisements were not only timely and on point, but were really a kind of graciously gifted ointment that could serve as a balm to others and as corrective cover for their cumbersome faults.

You rarely faltered or hesitated in the making of public speech acts. As a matter of fact, at this very instant, you were engaged in a tactical maneuver often referred to as “hitting on someone.” Needless to say, we all felt that bludgeon. Having ascertained that your current coveted target was occupationally ordained as a lay people’s (and therefore, you presumed, easily laid) high school English teacher, you were confidently trotting out a time worn but adamant yarn on American wordsmithing that you felt certain would flutter her heart strings. You were white and she was white and from there, your certainty. Your mouth shuttled back and forth in urgent surges as you loudly lamented how children in the United States these days scarcely even knew how to read due to the twin evils of technology and sophistry. And when literacy was a critical delicacy within their possessions, you were afraid they were hoodwinked away from the unwavering guidance of the “classics” by misinformed, diplomatic administrators more beholden, in your words, to “diversity” than to “excellence.” “Lamentable” was a term that permeated your lips with some frequency and was spit forth freely, as were “judicious” and “tasteful” and “germane.”

You shuddered at the thought (or at least you claimed to, while gamely winking at the woman before you) that these impressionable young vessels, these “future leaders” had been detoured away from the graces of Edgar Allan Poe, Rimbaud and Mark Twain. The way you conveyed this phrase – “future leaders” – with a practiced combination of gravity and disdain, in coupling with a pained and downward-weighing facial angle, made your tangled perception of the unlikelihood of their capacity in this regard abundantly clear even as you never veered from insisting upon it. Such juveniles, you rued, were being deprived of a viable chance to marvel at the time-vetted masterworks of Huckleberry Finn and The Raven. They couldn’t even begin to usher an image of the ever vivid James Fenimore Cooper in reference or reverence to his name.

As you came to the apex of your monologic indignity at this particular disappointment, “deplorable” was an adjective you clung to and “pathetic” was its tried-and-true partner; together they smothered any doubt on the part of the listener as to the clout you expected your judgments to carry. Yet the adamantly blank face which the woman in your proximity maintained was making you nervous. Her fastidious and unbroken silence. The way she neither moved closer nor recoiled from you, with no indicative warmth or revulsion extending from her body. You sensed, if only dimly, that perhaps this was not because she had zero responsive feelings toward your utterances, but rather that she couldn’t be persuaded to bother to offer them. A dilemma that made you speak more rather than less.

As you appealed with growing zeal, but no finesse, to what you believed was a universally agreed upon assessment among all discerning literary aestheticians, it was yourself you used as its dutiful measure. And while this was not a wildly uncommon practice in its essence, few others could press forward with such surety, so curiously devoid of any gestures of self-qualification. The lives of most others had mandated a recognition, however partial in its nature, of the risks involved, the pivotal exposure of one’s personal orientations and assumptions that such assertions necessarily entailed. Yet you did not feel exposed (or at least had never felt so previously), proud of your finely tuned judgments and the well-kempt values that girded them.

But now there was this woman’s face before you – immobile, defiant, unpersuaded. Although it took you some time, you were shocked to finally identify that she wasn’t in the least interested in your approach, that her only moments of laughter or shadows of a grin were generated not in flirtation, but at every repetition of the name “Fenimore Cooper.” To the point where it was now beginning to sound strange even to you. You sensed with alarm that her absence of speech seemed to indicate not an unfamiliarity with your reference points, but a form of reticent yet intimate knowledge. It would have tickled you to reign over her in the former way, to lap at her ignorance in semi-erotic, bullying reinforcement of your own thesis. Sweet Jesus, how you would have enjoyed that. An old hat, but nevertheless mack daddy, smack kathy feeling.

Finally, with her expression still largely illegible and her eyes trained into the distance, the woman spoke. “There’s a line in Twain’s essay, The United States of Lyncherdom, wherein he points to that ‘handful of America’s children that have given us a character.’ This character to which he refers is not the character of democracy, nor of pluralism, nor of honor, nor of liberty – it is the character of lynchers. A quality mortally coupled across a broad public, with what Twain calls ‘the inborn human instinct to imitate.’ In this case again, to imitate lynchers.” The woman pauses. She wonders aloud, straightening her blouse with her right hand, if this is what you were thinking of when you said that today’s high schoolers are missing a certain critical curricular element, a “classic” understanding that continues to direct our core cultural and institutional structures even when we cease to directly acknowledge its imprimatur.

