close“The Perils of Public Art,” Student Lawyer. In 1986, when I started looking for art environments in New Jersey, they were virtually unrecognized in the state. Scholars had extensively documented such creations in the mid-West and in California (the best known American art environment is probably Sabato “Simon” Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles) but there was no collected documentation of Garden State sites. Working with friend and photographer Robert Foster, I began to research New Jersey art environments past and present, and to document them.

Once I put the word out that I was looking for New Jersey “grassroots art sites,” people began to contact me. Librarians were wonderfully responsive. In early 1987, I received a call from a fellow enthusiast and preservationist, Seymour Rosen (founder of SPACES, www.spacesarchives.org) about an endangered site in Newark: a giant “ark” built out of ruined buildings on a church parking lot.

I’d begun writing for the American Bar Association publication Student Lawyer and thought the controversy over public art—both commissioned works like Richard Serra’s controversial Titled Arc, and non-commissioned works like Kea Tawana’s ark—would make a good piece. When I wrote it, I had some hope that Tawana’s creation could be saved.

But Newark officials did not want the ark to remain in an area slated for redevelopment. They threatened the church, the owner of the parking lot, with daily fines for non-compliance, and Tawana buckled, signing a consent agreement to relocate or dismantle her creation. No new home could be secured. In the summer of 1988, the artist destroyed her own work, ritualistically burning what she could not sell as firewood.

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close“City Animals,” Hoboken Historical Museum. How did I come to curate a history exhibit that chronicled the changing relationship of humans and other animals in one city? (The city, of course, is Hoboken.) It all started with this photo.
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close“Homeless Not Helpless,” Student Lawyer. Affordable housing is scarce. Why not take over city-owned abandoned buildings and rehabilitate them? People are living on the street; some are mentally ill, without services. Why not join with other homeless people and run your own shelter? Why not create programs that will meet the needs you understand best?

“Homeless, Not Helpless” is about poor and disadvantaged people in Philadelphia and the Bronx, who organized in the late 1980s to better their lives. More than two decades after this article was published, the profiled organizations are still going strong. Most have grown. The following links should lead readers to updates on Dignity Housing; Project SHARE, a project of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania; and Inner City Press. The increased scope of ICP is especially striking: this non-profit charitable group now advocates, organizes, and reports on “community reinvestment; fair access to credit, insurance, and telecommunications; environmental justice; and government and corporate human rights accountability.” Please consider supporting their important work. And please note, as well: My original representation of ICP’s homesteaders requires a correction; I misstated the nativity of the women rehabilitating the Bronx building I visited. Most were Dominican.

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close“Let the Witness Stand,” Whole Earth Review, Spring 1986. As part of a larger project on 20th century war resisters, I conducted an “interview by questionnaire” with an imprisoned anti-nuclear “ploughshares” activist, a woman who preferred to be “an anonymous witness.” I provided my background information when I submitted the interview, unsolicited, to Whole Earth. But on publication I learned the editors had developed the conceit that I, too, was a woman shrouded in mystery. Hmm. Read the article

close“A Narrative,” Art & Artists, April 1983. Six years after I went to the Soviet Union and met a few underground artists, I wrote about the experience. Re-reading the essay so many years later, what stands out for me is all I left out—not only the names of the artists, whom I wanted to protect, and my decision to take some of their artwork out of the country for pseudonymous publication in a European journal (another story altogether!), but also my amusing misinterpretation of some of the artists’ statements. They had gallantly spoken whatever English they knew, as I do not speak Russian. I was grateful to them for making communication possible, and was loathe to seem mocking in any way. But I also did not know how to comfortably interject humor (which was, after all, directed at myself) into my “serious” essay. I may still not know how. Nevertheless, if I were writing the piece today, I’d try. Maybe I’d start with the story of my first encounter with the artist I called “V. M.” When I called him from a phone box in the hotel lobby, he instructed me to meet him on a nearby corner. “How will I recognize you?” I asked—a practical question that nevertheless seemed badly scripted. “I am thirty-three year, and I will be wearing old skin,” V. M. replied. Old skin? I thought he might be prematurely aged, perhaps from the stress of his life of subterfuge. But when I arrived at the agreed-upon spot, I found a youthful-looking man who was smiling broadly. He looked quite well. On his back was a worn leather coat. Read the article

close“Remembering An Executed Man,” The Progressive, February 1998. This essay contains an account of its genesis. To learn more about the Catholic Worker movement and its newspaper, see http://www.catholicworker.org

