THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Gilah Yelin Hirsch

“I went to UC Berkeley at the time of the greatest revolution, revelation, revealing. Everything was opened up in a way that it never had been before. And I was a fantastic sponge, pulling it all in and trying to make sense of all this new information. I was there from ’64 to ’67, which was the time to be there, and it absolutely opened my world up.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, July 2026

GYH:  I am Gilah Yelin Hirsch. I live in Venice, California. I was born in Montreal, Canada, August 24th, 1944.

JW:  Well, tell us briefly about your childhood, maybe about your parents or siblings or ethnicity. I guess being in Canada too, like, what do you think influenced you to become who you became?

GYH:  Well, a complicated childhood. My mother was a famous poet, writer, and celebrity in Canada, but she suffered from this terrible mental illness, and she would become very violent and impossible. And yet at that time, there was no treatment. And at the same time, my father developed this disease called Lou Gehrig’s disease, which is like ALS. And he was an invalid for 13 years. No siblings. And I, from the time I was 8, I stayed home to take care of my father.

JW:  Oh my goodness. Did you go to school?

GYH:  Rarely, rarely. But I did go to a 4-language school. English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and French. So I was schooled in these 4 languages, which really was the best decision that my parents made for me, giving me this breadth of understanding of culture and language very early on. As far as school, I was in high school in Montreal, and then I was in McGill University for the first year. I was 16 at the time.

I was very bored at McGill. I wanted to go to the Sorbonne, but my mother wouldn’t allow it. And so the only place she allowed me to go was to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. So I was there for my second year. Studied with Yigal Yadin, among others. And there I met Ed Hirsch, who was there for a year from Harvard. And we got together and the following year, ’63, we were married.

The wedding was in Montreal, and then I went to live with him in Cambridge, and we were both in school for the rest of the year. And then we moved to Berkeley, California, where I went to UC Berkeley at the time of the greatest revolution, revelation, right, revealing, you know, everything was opened up in a way that it never had been before. And I was a fantastic sponge, pulling it all in and trying to make sense of all this new information while protesting at the time, lying on the tracks to keep the troops from going to Vietnam, being arrested by the Oakland police, all that stuff. I was there from ’64 to ’67, which was the time to be there, and it absolutely opened my world up.

JW:  Now, from there, where’d you go after ’67?

GYH:  My then husband Ed had learned that the only professor in the world was dealing with computers, which were— nobody knew about them at the time— was at UCLA and had established a course for computer-assisted education. And Ed wanted to do that. Meanwhile, while I was still at Berkeley, I got an invitation from Stanford, a full ride, PhD, clinical psych. That’s what I wanted to do. I grew up wanting to be a writer and a psychologist. And here I’m given this gift.

And at the time, it was still follow your man. And so there I was with this beautiful offer, which I felt I couldn’t take. I had to follow Ed. And on a lark, I had had to take an art history course. And on the basis of the 10 paintings I made in that art history course, I applied to UCLA MFA program without ever having had any classes in art, in studio art, or never thought of myself as potentially an artist. But those paintings, those 10 paintings, were absolutely unique in every way. And believe it or not, I was accepted, which was such a shock.

JW:  Is that where you got involved in the women’s movement?

GYH:  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So there I was, and I was immediately given a teaching assistantship, which meant that I was teaching a class, and I had no knowledge of drawing or painting, and I learned how to do it all by teaching. And so I became a very rigorous, vigorous, and enthusiastic teacher of drawing and painting.

Meanwhile, in my, my first year, as a graduate student, I was—all I could do was a kind of painting that I called window paintings, and they were overlapping layers of light and air. And Richard Diebenkorn at that time told me I had influenced his Ocean Park series by my window paintings. And the second year—so my first year I did these window paintings, second year I thought I wanted to do something concrete.

I set up what we used to call still life. And I painted this very, very meticulously real setting, a still life of domestic vegetables and things. But as I painted them, it seemed to me that they had personalities. And so I began to think of everything as a metaphor. And the image became metaphor for me, in this case, of the children of Israel marching across the desert from Egypt.

