February 2023: At Home and On the Road
On the Road—The works-on-paper from the Postcards to America series continue to be selected for inclusion in national juried exhibitions—delivered one to Georgia in January and another is going to Louisiana in February.
At Home—Work on mural designs continue and warmer weather in February will allow the actual painting to begin—more importantly two friends have or are in the process of transitioning to the undiscovered country. The poem below would easily belong in a second edition of the book of poetry published during the pandemic shutdown—Letters to the Deceased & Other Missives.
DEAR SIS
Another of our friends is dying
diagnosed shortly after you were gone
and the cancers just kept on coming—
three different ones I believe.
She didn’t get the nine-year hiatus
that you, Mom and I had to complete
our family’s unfinished business.
(hiatus—a funny word—discovered
long ago in one of Dad’s poems.)
She is getting the opportunity
you wanted—a long goodbye
surrounded by friends and family.
Instead, you went out like a bang
the first time hospice nurse visited
while Mom ducked out to the pharmacy
for the meds you would never need.
P.S.
Another friend took a page from your book
and died suddenly this weekend.
Postcards on the Road
Alaska: Our Vanishing Future was selected to be included in the Valdosta National 2023 Change of Weather. Hosted by the Valdosta State University (VSU) Dedo Maranville Fine Arts Gallery in Valdosta, Georgia, the 35th annual exhibition explores climate change and its impact on humans, ecology, the environment, and our future. Exhibition runs from January 17 until February 7, 2023. The juror was Dr. Jason Allard, PhD – Valdosta State University, Professor of Geography, Climatology. Dr. Allard teaches Weather & Climate, Global Climate Change, and Hazardous Environment.
Angola, LA: Pandemic in the Penitentiary was selected to be included in the Masur Museum of Art’s 60th Annual Juried Competition. Exhibit runs from February 23 until May 6, 2023. This year’s guest juror was Jovanna Venegas, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has worked on public programs and exhibitions at e-flux, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the 11th Gwangju Biennial, and was a curatorial advisor on the U.S./Mexico border region for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. At SFMOMA, she curated Bay Area Walls: Liz Hernández and co-curated New Work: Wu Tsang Presents Moved by the Motion and Shifting the Silence. She also co-curated the SECA Art Award, opening in December 2022. She is currently a lecturer at the California College of the Arts in the Master’s in Curatorial Practice.
Murals at Home
The painting phase of the Garden Gate Mural on the corner of Marble and 15th Street in Albuquerque will begin on February 1st. Meanwhile I’ve been working on the design for the 2nd mural at The Next Best Thing to Being There gift shop at 1315 Mountain Road NW. The Tree of Life mural was completed there in 2022 and this year the theme is The Sea of Life. See below for the designs-in-progress of the first three of five total panels that will wrap around the building just beneath the screened-in porch.
Save the Dates
A show of the metal prints from the Postcards to America series is scheduled to be show at The Next Best Thing to Being There in April of 2023 and another show of the originals from this series at Tortuga in March of 2024.