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close“Kids in the Cuckoo’s Nest,” The Progressive,
December 1991. In 1977 I met a young woman (we later became good friends) who told me about being committed to a psychiatric facility during the late 1960s. She had not been mentally ill, but a rebellious teenager. Her parents had committed her. Placed on a ward with psychotic adults, the unsupervised teen woke to find a patient trying to set fire to her bed.

I am certain the story of my friend’s commitment made me stop and consider a magazine advertisement I came across more than a decade after our meeting. The ad was directed to parents and promoted the services of a private psychiatric hospital. An “out of control” teenager, the copy announced, could “get help”—and the parents, relief--with the child’s hospital stay covered by “most insurance.”

The Dick Goldensohn Fund awarded me a grant to investigate and the Progressive published my findings on the new wave of for-profit institutionalization of rebellious children. The magazine’s art director, Patrick Flynn, wisely chose Henrik Drescher to provide the accompanying illustration. To see more of his work: http://www.hdrescher.com

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close“Wendy Ewald,” Threepenny Review, Winter 1997. I initially proposed this essay on the work of photographer Wendy Ewald to another publication, one with a pronounced left-leaning perspective. When I presented the finished piece, the editors declined to publish it, suggesting—in a misreading of Ewald’s intent and process—that the photographer’s introduction of a tool by which children of limited means and opportunity (in both developing and developed countries) could “frame” their environment and experience agency, was a kind of cultural imperialism. They would not even consider publishing the essay to test their assumption or to initiate discussion among their readers. I then sent the essay to Threepenny’s editor, Wendy Lesser, and her response could not have been more different: she invited other writers to respond to Ewald’s work and published them as a series, opening with my essay. Read the essay

close“Labor History Rocks
Small Town,” The Progressive, June 1995. Documentary filmmakers George Stoney and Judith Helfand unearthed the lost labor history of a South Carolina mill town. After I saw a preview of their film, The Uprising of ’34, I contacted some residents and learned that more than 60 years after the largest single-industry strike in U.S. history ended with the shooting deaths of seven striking mill workers and the wounding of seventeen more by National Guardsmen or deputized locals, powerful forces in the county were still trying to keep the story from getting out. Read the article