So then I continued with what became known as the food paintings, and I used everyday domestic objects, food objects, pots and pans, to rarefy, reify a metaphor. And in, in all of it, it was a question of showing the domestic life of a woman and how this domesticity kept her trapped. So some of my most renowned paintings of that time show a giant tomato trapped in wires. Another one shows a 6-foot-tall house arrest fried eggs like prison bars.

And then I began to see also that the canvas was a metaphor for me. How many ways could I paint extreme reality and paint over that more extreme realities and more extreme realities and more extreme realities? So the paintings were very layered in truths and in metaphor. And I understood the canvas then was for me a metaphor of exploring my own personality, my condition, and my sense of place in my world. And they began to peel even more.

And by this time, all my food paintings became really well known. This is my second year of graduate school, and they were being shown in the county— LA County Museum, the Whitney, other major museums. They were being written about, and I was shown with the luminary male artists at the time, like Warhol and Rauschenberg. And they didn’t understand that my food paintings were about—were psychological, in-depth explorations. Nobody got it. So in the meantime, you know, the paint— those paintings were getting a whole lot of play.

And meanwhile, my own interest in what I could do with a canvas is turn it into a psychological exploratory exercise, continue deeper and deeper until I left the food imagery altogether and began another series where I was looking inside my body, inside my soul, and that became the next great big opening.

In the meantime, I left my husband after 10 years in ’72 and became involved with the Women Artist Movement. Now, my introduction, a momentous moment in my life. I and my then-husband Ed were invited to CalArts’ inaugural party for their new school. We were invited because one of the people who was invited to start a chair on pop culture was Robert Crisco. He became the first rock and roll critic in the world, and the one for the Village Voice. And so CalArts invited him to start a chair in popular culture.

And the other person who was invited to start a chair was Max Kozloff, who was Joyce Kozloff’s husband, and who was the very famous art critic, then the founder of Artforum and other things like that. So at this inaugural party, we were invited by Bob Crisco, the rock and roll critic, and it was there that I met Joyce. And she changed my life in the first conversation we had when I was a little mushy about the definition of feminine and feminist.

And she straightened me out right there. And that really changed my life because at the time, those who were, let’s say, very feminist in their action were dressing like men and acting like men, thinking that they would be perfect. And I never got that. And yet I had strong political feelings. So that conversation with Joyce Kosloff changed my life.

We became immediately very close friends. She was the painter from New York, arrived with her husband and her 2-year-old son, and we became very close friends, and we began to invite other women artists to their very tiny little apartment. And in a short time, we formed the Council of Women Artists, LA Council of Women Artists, LAQA. And I wrote all the manifestos, all the documents, all the— everything that had to be set down in ink.

It was pretty much a full-time job. And I was a graduate student. And as soon as I graduated from UCLA, and my paintings were all over the place, [there were] a lot of interviews and international interviews about my work. I became very much involved with LAQA, and I was the one who would be interviewed on TV and on the radio. And we had many protests at the county museum. It was a full-on war.

JW:  Protests on what specifically?

GYH:  Protests that there were no women in the County Museum exhibitions, and none were invited. So that was a simple fact. We went and counted up all the paintings that were being shown at any time, and none of them were by women, but lots were by anonymous. And after doing a whole lot of research, we discovered that all these anonymous were either the wives, sisters, or mothers of those who were shown.

JW:  You wrote the manifesto. Can you remember much about it? What did it say? Any major points? 

GYH:  Oh yes, all the major points. All my papers are in the Smithsonian now, by the way, and, they get many requests for exactly what you asked for. I have copies, but it would take my assistant to find them right now.

JW:  That’s okay. I just wondered if you could give us a couple points from the manifesto.

GYH:  Well, the easy one is the fact of not recognizing women as artists. That was, you know, right there, face up. And then by how many non-women were represented in a museum that always had thousands of works on the walls, not one by a woman, by women. And there was no plan to bring women into the museums.