The woman doesn’t wait for you to respond, but continues: “As Twain brainstorms how we might strategically gather forces to combat this cruel tendency, he suddenly recalls the thousands of overseas U.S. Christian missionaries who have been permitted by the leniencies of distance and non-citizenship to fulfill the foreign function of imperialist assassins. He fastens his attention on their avowed ethics, challenging them in their holy commitment to the sanctity of humanity to ‘Come home and convert these Christians!’ These sinful fellow worshipers who not only don’t balk, but gawk and applaud before a line of domestic noose-fed executions so long it would ‘be hidden from view by the curvature of the earth.’ I imagine that you and I could agree that’s a rather long line,” the woman divines, her voice scarcely modulating. “Do you know what Twain’s definition of a classic was?” she asks, her arms so flatly tacked to her sides they look almost stapled there. ‘Classic: a book which people praise and don’t read.’”

To say that this unseasonably succinct reply sets you ill at ease would be an infeasible understatement. Your kind is not meant to be met by teasing, provided that’s even what’ s happening here. The great power of a pick-up line lies in its vagueness, in the way that it easily absorbs approbations and approvals without imbuing complications. For the recipient to know something of substance regarding the vacuous matters at hand ruins the exchange, precisely by making it into one. And you are in one now. Holy cow, are you ever.

The woman unlids a hydrating beverage. She remains measured, retaining her commitment to scrupulously avoid whatever spatial interactions she deems are avoidable. But she is speaking fully now. To be frank, you can’t believe how she is poised to go on – as if a simple rebuff were not enough, as if her prior and now pined for silence was actually a decoy presaging the summoned deployment of decimation powers. And suddenly you find yourself so easily decimated, no longer such a stately or savvy crowd-pleaser. You once read a poem by Martin Espada, which you hated (claiming it to be both unartful and Spartan in its lack of lyric eloquence), but which you nonetheless have always remembered. It included the line “if every rebellion begins with the idea / that conquerors on horseback / are not many-legged gods, that they too drown / if plunged in the river, / then this is the year.” Against all your own wishes, you committed that line to memory, all the while doggedly trying not to, scoffing off its final toss of incompleteness as emblematic of intellectual weakness. “This is the year, what?” you asked rhetorically, categorizing its author as a failed prophesier, inadequate to provide an answer. But it haunted you, that line. And now it comes back to you again, suspending itself in your frontal cortex. And for the first time you have the treacherously creepy and creeping sensation that maybe it is your lack of imagination, or your narrowness of mind that denies anything but blankness in that poignant space where language hangs in the balance.

Such unanswerable queries are making it very hard for you to swallow. Your mouth has become a veritable cyclone of unrest, crested by a testy outstretched tongue of trounced gung-ho bravado. Your margin of maneuver has been crudely marginalized. Your sizable jowls dangerously maladaptive to the challenge.

And again this woman is speaking. So much vocality in one of her gender is an unfriendly characteristic. It prickles the visage. Although your own invasive and involuntary facial contortions have caused you to miss a few of her words, you infer that she is somewhat perturbed, wary even, of the pairings that you have previously been making. While you have merged the “perceived mastery” of these “great whites” – the Fenimore and the Twain – so freely, the woman decrees that they would not so easily have merged themselves. They would, in all likelihood, have fiercely resisted such positioning. It is not outside our capacity, the woman offers dryly, to surmise this. “Especially,” she posits, “in relation to Western Civilization. With a certain droll sense of the macabre, Twain complains that, ‘The Blessings of Civilization are best seen in a dim light with a proper distance, a little out of focus [since] close examination does not suit them well.’ My sense,” the woman ventures, “is that as an artificially co-glued duo the Cooper and the Twain function similarly for you – identically embossed with the sweeping gloss of generic genius that so often does not stand up admirably to careful prodding.”

The woman finds your marrying of the two especially ill-suited because Mark Twain did not like James Fenimore Cooper’s work, not even a little. “Although it is worth noting,” she says, plucking calmly at a tiny piece of lint on her mint-colored slacks, “that Twain saves his most scathing critiques for matters of craftsmanship rather than politics. He finds Cooper’s work slovenly in form, verbally over-gorged as it breaks the cardinal rule to ‘eschew surplusage’ with dangerous frequency. The prose’s tropes, Twain mopes, are both repetitious and implausible. He mocks that Cooper’s gift in the way of invention ‘was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it.’ Twain accuses Cooper of having no more than six to eight mainstay literary devices that he implements with neither pause nor mercy in order to move a plot forward. For instance, ‘A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick.’ Another precious Cooper gimmick, Twain proclaims, was the broken twig.”

Here the woman almost giggles in recollection, a display of emotion which surprises you tremendously, dousing your already dampened spirits into a sludge of unpampered irritability. Now, as if to throw upon the grill a billfold that is already well charbroiled, the woman oils her lips with water and proceeds. “I give you these lines,” she says, “from memory because they so pitch-perfectly capture Twain’s exasperation, whose penchants I do at times find charming. Cooper, Twain writes, ‘prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig.’ In fact, Twain argues that Fenimore Cooper’s whole Leatherstocking Series ought to have better been called the Broken Twig Series.”

