That Old Shipwreck Scene Neither that rainstorm in the middle of the night Nor the brilliant sunlit day changes a thing The castaways are doomed Those well-fed victims clinging to a black raft Mounted on the wall in the Louvre Will float adrift forever waving at that distant ship Never to be rescued Yet never to eat nor starve And I say well fed because these are models Parisians with full bellies and not those Who at the moment depicted Had neither nibble nor sip for two weeks Always in torment much like a frozen ball Of worms or tangled marionettes smeared with tar Painted with bitumen a fake paint And their tipsy raft is lost upon choppy water Meringue on lemon pie not yet cut into wedges Never placed on the table with fork and cup of tea Just a raft of people who have perpetually Lost their boat and are fated to float till the end of time Last night’s rain will not quench their thirst None of the thousands who walk through the gallery May p...

The Fabrication of Nothing: The Erased de Kooning Drawing On a cool morning, with a touch of winter in the air, it can make us smile to see evidence of our own breath. It surprises us when we see our own breath made visible. We take air for granted, we don’t have to see it. Some art is like air. Robert Rauschenberg’s white on white paintings and his “Erased de Kooning Drawing” are artworks we don’t need to see to understand. The concept satisfies our minds, well enough to bypass our eyes. The weight of these artworks is not physical, but completely conceptual. Yet, they do exist as objects. Robert Rauschenberg painstakingly erased a Willelm deKooning drawing, producing the infamous “Erased deKooning Drawing”, of 1953. One action obliterated another act, creating while destroying, making while undoing. It was as bold as it was blasphemous. The “Erased de Kooning Drawing” is known mainly to artists and modernists. Amongst this group it is legendary. However, few a...

The Lunch Box Each morning he packed his own lunch: always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder bread, an apple (in season) or a banana, one store-bought oatmeal cookie, and a thermos of hot coffee, tepid by the time he drank it. It was not a very good thermos. Ex-cept for the lukewarm coffee, it was the same lunch he had carried to school, as a boy. It was his regular lunch, all his life. As a child the only difference was in beverage, a half pint of chilled chocolate milk purchased each lunch hour in the cafetorium, meaning there was no need for a thermos bottle. A disposable brown paper sack was all he needed to carry his waxpaper wrapped sandwich, fruit, and cookie. His brown bag lunch was like anyone else carried, except in one aspect. All other students chucked their emptied bag into the trash can as the back-to-class bell rang. He kept his brown sack, folding it flat, smoothing it and making a small drawing. When the bell rang he put the dec-orated bag in hi...

The Artwork Displayed Face to the Wall Here’s a category that was probably never even considered by the Guinness Book of Records; “Artworks hung face to the wall.” Thank you very much for allowing me to hold this distinction. The Museum of Modern Art , in New York organized an exhibition of works on handmade paper, in 1976. Kathy Markel called to tell me she was loaning a piece to of mine to the exhibition. I was too busy with the Venturi renovation and addition to the Allen Art Museum, at Oberlin College, to go see the show until toward the end. A friend who often helped me in the studio, Walter Bosstick, was in New York about a month after the exhibition opened and reported back to me the following: “The piece they are showing is beautiful. It’s displayed in between a Jim Dine and a Robert Rauschenberg. But, you know, I thought I knew all your work and this one is very subtle.” I asked him to describe it, since I didn’t know which piece was selected. He did an...

A policeman stopped by to ask questions and fill out paperwork. That my left pant leg had been split up to my knee by the paramedics might have caught his eye. So, he wanted to know if I was involved in a traffic accident? No, an elephant sent me to the hospital. Most probably the officer was familiar with a recent incident at St. Paul’s Como Zoo. The story made front page in the papers. Two drunks had decided to wrestle a polar bear. It was night time, the zoo closed. The drunker of the two managed to climb into the bear’s enclosure. Sadly for the polar bear; the police, responding to screams, came to the rescue of the drunk. This Policeman could see that I was completely sober. So it must have been a mystery to him how I could have gotten tangled up with an elephant in Minneapolis, especially at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I was a twenty-five-year-old art handler for the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I had recently returned from Malibu, where I had been crating pai...

Alice Neel Said I Reminded Her of a Cat Before they met me people (might) have, thanks to my nickname, leapt to the seemingly logical assumption that since my artwork was wonderful, I was worthy to be a celebrated Woman Artist. Female artists such as Sandy Kinnee, deserve to be admired. I happened to have timed my entrance into the Art World better than M. E. O’Hare, who was a kick ass painter as well as being my aunt. When she was starting out in the 1940s, being a Woman Artist in a tiny gallery world designed for and run primarily by males, was not her choice. She chose the route of taking commissions and painting portraits. Her gender was obscured by her use of her initials. There were many women artists, few were taken seriously, despite the quality of their work. By the time I leapt into the first little puddle in the art world, there was an awareness that all along women had been making art and it was damn well time they be taken seriously. Women artists w...