And furthermore, there were other things. Women were not getting teaching jobs. I was the only one who got a teaching job at a university teaching studio art. Women at that time, at best, they could get an art history teaching job, not a tenure position. I was the first to get a full-time tenured studio position in any university. So there were many firsts in my life, and they continue to be many firsts.

As far as the manifesto, I would rather send you a copy. So I mentioned that I became an artist by accident. I had no intention of being an artist, and it never occurred to me. And so the accidental artist had so many interests at that time that everything interested me, and my work then reflected all my other interests as well as my own, my— the ones that I went to graduate school [for].

JW:  And you said you did some that represented your psychological being.

GYH:  Yes, I did a whole series called the Round Series that explores the inner world, my inner world, in an abstract and yet realistic way. When I give presentations on my work all over the world, then that’s pretty often I give the history through the images of how everything was changing. And it is quite an adventure. And in fact, if you felt like it, there are several, let’s say, documentaries of me giving talks like that on YouTube and also on my, my website.

JW:  Were there other, um, activist things with other women? Tell us more about the organization then that you were involved in.

GYH:  Certainly I was rather isolated from the art world because I wasn’t in it until we formed it, and we formed the Women’s Art World. We came to know women who were filmmakers and women who were painters and sculptors and who were teaching, but teaching history of art. And we got together so that we could discuss the current situation at the time and what further actions we could take. So besides a whole lot of letter writing, which I did in representing the women artists, I was also making new images, a new series of images that was exploring my inner world, inner psychology.

At the same time, I took my first solo voyage into the mountains in the winter, in the middle of the winter. And I went off in my van alone to the Sierras. And I was at a very high altitude. And at that time, there was a snowstorm which trapped the van and there the van couldn’t move. I knew that if I stayed in the van, I would freeze to death. And on the 3rd day, I ventured out.  I thought I’d walk, you know, walk somewhere. And the next thing I remember, it turns out to have been 4 days later when I was miraculously found by someone who happened to be there in that area. And their dog sniffed something under a snowbank. And that’s how I was found.

JW:  Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.

GYH:  Yes, amazing. Many amazing stories in my life. So that is when, and I was cared for and revived, but that is when I began to explore my, let’s call it my soul. And my soul in my body and my paintings were very reflective of a female body and also of where is this soul? How do you find it and what does it look like? And that series went on until I found that the image seemed to go underwater. And it was as if there was this body being formed.

These are very large paintings, by the way. As if the figure was moving out from the bottom of the ocean, like being reborn into the material world. And then I became involved with an actual pond in Southern California at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. And I was there for 3 years painting that pond in all moments of light and season and weather. Over 100 paintings of that pond. And so I had left the food, I left the inner exploration in that way. I was now in the material, actual world of nature.

And while I was at the pond, I began to notice that there were certain forms that were being made when the reeds on the other side of the pond were dying. So they would die into an angle, an arc, a line, a triangle. And soon— and I was painting all this time and taking pictures of this, what seemed to me a scriptural message that was being written for me by the reeds at the other side of the pond. So I began to read these letters, and because I am fluent in many languages and alphabets, these certainly became alpha— what I called alphabetic morphology.

And after 3 years, I began to examine the land with the same kind of meticulous eye that I had examined the pond, and I was finding letter forms everywhere and photographing them everywhere, including going off to Asia and Europe and looking at all languages ancient to modern, and finding that these 5 forms were intrinsic to all alphabets, ancient to modern. And then I began to think, well, why, why these particular 5 forms?

And one day I got it, and, and I began to think, well, as our ancestors were looking for food or foe as they walked wherever they walked around the world, There were 5 forms that jumped out at them. And why? Because they reflected the shapes of the neurons and the neural processes of perception and cognition. And we are more alike than we are different. That was a huge milestone. And in the meantime, I was being invited to all sorts of scientific conferences to, to tell my theories, and all of my theories were being accepted into science.