“I have always found it a pity,” the woman admits, “that Twain didn’t dig his talons in beyond this priggish figure of the brittle stick, since some of the other shticks and gambits of the Fenimore Cooper tales can indeed tell us a great deal more – can tell our children more, as you have so adoringly opined and celebrated. But just what, pray tell, do these works spell out to our offspring, our fleet-winged future leaders? Is there an answer here other than the mere pleasures of adventure pioneerism?” The woman thinks yes. And you are more or less despondent with the prognostic dread that she is about to tread forward and tell you why. And by god she is.

“Cooper’s Littlepage Manuscripts are the second most famous of his widely circulated fiction collections and take place in upstate New York. They were written during a period of fierce regional land disputes, often referred to as the Anti-Rent Wars. In the early 1800s, most farmers in the Catskills (some 300,000 of them) were painfully tied at the bridle to a feudal land system in which they leased their plots from a few large hotshot landowners. Because the rents were so relentlessly high and the value of the land so outlandishly low, many farmers paid the full worth of their property over and over, in perpetuity, to a slender handful of wealthy families. The largest manor was owned by the Rensselears, who steered the fates of some 80,000 tenants and accumulated a fortune of more than $40 million. When the hardships of these subsistence tillers was compounded by economic crisis in the late 1830s, the tenants began first to contest and then to forego the issuing of their monthly payments en masse. In response, the irascible proprietors sent land agents and aging sheriffs to conduct court ordered sales of the cultivators’ acres, often confiscating farm animals when they couldn’t manage to collect their fees.”

“This was easier said than done. The tenants had begun to collectively organize, using the tin dinner horns of the women as an intricate system to warn neighbors of encroaching authorities. They gathered in large armed and disguised bands, under the banner of Anti-Renters, bent on obstructing either sales or evictions. These defensive convocations of humans could number fifty or a thousand. There is a mountain more that one could say about the political convictions and visions of these populist troops, as well as the unusual disguises they chose: garbed in calico, hooded, wearing fabricated sheepskin masks, often bedazzled with ornamentations. A chaotic, but optically hypnotic, get-up which they insistently referred to as ‘Indian’ garb. As ‘Indians,’ they made their defiant claim to be rid the chains of serfdom. Drawing upon the jumbled iconographies of American racialized hierarchies, they staked out their rights as dominated, but still supremacist, working class whites.”

“These, however, are not the insights I expect you and I to unite in unwinding. Rather, the point I’ve a mind to emphasize here is that Cooper’s trilogy, written in the dead middle of these events, with its unpent clownish depictions of the embattled and impoverished agrarian sector, is not simply pro-landlord and anti-tenant; it is profoundly pro-feudal, a dull-minded portrait of rote privilege far more worn out than any boring saga of synchronously toggled moccasin prints, although the socio-economic tints of each are not entirely unrelated. At this date in our history, perhaps an important question for our students might be: What are the other tropes in this oeuvre that we have overused and abused by barrel after barrel after barrel after barrel?”

This final well-aimed arrow of residual repetition is more than you care to hear. Your insides rear up in discomfort against the treasonous nature of these proceedings. In the last ten minutes alone, you have acquired two new facial ticks. The first is a periodic limited squinting of the left eye socket: it’s not a wink, rather the outer lid tinkers about noncommittally in an awkward rhythmic narrowing short of closure. Oh, that you could muster a wink right now to bring this dreadful and seemingly fling-proof woman down to appropriate size. Instead, in a misguided appraisal of bodily permission, your right cheek makes a mission of christening itself with newly drawn air which it proceeds to carry without exhalation. This oxygen in its grapefruit-sized station simply tarries there and sours, dilated, but non-circulating. And you begin to taste its stagnant wastes on the buds of your tongue, which compels you via glumness to volumize it further still. You are alarmed by this ill-proportioned version of yourself, its unfortunate self-coercions. When the chest inflates, that’s a powerful manhood; when the cheek inflates, that’s… But here your language straggles at the gates. What is that? No matter really. Given that whatever words you might conjure, powerful is certainly not one of them. Unbidden, Martin Espada re-enters with his porous chorus, “Let this be, what exactly? Please let this not be what?”

It has come to your attention that this demented woman before you may never stop speaking. Contrary to eliciting her admiration or arousal, you seem to have hit a sciatic nerve – a verbal loadstone – unleashing an onerous barrage of pent knowledge and relevant analysis you could never have anticipated. Especially given your trademark tendency to deny any interiority of substance to those who keep your company. Having lost your accustomed upper hand, you are hindered by feelings of infinite regret. You lament staying, but find yourself unable to confect an exit strategy.

