Connections

Friday, March 13th was my 50th birthday. I spent the day with my husband at MOMA, and it was the perfect place to connect to the ideas that shaped my thinking as an artist. It's always been one of my favorite places; there are all kinds of connections at that location. Right now though, there's an exhibit that's called Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art.

The fifth in a series of installations focusing on MoMA's contemporary holdings, Here Is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art maps a chronological path through the art of the recent past. The exhibition brings together photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, and videos in thematic groupings, and includes several new acquisitions, on view for the first time at MoMA, by such artists as Matthew Barney, Mircea Cantor, Nan Goldin, Paul McCarthy, and Bruce Nauman. Explorations of topics as diverse as the artist's studio, the changing urban landscape, politics, and the radical transformation of media culture appear repeatedly in the art of the last forty years, proving that certain artistic concerns ultimately transcend chronology.

It was the perfect place to be. We went to my friends' (Robbin and George) 50th surprise birthday party on Saturday and I had a great conversation with their friend Hannah, who's been an artist, a working artist for the past few decades about what this exhibit meant to me. Mainly, I thought "oh, that's what we were thinking". The drawing here is by Paul McCarthy and was done in 1984. I don't know him or follow him, but the drawing is like what we were doing at RISD around that time. (We graduated in 1981, we were in Italy '79-'80).

Anyway, Hannah's conversation was around the fact that what I'm doing now (working in marketing communications in high-tech) is the zeitgeist of today. That location also connected to my first career in publishing, I started on 53rd and Broadway, moved to 53rd and Madison, and then ended up down Madison at GOLF Magazine. I took a photo at 515 Madison on Friday, it still has the iron-work on it, but a lot of the other buildings have changed. Burger Heaven is still there.