So the next step of that branch of my burgeoning life was that as I became known as a scientist, I also became known as a psychologist and as a psychiatrist. And meanwhile, my writing on all sorts of subjects was being published in all sorts of very impressive things like MIT’s Leonardo Journal and books. And people were writing about me, and meanwhile I was just following my curiosity, endless following. The next step of this—

JW:  Let me interrupt you. So was this all— were you the only woman doing this? I’m trying to get back to the importance.

GYH:  The only, absolutely the only woman, right? And the only one. These were unique ideas that came from me as a woman, but also as someone who really wanted to know everything about everything and how things are connected. And that’s been my mission in my life. Always, I’ve been the only woman in all sorts of things, but it never was the key element. The key element is, what am I going to learn?

It’s like I’ve just come back from a conference in South Korea, a conference on shamanism. And, you know, the question is, well, what did I learn? Two weeks before that, I was teaching psychiatrists at McGill University, which I do every year. I’m— I wouldn’t say eclectic, but I am universally curious. So let me just go, if it’s okay with you, sort of bring you up to date on the relation of the letter forms. To something called psychoneuroimmunology.

And that is an area of medicine that I am a pioneer in. And it is the relation of mind-body toward healing. And how do those letterforms connect to that? It is in the fact that by focusing on images that contain those letter forms, your body changes. Your body changes every time you look at anything. Your body changes.

In the West, everybody knows that if particularly a man is shown an erotic image, his body will change. So does a woman’s. But everything we see changes our body at any moment. So I have made an entire new field in this area called psychoneuroimmunology, and it has to do with art and healing and the power of form in healing. So I’m perpetually busy.

JW:  I hear that.

GYH:  I’m always on the verge of going and always just arrived. And for every time I’m invited to do a presentation, I develop a new one.

JW:  How much has your feminist activity continued through all this?

GYH:  So in my travels all over the world presenting my work, invited, always invited, I have been amazed, particularly the ones that become Zooms. How many women in non-Western worlds asking me, how do you become a woman artist? How do you do this? How do you prepare your life? They are always punished if they are showing any interest other than their families.

And this becomes a route for them, or I do give them a way that they can do this and give them a community that’s worldwide. where women are beginning to assert themselves in the most heinous of situations and say what they want to say and also make images that they can show to each other, at least. This has been very moving for me. Now, it’s many years I’ve been doing that.

The other thing that I did during the time of graduate school and after that June Wayne was a very important figure in my life, and she was seasoned in the art world with all her very bad experiences besides her wonderful artist self, which was always suffering because the art world was discriminating against women. But June then decided in 1960, let’s say ’71, to found a seminar for 20 selected women artists where she would explain in 6 weeks the miseries of the art world for women and how the business of the art world worked.

And this was the most important education I ever received in terms of a fact, fact, fact, fact. Her experience throughout all of the branches of the art world for her entire career, and she also knew the miserable stories of other artists, women artists particularly. At the end of the seminar, which was absolutely enlightening, she designated that I should be the bearer of the aegis and take this information into the world.

So I then became the, the founder of a new set of seminars which I called Joan of Art. And the child of June’s unnamed seminars. I took Joan of Arc to many cities and many countries, actually. Mostly I collapsed the 6 weeks into a weekend marathon, and I prepared innumerable handouts. And we also—the other thing we did was role play with dealers, with museum curators, with each other. Because women were afraid to speak.

JW:  Of course.

GYH:  And I then—the next step with that was I created the first university course in the world with the artist business, because no artist, no man knew for sure what was going on either. But this was for male and female artists, the artist business, and that became the foundation of many such courses in universities and other institutes, longer or shorter courses, but that was the foundation. So that was an important part of my life at the same time as I was doing all these other things.

JW:  Well, so, I mean, you did this with women all over the world, in the United States?

GYH:  Well, I did definitely—I didn’t do the marathons with women all over the world. I did presentations.

JW:  I see.

GYH:  And then they could get all my handouts and other things if they wanted.

JW:  What year was that?

GYH:  ’72. And also, June asked me to be involved in a report analyzing media adverbs and adjectives because I was, as I was doing all this research, I was finding that very different words were being used for female or male artists. So the male artists were, you know, lauded as brilliant. The words used to critique them were “hard, angular, strong, bold,” while the female was always seen pejoratively as “soft, light, organic, sensual, sexual.” Only male art had credibility.