The woman correctly senses your stuckness and trucks on ahead. “Whenever Mark Twain refers to Christian Americans (be it in scorn or praise, and whether man, woman, or child) he implicitly means white Christian Americans; he is appealing to lynching’s primary actors and foremost reactionary viewership, not to its victims. To his mind, in order for conditions to change, it is these whites who must alter their behaviors, their savior complexes, their beliefs.” The woman pauses to push up her sleeves. “When you approached me,” she says, “you were also making a presumptive appeal. You had geared yourself up to a particular kind of greeting, without first seeking any confirmation, as to what you assumed to know of my epidermis and my genitals. However, I think Twain’s observational efforts simultaneously create more friction and generate more compelling demands than yours can. Because, to speak truly, you are not observing; you are summarizing to your convenience. Valuing persuasion over accuracy. And this I would say, despite Twain’s limits – and he most definitely has some – is not one of his faults.”

“In my high school, I am required to use the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Without variation, every year I am mandated to teach almost solely from its contents. The Norton has a very interesting way of framing Twain; you may be familiar with it actually; it may have guided your own assessments. The Norton editors forcefully assert that within the literary apparatus there is critical consensus that Twain’s creative time had passed when he turned fifty. These critics celebrate Huckleberry Finn for what they call ‘its embodiment of the enduring and universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom, its recording of a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi.’” This, the woman believes, is precisely the “universally shared dream” that you too were creaming your pants over earlier. The dream that you presumed she would share, and the “vanished era of life” whose loss you were lamenting. The woman reports that she has, alternately, often dreamed of performing a survey in order to see just how many residents of her own city would so giddily and so “universally” associate pre-Civil War Mississippi with unblemished innocence and great personal liberty. She expresses some dismay as to how to categorize the kind of pick-up line that Norton is performing with this claim. Are they too engaged in the same gamble of the Caucasian speed date that you have instigated today?

You wince belatedly, your timing destroyed, your maw in crisis, opening and closing without license in isolated manic repetition, assuming one panicked position after another without sound. And still, with a chilling (to you) lack of emotional tacking, the woman simply continues – dear god, how dutiful and broad are the contours of this broad’s continuity. As if intuiting your every desire to the contrary, the woman will not demure. She further offers that, according to Norton, Huckleberry Finn is lauded for revealing to readers “the discrepancy between appearance and reality without leading us to despair of ourselves or others.” In contrast, the editors cast their dispersions on Twain’s later works as doomed by their acutely conveyed sensations of devastation. It is a mood of despair, for instance, that they are convinced “informs and flaws The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson,” a book which “shows the disastrous effects of slavery on victimizer and victim alike – the unearned pride of whites and the undeserved self-hate of blacks.” After so many back-to-back years of teaching, the woman herself has memorized large portions of the anthology’s introduction, but she has never required her students to read its contents. The voice of authority it provides quarters to makes her extremely hesitant to do so. “It is too burdensome to share, too irreparable in its testified neutrality and compliant judgments. In his later life,” the woman concludes, “Twain was unmoved by the aesthetic demand not to be a bummer, and for that I would say, more power to him.”

As luck would have it, and your luck today has only been bad and can only be worsening, the novel that Norton dismisses in flaw and failure is invariably this woman’s favorite book of Twain’s. You have never heard of it, nor of any of the late essays that she is sequentially naming. This unfamiliarity shows in your face and you know it. It embarrasses you. Your jaw is lewdly going crazy. Your ragged tongue wags and wags, but refuses to perform the interruptive favor of gagging you. Instead, it sags, it reddens, and it chafes.

And just when you wager that your day’s fate could not possibly sink lower, that nothing more could happen to further skew the inhuman imbalance of this woman’s asymmetric forms of reply, she gently pries from her sky-blue shoulder clutch a tiny paperback Bantam Classic. It’s a movement that might, in your earliest naïve moments of initial approach, have warmed your spirits with thoughts of what a perfect tart you had targeted for your self-marketing, but which now causes you an insuppressible nausea and, to your surprise, fear. Fear of what? You butt up against the realization that you have never made such an utterly bad choice in terms of who to hit on, or to speak to. This person is punching back, she’s ground-tackling you, with an aloof knack for exactness that leaves your emphatic blather in withered tatters.