closeInterview with photographer Susan Meiselas, The Progressive, April 1998. The images that accompany this article are mere suggestions of the originals. Please visit Meislas’s website and the magnificent Kurdistan site to view the photos as they were meant to be seen, and to learn more about the photographer and her projects.
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close“Native American and human rights activists urge museums and collectors to learn the difference between archeological displays and sacred relics,” Student Lawyer, 1993. An article I read in Harper’s magazine in 1986 had always stayed with me. In it, a group of North Cheyenne Indian chiefs describe discovering, quite by accident, that the remains of 18,500 of their ancestors were being warehoused by the National Museum of Natural History. The discovery helped spur the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/) and three years later I decided to contact activists, museums, and participating organizations to see how repatriation and protection was working. For further information and updates, readers can begin with the website of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation which will lead them to other resources.
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close“The necessity defense gets a new workout from protestors on both sides of the political spectrum,” Student Lawyer, November 1987. This article was reprinted in the 4th edition of Before the Law: An Introduction to the Legal Process (eds. Bonsignore, Katsh, d’Errico, Pipkin, Arons, and Rifkin.) Protestors are still using the defense, with varying degrees of success.
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close“Defender of Primates,” The Progressive, July 1993. After writing several in-depth articles on human-caused animal suffering, I was delighted to learn about (and to profile the founder of) the International Primate Protection League. They’ve successfully combated illegal trafficking, and furthered conservation and rehabilitation efforts worldwide. See http://www.ippl.org/ to learn more about IPPL’s good work. To learn more about The Progressive magazine, see http://www.progressive.org
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close“Death by Oversight,” Student Lawyer, September 1998. As a freelancer, I pitch nearly all the articles I write. Not this one. After working with editor Sarah Hoban for several years, she knew I’d want to investigate how a gutted Occupational Safety and Health Administration was failing to protect workers, leading state and local prosecutors to haul corporations and executives into court for workplace injuries and deaths.
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close“Milton Rogovin: Seeing the Forgotten Ones,” Labor History, Fall 1997. An essay on the Buffalo optometrist and political activist who captured, in direct, black and white images, the pride and strength of people—workers, the very poor—who often went unseen by the majority. Milton Rogovin died at age 101 on January 18, 2011. His family has created a website, www.miltonrogovin.com, to share his photography and to offer educational materials based on his work. (It also updates the bibliography at the close of my essay, and includes a filmography, and updates on exhibitions as well.) The family notes that Milton and his late wife Anne, an educator who was his partner in all things, “expressed a strong desire that these photographs ‘help to feed and strengthen’ the communities where the images were taken.” The images featured here were selected by the editors of Labor History to accompany my essay. Rather than present scans of the twelve pages on which the pictures appeared, the Rogovin family kindly provided scans of the original photographs.
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close“Selling Sand & Sea: Sand Sculptors & the Development of the Atlantic City Resort, 1897-1944, The Clarion, Summer 1992. I have long been fascinated by ephemeral works of art and the impulse to record them (often to create a saleable object.) While going through a collection of postcards of Atlantic City sand art, I noticed two versions of the same 1910 image. In one, the artist posing in front of a sculpted touring car is African American. In the other, the photo of the artist’s face has been re-touched to make him appear white. My research into sand art in Atlantic City, and its representation, began there. The essay I produced was published in the now-defunct journal of the Museum of American Folk Art (since renamed the American Museum of Folk Art.) The magazine’s fine reproduction of the original cards almost made forgivable the errant “e” that appeared in “development” (in the essay’s title.)
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close“The Pentagon’s Secret War
on Animals,” Animals’ Agenda, June 1987. Since the early 1900s, every form of weaponry developed by the U.S. military has been tested first on animals. In documenting this simple fact I hoped to create a bridge between peace activists and animal rights advocates, who were then operating in different spheres, as if their concerns were unrelated. Animals’ Agenda editor Jim Mason championed my project, the results of which were later chosen by Project Censored as one of the “25 Best Censored Stories” for 1987.
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close“Joe Furey’s Urban Grotto: Found and Lost,” Intuit, Summer 1995. This article explores what happened to the five-room Brooklyn, New York, apartment that retired ironworker Joseph Furey transformed into an urban grotto.
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close“Desert Christ Park,” Preservation, 2005. During a road trip through Southern California, I visited this Yucca Valley site and was transfixed by the eerie white sculptures dotted among desert scrub and twisted Joshua trees. I began to look for information about its maker, Antone Martin, in part to figure out why I was so taken with his work. The archives of the Los Angeles Times were especially rich in stories about him and the art environment he made. As I read through these early accounts, it did not surprise me to learn that Martin’s art environment was largely motivated by his fear of atomic war.

Some of the material in this unpublished essay appeared in a short piece for Preservation, the magazine for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, (November/December 2005.) Although the article is not available online, the website provides much information about preservation projects nationwide. The website for the park’s caretakers, Desert Christ Park Foundation is also useful for its site map, directions, updates on park preservation, and a park history that focuses on its Christian symbolism.

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close“Lund’s Scenic Garden:
Found and Lost,” 2005.

One editor I submitted it to said she found my account moving but candidly admitted that she would not give space in her journal to the Lund’s art because of her deep antagonism to religion generally and to evangelical Christianity in particular. I believe I understand her position, but do not think this essay is, ultimately, about either. Perhaps she would have been swayed—and I would have written a different piece—had I known about Jay Yager’s documentary film, Lund’s Scenic Garden, when I was writing it. During an interview with Yager, the Scenic Garden’s co-creator, E.K. Lund, describes his early career as a magician. For information on Lund’s Scenic Garden and other Yager videos: http://spidershack.net/video/jaydesc.html

A version of this piece appeared in The Outsider Magazine, a publication of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. The article is not available online, but check out www.art.org for information about their Chicago-based collection, gallery, and educational programs.

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