And so I, on the warpath, you know, also got involved with this. It was called Sex Differentials in Art Exhibition Reviews. in ’72, women’s art was absolutely detested by male artists. It had no credibility, no viability. So we began to have exhibitions of women’s art, and that’s when the word feminist art came into being as a segregated item that had its own birthing process and its own feeling and imagery and all of that. And that was also in ’72 or so.

So between Joan of Arc and the— and by the way, from Joan of Arc, the next organization of women was at CalArts. That was Judy Chicago’s feminist art program. And then that became Women Space. And then we had a women’s gallery called Women House. And then that became the Women’s Building downtown LA. So that little group that Joyce and I started had many children and grandchildren and continues.

JW:  Still there?

GYH:  Oh, yeah, yeah, there is. But, you know, it’s not as pointed as it was. The women’s building downtown became, after some years, a center for gay women, and it became less welcoming to straight women. Yeah. Well, you know, all these movements go through stages where they become very ferociously singular, and then eventually things open up.

I had a similar situation. I had the first studio here in Venice in what’s called SPARC, the Social Public Art Resource Center, which was the original police station in 1900. And I made the first artist studio my own of what was the police war room on the 2nd floor. And then I had the first exhibition in the original jail cells that turned into exhibition spaces.

First my work, and now it’s a cultural heritage place. And so they had to leave 2 cells as they were and opened up the rest to a larger gallery. But that building too became a generally a gay women’s building, and I think, I’m hoping now that it’s, it’s more open.

JW:  That’s amazing. Wow. Well, I kind of interrupted you as you were going through your different iterations of work with women. I don’t know where you left off. Do you want to pick back up?

GYH:  I wanted to mention Joyce did so many marvelous things, and she was already very active in New York with Heresies and other things like that, and the Guerrilla Girls. But Joyce organized a panel for the 1974 College Art Conference in Washington, D.C. She invited 5 women artists to talk about a woman artist who had deceased, and I chose Emily Carr. Nobody had ever heard of Emily Carr, but I did, being Canadian, and I spent a year researching Emily Carr.

And found her literally buried, oil paint on butcher paper buried in the Vancouver Art Gallery, and nobody had looked at them. They were rolled up like garbage. And I took pictures of all of them and brought Emily’s life and her paintings to the College Art Association. And then she became known and known in the world, and she is the most renowned of all Canadian artists at this time.

And her story is interesting. It was interesting to me because she was first an explorer, and she went to live with the Kwakiutl and the Haida Indians in Queen Charlotte Island and learned their language and wrote about them. And it was her writing that brought an anthropologist to visit her. And when he saw her paintings, which are all around, he had the initiative to take them to Ottawa and show them to the museums there.

So she was first a writer, then a painter, and this was my history as well. And furthermore, she lived for many years alone in the forest, and so did I, and this comes later. So, um, uh, that panel was fantastic, and whenever I give a talk about my work and the evolution of feminist art, I always talk about the panel because all the artists and those who they brought to life literally were brought to life.

And that was the beginning of, let’s see who else we forgot. Let’s bring them forward. And that was a beautiful, wonderful, and important thing. Another memorable, for me, event was Joan Hugo – a very important critic here in Los Angeles in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. And she invited me to be on a panel on spiritual art at the Japanese Cultural Center. And this was also in, in the very early ’80s, late ’70s, early ’80s. And nobody had talked about spiritual art before. It was a dirty subject.

But she was the first to write about my work as spiritual and to have a panel on what is spiritual art. And that was a real milestone, a breakthrough into another aspect of being an artist. Melinda Wirtz was also a very important critic at the time, and she was the first to write a feature article on my work for Art News International. So now, it wasn’t something that you don’t do. It was something if you do it, if you are it, but there are no rules here.