“Perhaps I should ask your pardon,” the woman ventures, “for the domination of your time that I am presently inclined to embark on. However, since I did not take part in sparking this encounter nor its directions, and since you are such an aficionado of the arts as it were, I will not do so. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson is Twain’s shortest novel, first published in 1894. The edition which I am fortunate enough to own is from 1959 and proceeded by a foreword from the poet Langston Hughes who admired the book for its ability to reveal U.S. race relations as taking place within a politicized landscape of economic and psycho-social constructions, expectations and constraints, rather than as a false and antiquated conflation of biological precepts or features. The narrative bears all the hallmarks of a conventional mystery novel, but its primary suspense-for-the-solving revolves around the exchange of two children who in their infancy look so similar (including in their whiteness) as to be interchangeable. One of the infants is a slave (the child of a household female servant named Roxy) and one of the infants is heir to the estate of one of the most prominent Virginia citizens and first families (in whose home the enslaved Roxy labors – both productively and reproductively).”

“Petrified at the very real prospect that her child could, at any time and according to any whim, be ‘sold down the river’ (into the even more notoriously brutal involuntary work regimes of the Deep South), Roxy exchanges the two children’s clothing and cradles under cloak of darkness. And no one knows but her. Eventually her birth son – who has been raised as her indifferent, reckless and volatile master – commits a murder that in its discovery unravels more than it bargains for. The young man (who is known as Master Tom Driscoll and who has been brought up in the bright, unconditional waves of unwavering entitlement) is exposed not only as an assassin, but also as ‘black’ and therefore ‘a slave.’ A double-edged razor, I suppose we could say.” The woman’s laserlike concentration now angles toward the pages themselves. “I’d like to read you,” she decrees, “the last two paragraphs of this narrative, a section which I trust, in your love of the great august traditions of canonical literature, you will find of interest.” With that, the woman opens the little battered pocket edition to its final weathered pages and begins reading:

The false heir made a full confession and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. But now a complication came up. The Percy Driscoll estate [an inheritance from his false father] was in such a crippled shape when its owner died that it could pay only sixty per cent of its great indebtedness, and was settled at that rate. But the creditors came forward, now, and complained that inasmuch as through an error for which they were in no way to blame the false heir was not inventoried at that time with the rest of the property, great wrong and loss had thereby been inflicted upon them. They rightly claimed that “Tom” was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years; they had already lost sufficiently in being deprived of his services during that long period, and ought not to be required to add anything to that loss; that if he had been delivered up to them in the first place, they would have sold him and he could not have murdered Judge Driscoll; therefore it was not he that had really committed the murder, the guilt lay with the erroneous inventory. Everybody saw that there was reason in this. Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him – it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life – that was quite another matter.
As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river.

“Whenever Twain uses the word everybody,” the woman warns you, “you have to be very careful, to tread lightly, to carry suspicion as a key feature of cognition. For this is his stealthy cue to the reader that such unanimously held rationalisms can’t be trusted and, in fact, are scarcely unanimous, even if and especially when they are politically imposed as such. For this is the ‘sensible’ rationalism of ‘inventory,’ and not of human lives. ‘It would be no loss to anybody,’ writes Twain, but only so long as you subtract any and every body who has the greatest stakes in the matter, whose very bodies are the stakes. Bodies that are ‘pardoned’ only because the fate that awaits them instead is both more awful and more utilitarian to everyone in the political picture except themselves.”

The woman pauses to straighten the center hem of her shirt, running her finger expertly across one of its topmost buttonholes. While shoaling up her clothing’s closure, she assures you, “Langston Hughes sees Puddn’head Wilson as a well-wrought novel that works just as any good mystery novel should, ostensibly coming to wraps with all its loose bottles tightly capped and all its imprudently hijacked actions set right. ‘But for whom?’ Hughes asks. Set right for whom? And his question is the question and the discomfort and the unsettled edginess of every thinking reader. This is the flaw of which the literary establishment’s critical consensus speaks. However, the feature that they believe mars the text is actually its strongest asset – its capacity to leave behind an abiding squeamishness in the reader, especially the white reader. Fenimore is entirely without squeem, his works are deemed ‘perfect’ by dint of their pinnacle male austerity, their unerring patriarchal didacticism.”

“In March of 1906, years into the American-manufactured U.S.-Philippines War, Mark Twain recorded two days of excoriating autobiographical dictations in response to the Moro Massacre, an event in which 900 Filipino men, women and children were rounded up into the crater of a volcano and slaughtered. It is true that Twain’s documentations of this matter can not accurately be termed ‘humorous,’ although they do contain a most unembellished category of grim wit. With bitter acuity, he informs:

General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been “Kill or capture those savages.” Apparently our little army considered that the “or” left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there – the taste of Christian butchers.

