Drawings | 1982-1990

This large group of charcoal drawings is seminal. Through the process of making them, a vocabulary of images emerged and developed that was new to me, but also curiously familiar, as if puzzle pieces had been dislodged from inside my body to be exposed to the light of day. These elemental forms generated everything that has come since.

Two different groupings of some of the larger examples were shown in solo exhibitions at 55 Mercer Gallery in New York in 1985 and at the Ben Shahn Galleries, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, in 1988. The mural-drawing Bye-Ya was commissioned by and exhibited at the Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, in 1986. A grouping of drawings from this period was included with more recent work of felt and paper in the failed utopian & Other Stories, a solo exhibition at FiveMyles, Brooklyn, in 2018. A different grouping was exhibited with a work of felt in the inaugural exhibition, Afloat Afield, Long Play Contemporary, Santa Monica, CA, 2023.