This project, and the one after, were worked on over the course of about four years, while doing other things as well.
I have referred to this work as “my dictionary” for two reasons. First of all, it is based up two old dictionaries, French, that I found –one from 1898, the other from the early 20th century. Secondly, the work is also about making my own ‘ definitions’ , recognizing relationships. Perhaps the best way to describe the intention is to say simply that I am curious about some new hybrids: what comes of the marriages of accident and control, color and word, past and future, chaos and organization, texture and space, intellect and sensual experience, emotion and thought.
Another kind of hybrid is biculturalism. I thought about the possibility of taking a bicultural person out of her normal environment and putting her in a little theater made uniquely for her. Would a possible third aspect of her emerge? -or…?
The poses were chosen by each sitter at the moment of entering her theater, seeing it for the first time, including the fan made for her.
I went to Santa Fe to work on the administrative consolidation of an art school for Native Americans. It was a program at the Poeh Center founded by George Rivera. He had worked as a student and then as my assistant at Lacoste and became a good friend.
The Tewa pueblo culture is an incredibly rich one and a major goal of the Poeh Center is to help keep it alive and revitalize it. Unschooled about Native American culture, I learned an incredible amount, with the help of so many: students, teachers, administrators at the school, and many others.
The landscape of northern New Mexico was quite an instructor also. I enjoyed many drives to the north to draw at Georgia O’Keefe’s Ghost Ranch. Those works on paper were never photographed.
I also made two sculptures and the photographs follow.
Bernard Pfriem died in New York, March 1996. He had been ill for years, but his great joie de vivre always shone, even in January 1996 when I last visited him. He was a great mentor to me, despite the puzzling aspects of his communication and his personality. Or perhaps these enhanced his mentor role, difficulties prodded deeper thinking and an understanding that one can continue to learn only when one’s own backbone is sturdy.
There was some discussion of me doing a plaque, a bas-relief portrait of Bernard in stone for the school. Somehow that didn’t seem meaningful enough to me, it would be too incidental, like an item checked off a to-do list. Instead, I embarked on a portrait bust of Bernard, fully in the round.
In 1997 and 1998 I made some assemblages of objects, which were juxtapositions, sometimes physically attached to each other, but not in boxes. I also drew the objects either alone or assembled. A more personalized kind of still life work, working with things or parts of things that were ordinary enough but objects about which I perceived some kind of story, particularly once put together.