You used the word ‘tasteful’ with me earlier,” the woman notes, “but I prefer to say ‘full of taste.’ Sometimes its flavor can nearly overwhelm one’s senses. It can drown any hope of selfhood or of justice with its corpulent insistence. The way its powerful seasoning tends to mince everything around it to pieces, creating lesions no bandages can mend. I think the hyper-sensitized tensions of those lesions would resonate with today’s youth, don’t you?”

And with that, the woman turned, as if spurred by an invisible herding tool, and walked briskly away. Your pink organ lay there, outthrust, continuing to grow in its robust bloatedness, but not in speech. No, most definitely not in speech. Your right cheek had never been more aerated nor more heavy. You had long ago ceased to refer with any mental cognizance to the lyrics of Espada, lost as he was in the torrential waterfall of the woman’s language, but your left eye had taken up the mantra without and against the mind’s command and it twitched with a patterned kind of itch that were you not so dumbstruck you might have identified as a five-syllable rhythm: then-this-is-the-year, then-this-is-the-year, then-this-is-the-year, then-this-is-the-year. But what?

Emily Abendroth is a writer and artist who uses interventionist and documentary poetic strategies as exploratory tools for investigation and the “making strange” of otherwise all too familiar socio-political dynamics, relationships and intimacies. Her poetry book ]Exclosures[ is available from Ahsahta Press, along with numerous chapbooks from a variety of small and micro presses. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was named a 2013 Pew Fellow in Poetry. A collaborative, durational text/dialogue that she has been engaged in with fiction writer Miranda Mellis is forthcoming in book form from Carville Annex Press in the Spring of 2016.

There is a black-owned business in my neighborhood. Over the past year, I would safely say that I frequent this place a few times a week.  I would never assume that I am friends with the owner, but we are more than cordial. We’ve talked about his kids, my goals in life, politics.  We’ve exchanged more than a few laughs and we have had moments of agonized connection when discussing the current political moment.

This man has several employees, including at least one from Mexico.

So the owner, his employee, and I were talking about the end of my sabbatical, my return to teaching, and a funny thing that happened with a student. Two other people, a man and a woman, also were in the establishment and could over hear us. As I was turning away the man overhearing us spoke up.

“See these young people are so entitled now.  This is one of the reasons I like Trump.”

I turned and simply looked at him. I could see the owner and the employee from the corner of my eye. I felt the air thicken in the room.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “I love what he says and I love that it pisses people off.”

The two of them then started to talk loudly about Trump.  The cited what they called his disdain for “political correctness” and his lack of concern for others opinions.  They liked how he said what needed to be said. They had the almost drunken belligerence of someone taking up too much room at a party-a party they had managed to crash.

These two people, both white, felt very comfortable coming into a black-owned business, one with a multi-ethnic staff and clients, and professing their pleasure with the statements and conduct of a man who professes some of the most vile and hateful rhetoric in American life.  They filled the place with their thick and stupid laughter. They looked at us, the owner, the employee, and myself, as if we too dumb to get the joke.

When people talk about the indignities of every day racism, this is what they mean.  What kind of person walks into someone’s place of business and insults them to their face?  The kind that knows that there will be no consequences.

The owner said, “this is a politics free zone.” And the two white people had a final laugh. The man said, “I just knew I’d get a rise out of you.”  The woman turned to the Mexican employee, who resumed working with her.

I looked at the owner. I thought about his kids.  I thought about how he told me how hard he worked to build his business and what it meant to him and his wife. I thought about how he had clients who felt completely entitled to come into his work place and insult him and his employees just because they thought it would be fun. I thought about his employee who now had to work with a woman who told a group of people that she believes Trump when he says that Mexicans are criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. I remembered with a mouth full of hot blood that I was in someone’s hard earned business, and in an immigrant’s place of employment.

I said to white man, “I want to continue liking you, so I’m going to forget this happened.”  He laughed and I smiled the “go fuck yourself smile” I learned from my mother.

Later, I went over to the owner.

“I’m so sorry that happened.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

“What the actual fuck?”

“I know, I know. And there’s a man from Mexico right in front of them, too.”

“I was about to tell them both about themselves.  I was about to say something and then I saw your face.  I don’t want to go off on these white people and fuck up your money, man.”

“I appreciate that. This is my livelihood. And the fact is, today isn’t even the worst of it.  You’d be amazed.”

I shook his hand.  And left.

A few days later, the woman was there and the Mexican employee was working with her.  He was kind and encouraging, present and supportive.  As I passed them, she said hello to me.  I stopped and looked at her.  In my mind’s eye, I could see her face, drunk and stupid with laughter.

I said nothing.

Still from video found at http://www.thexanadugroup.com/videos/

Hello Colin,

I was looking at Houzz.com and I came across a few pictures of your work with The Xanadu Group. The site is impressive and I really enjoyed seeing the videos of you and your team installing the large scale projects.  I also appreciated seeing all of the inspirations.  It is clear that what you are doing now is still influenced by your interest in contemporary art.  Someone asked who did some of the artworks in the pictures so I replied and included links for Mariana Lopez, Mark Chariker, and the Colaço Twins.

