NEWS
Since moving to Miami year-round in 2012, I have been making large-scale, mixed-media portraits of people in the Miami arts communities. An exhibition of 9 of my 40 x 60 inch, mixed-media portraits of patrons and performers at the Historic Hampton House during the era of Segregation opened on February 1, 2022. “First Person Portraits: Hampton House Performers & Patrons” was funded by an Ellies Award from Oolite Arts. The exhibition opened on February 1, with people in the portraits telling stories about their experiences at the Hampton House during the Jim Crow era.
From October 22, 2023 to April 1, 2024, the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach exhibited 27 of my large-scale, mixed-media portraits + 27 video portraits.
We are currently organizing my next exhibition at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Perform Arts of Miami-Dade County, which will open in February, 20
ABOUT
I arrived in Provincetown in 1970, when I was twenty-five, welcomed by older artists and writers, many of whom became my friends. Over the years, in addition to making art and exhibiting on the Outer Cape and elsewhere, I have served as a Trustee and Officer of the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, as President of the Provincetown Group Gallery, as board member of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and as Co-founder/ Publisher / Editor of Provincetown Arts magazine.
Robert Motherwell often said that he chose to live and work in Provincetown because of the “Mediterranean light,” and because of the easy camaraderie amongst the art community. B.H. Friedman wrote, “In Provincetown everything happens in the streets and on sidewalks. In the Hamptons there are no sidewalks. Everything happens behind tall hedges.”
In 1989, after a half-lifetime of making only abstract art, I started making paintings portraying the art colony at leisure – what people do when they are not working – documenting the fabric of life in the art colony that draws people back every year.
The first painting in this series portrayed E.J. Kahn, Jr. (veteran New Yorker writer) and Palmer Williams (Executive Producer of Sixty Minutes) playing backgammon outdoors on the edge of the National Seashore – in positions reminiscent of Cezanne’s “The Card Players.” The painting is 6 x 5 feet.
Since then I have made over 400 paintings in this series of notable talents such as Norman Mailer, Robert Motherwell, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Douglas Heubler, Justin Kaplan, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Dillard, Mark Strand, Sebastian Junger, Alec Wilkinson, Varujan Boghosian, Budd Hopkins, Paul Resika, Mischa Richter, Al Jaffee, Lee Falk, Anne Bernays, Jane Leavy, Daniel Okrent, Alice Brock, Susan Orlean, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Pinsky, Knox Martin, Gary Burton, Lourdes Lopez, Richard Blanco, Campbell McGrath, Michele Oka Doner, Morton Dean, Robert Pinsky, Winston Scott, Enid Pinkney, Robert Zuckerman, Richard Saul Wurman, Mitchell Kaplan. The dimensions of most pieces are either 60 x 40 inches or 40 x 30 inches.
I envision continuing this series for the rest of my days, thereby creating a unique documentation of life in two of the world’s most interesting art colonies.
