20th-21st Century Contemporary American Art

The Moon is Black 1988, 20 x 24 inch Polaroid with a water-color 17 inch diameter moon painting in the backdrop; excerpt from the series The Moon is Twelve Colors. Black recalls the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic which emerged in New York City in 1981 when suddenly friends were dying so young from this disease. 

All my art is created using techniques I've mastered and is produced  true to the classical  values of a handmade archive object. Whether I employ silver gelatin photographs, hand-sculpted 2-dimensional paintings on mahoghany doorskin,  archive ink jet color prints from original scans; or present -- from my library of early archive and now considered "vintage 20 x 24 inch color Polaroid and SX-70 Prints:" All materials and studio time which were granted for my use - the first Artists Proof was chosen in trade - to build onto the Polaroid Art Collection from 1977-1987. Over 100 of my images  were sold off in 2010 at Sothebys, NYC from the Polaroid Corporations' Art Collection; after Polaroid went bankrupt due to the creation of digital photography in 2010. My work is now in the collection at  the Westlicht Schauplatz fur Fotografie, in Vienna, Austria.

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 Chocolates 2023, 

36 x 22 inches, acrylic on mahogany door skin, is one example of  my ongoing series since 1989, "The Fake-O Cards" inspired by the Haines 1936 deck --used by Hollywood  Magic Castle Close-up Magicians to warm up their audiences by producing a cards from their pockets or sleight of hand, that do not exist.

     All my art is titled by American slang language, words and phrases created by me, as in The Moon is Black, or, researched and appropriated from the past which represent moments of time between people talking together, eating chocolates; moments from real-life experiences, and restructured into art objects.

Race Card,  2020,

54 x 36 inches acrylic, epoxy on mahogany door skin

This painting  represents my total disdain for Racism, symbolizing the concept with a celebration of the beautiful and rich colors of our human beings' skin tones-symbolized in the epoxy-surfaced-reflecting-spades.

The phrase race card first came into play in 1995 during the O.J. Simpson trial, coined by one of his lawyers, the late Johnny Cochran and is commonly used to describe political states of social vignettes.