I have not heard from you for a while.  I have reached out to you quite a few times since 2009.  I have sent emails and I have sent registered letters to every address I have for you.  I never received a response.  Also, I have contacted your parents as well and they could not (or would not) put me in touch with you.  Your father told me he had no idea where you were and your mother told me it was none of her business, which I can completely understand.  It is my profound hope that you are in touch with your parents and that all is well.  I did see that you mom gave you a very favorable review on the Houzz website of some work you did for her.  That goes a long way in assuaging my concern that you are estranged from her.

Shaun Leonard0, Colin, and the author. Basel, Switzerland 2009

The last time we hung out was with Shaun Leonardo in Basel during VOLTA5.  I’m sure you remember Shaun; he certainly remembers you.  We stayed at Sandra’s place during the fair.  Sandra and I have become quite good friends over the years.  Whenever I go to Basel I try to stay with her.  Her apartment is the same, as is she.  Last time I was there she asked about you.  I had to tell her I hadn’t heard from you in a very long time.

Shaun and I showed some of our best work at that fair.  I had a special project and it was one of my first ever neons.  Remember?  I installed it in the freight elevator at the Markthalle?  I was so freaked out that part of it broke that I actually considered getting high because I was so stressed.  Remember?  You talked me down and got things resolved.  I was so glad I had you to talk to in that moment.  I could have lost everything.  After you got me calmed down I went into Basel and bought some paint and paper and made the 39 drawings that would go in the elevator with the neon.  The blue light (the pink light had broken) made the faces seem like they were in motion.  I thought it was one of the best things I had done.  I remember Amanda Coulson coming by the booth and asking to meet me because she liked the project so much.  She and I have kept in touch.  She was very chilly to me in the beginning when I would see her at VOLTA or at other fairs, but eventually she warmed to me again.  I think once she knew that I was not working with you (and the fact that I was working with Camilo) made her feel safe enough to talk with me again.  It was great to see her in Basel last year and in NY at the fairs this year.  Her daughters are beautiful and growing tall and gorgeous like her.

Shaun had this amazing wallpaper and two of his cut out hero paintings.  I made “the boy with the thorn in his side” especially for that exhibit.  It was over 400 drawings.  We were exhausted because Shaun and I installed everything except the wall paper.  We were very nervous and we were methodical in putting the whole booth together.  But it was a lot of fun and we met artists from all over the place.  And I am still in touch with a lot of those people today and when i run into them at other fairs, they actually say hello to me now.  There was a time when they didn’t, but like with Amanda, when they figured out that I was no longer working with you, the easy camaraderie returned.

It was after that fair that things got very strange.  Phone calls ignored, emails unanswered.  Questions from other artists.  Mariana Lopez and Mark Chariker kept calling me asking me if I’d seen you.  The gallery was supposed to move to LA and I got a phone number and an email but I never got an answer.  Months went by with Shaun and I waiting for our work to come back from Basel.  It never did.  I called your former partners in Brasil and they had no idea what to tell me; they were looking for you too.  I called mutual friends in LA; Mark Schoening gave me a phone number, but I never got a call back.  Fernando Mastrangelo hadn’t seen you, but he did have one of my paintings that you gave him.  When he told me I knew you told me it had sold, but I had never been paid for it.  There were a few paintings that sold at SCOPE as well that you sent me photos with red dots, but I never got paid for those either.

I started talking to the other artists from RHYS Gallery.  A lot of them hadn’t been paid.  Some, like Shaun and I, had works that were never returned to them.  I started compiling lists of what was missing, what had been sold, and what was unaccounted for.  There were a bunch of us who had no idea what happened to you or our work.

Lydia was left here in Boston to try to deal with all of this stuff and honestly I had no idea how she managed to do as much as she did.  Her marriage ended and she left Boston.  She’s in LA now.  I talk with her pretty regularly.  I told her that you were doing work for Xanadu now and she seemed surprised.  LA is big.  It’s not a shock that you haven’t run into each other.

It probably doesn’t matter to you, but I’ve done pretty well.  After RHYS Gallery closed, I was a bit of a pariah here in Boston.  See, I had talked to everyone here about what a great guy you were and how much I trusted you with my work and my career.  When Mariana called me from South America to ask me if you were a reputable dealer I said absolutely.  I even had a terrible moment with Andy Mowbray where I accused him of gossiping.  Remember that?  You and I laughed about it because we knew that all the rumors about you closing the gallery and not paying anyone were just that, rumors.  And we thought that people were just jealous of your success and your youth and your eye for talent and your groundbreaking shows.  Andy has been kind enough to accept my apology for that.  I still can’t quite forgive myself for mistaking his concern for me for jealousy.  I’ll have to live with that one.

Like I said, I was a bit of a pariah, and no one wanted to show my work.  I had meetings with a couple of gallerists but mostly they just wanted to hear about how I got taken and how much I lost and where were you.  There is something about failure, Colin, it stinks.  I mean it literally has an odor that you cannot mask.  Everyone smelled it on me.  I just retreated into my studio.  I got a couple of residencies and I went to Turkey for a while.  When I got back Camilo reached out to me and we started a working relationship.  I’m very fortunate that he saw past the history and looked at the work.  I got back on track.  The work got seen and Camilo makes sure that everything is out in the open.  I trust him.  And he helps me make my best work.  I used to think that about you, but now I realize the difference.

Colin, do you know where my work is?  Do you still have it?  Did you sell it?  Is it on a pier somewhere in Switzerland, unclaimed? Can you just tell me what happened to it so I can try and figure out how to get it back?  Can I be compensated for the loss of the work?  Have you contacted any of the other artists?  Have you returned some works and not others?  If so, how did you determine what who would get their work back and who would be ignored?

I have come to the realization that I may never see that work again.  I can live with that.  I would just like an honest answer as to what happened and an accounting for my loss.

I am glad to see you doing well and doing something you clearly love.  You deserve to be happy.  I’m in no way interested in ruining that.  I’m just trying to close a chapter of my artistic life and to put a nagging question to rest.  I’m sure you can understand the importance of that.

Steve

Black people do not have the presumption of innocence.  The law is not organized for their protection, rather it is organized around their annihilation.

There are highly funded media outlets and personalities that perpetuate racist stereotypes and hate speech against black people.

When black people are attacked or killed by the state, their attackers are not subjected to a vigorous prosecution.

Cases of black women who are missing or murdered are ignored or not given priority, even in the case of a serial killer preying upon a community.

Unarmed black people are perceived as more dangerous than armed police officers.

Black girls are so dangerous that officers need to subdue them with force.

Any offense a black person commits is punishable by incarceration or summary execution.

Images of black people being brutalized by the state are used to affirm black criminality.

Agents of the state who kill unarmed black children in their homes are rarely (if ever) charged or convicted.

A police officer, even off-duty, can kill a black girl and expect the benefit of the doubt, paid leave, and counseling upon their return to work.

Black people of any age are not allowed to carry toy weapons in open carry states.

In interactions with the police, black people should abandon any expectation of a right to life.

Black people can be arrested for resisting arrest even if they have not been advised of any other charges against them.

When your black loved one is killed by the state, you will be subjected to video of their death on all forms of media.

Racism allows legal activities of black people, including the President, to be framed in criminality under the guise of “debate.”

100 watercolors waiting to be mailed out as soon as you ask for one.

29 June 2015

UPDATE!

Well, the 100 watercolors I made for this project are gone.  I don’t have any more to send out at this point in time.  But I will say that I will do this again at the end of the summer.  I will give the folks who missed out first crack at the new batch.

A heartfelt thank you to all of you who grabbed one.  I am humbled.  And psyched.

Steve

Early on in my career, before I even had anything close to what one could call a career, I used to send art works to people through the mail.  I sent books of drawings, individual art works, paintings, postcards, all sort of things.  The main reason I did it was because I thought it was pretty incredible that I could write some code on an envelope and my work would get directly into someone’s hands.  All I had to do was write PERSONAL on the package and no one would open it but the addressee.  It made me feel like a success at a time when I really felt I had nothing going on.

I wanted to do another mail art project but social media has changed the notions of connections that once were in place.  If I got a collector or curator’s address and I sent them personal mail, it was almost guaranteed that the package would get to them.   With social media replacing email (and frankly, people don’t even read their email much anymore) I tried to figure out a way to get the work out with the chance of accessing someone I didn’t know or would never meet.

Also, I had a show of watercolors at the Hudson Opera House earlier this season.  A lot of people told me that they wished they could have seen the show.  Some also lamented at the cost of the work and that they would love one, but they couldn’t afford it.

So here’s how it works:  Send me $50 and your address and I will send you a watercolor.  Super easy. Send me an email with the subject line MAIL ME A WATERCOLOR (or post a reply on whatever social media platform you see this message) and I’ll send you a Paypal invoice.  Once you send it back, I’ll mail you a 5×7 inch watercolor painting.  There’s a limited amount of them and it will have to be first come first served.  You can even tell me the one you want and if it’s available, I’ll send it to you.

Please feel free to share this post.  I want to mail these out all over the place.