At that time also, I, at 78, I curated the first exhibition on spiritual art at my university, Cal State Dominguez Hills in LA. And it was a brand new building and a brand new gallery, the most beautiful gallery in town, actually. And I invited 21 artists, 18 media. And this was a very amazing exhibition. And it was the first of any kind of recognition of spiritual art. They were all great artists who also were spiritual. In the way that they perceived things and presented things.

So that got a lot of publicity and, um, uh, it was, um, very exciting. A lot of work, very exciting. I also made 2 movies. The first one was called Cosmography: The Writing of the Universe. After I was talking about my alphabetic morphology and relating it to, to neural shapes and forms and perception, I was invited all over the world to present this theory. And I had 4 slide projectors and all sorts of equipment, and it was a pain in the neck to go anywhere with all my stuff.

So I decided to make a movie, based on all the slides and everything else and talk over it. It’s an hour-long movie. It’s available everywhere on my website and on YouTube. And it became the, the Bible of my— that theory and very well done. And the next one was the cosmography movie was being used so much around the world that I was asked to do something for children of all ages.

So I spent the next 5 years making a movie for children of all ages called Reading the Landscape. And that’s a half an hour movie. And I went to 26 different countries and cultures in order to show the landscape there and what their alphabet looks like. And so making the correlations all over the world. I mean, there is a, I perceive, an issue still that women artists have to be described as women artists, not as artists, but as women artists.

You don’t talk about male artists as male artists. You talk about them as artists. And once that, uh, nomen— nomen can be dropped, that’s when the real equality is there. And then we talk about the art. Now, as far as personalities of artists and male artists and women artists, there’s the whole gamut on both sexes, of course. So I’m still, you know, a little leery about how long do we have to have the extra designation. Interesting.

JW:  That’s probably true of almost every profession that we could name.

GYH:  Yeah, it’s true. Although, you know, I’m so thrilled there are now so many women in positions of political power, literary power, university power. All these situations that were forbidden are now very much enthroned for women.

JW:  Are you doing any activist stuff right now?

GYH:  Yes, in the sense that I’m always talking about the role of women in every talk I give all over the world, and there are always questions about that, although there are fewer now in, let’s say, Western contexts than there were, because it’s now more accepted. So, but I always talk about that. And also the evolution, when I show the evolution of my work, it’s really talking about a woman coming into her own. And that’s what it’s about in the world. And so there’s always a discussion about how have I fared as a woman artist.

JW:  So really, your early involvement with the Women’s Art Association has really affected how you present yourself all the way through your life and your work, I assume.

GYH:  Absolutely, yes.

JW:  Well, as we close, do you have any final remarks you’d like to make?

GYH:  Well, I’m grateful to you, for you to have notified me and invited me to join your army at this point.

JW:  I’m so glad it worked out.

GYH:  Let me talk about 2 other really important times in my life. I mentioned living alone in nature. From 1988 to ’90, I lived alone at 9,000 feet in a forest in northern Arizona. And I thought I wanted to live that way for the rest of my life. And so I took the opportunity and did it. It was, of course, very hard. It was physically very hard. It was emotionally difficult. I continued to paint while I was there until there was so much snow that I couldn’t move my fingers.

But this was a really important time for me, and in many ways it was the happiest time of my life, as everything in nature became an entire world. And I learned to look at things, really look at things, and look at the relationship between every blade of grass and every other blade of grass and everything else. It structured my inner looking to a deep degree. And it created a tremendous sense of compassion in me for all living things. That’s putting it mildly.

And it was a terrible test for me to come back at the end of the 2nd September and go back into teaching and the craziness of university life and what was going on in my personal life and, you know, all of that. I had had the fortune of leaving it all and going to live on a mountaintop in the winter.

The other major thing in my life was that I have lived in 15 Asian cultures. 1986 and 1987, I went alone to Asia, and I went and lived in every culture. And this was tremendously instructive for me because I learned that Joy is culturally determined. In one culture, you want many husbands, another many wives. In one, you want daughters, another one you want sons. The gods change every 5 kilometers. And so it’s kind of arbitrary, but grief is the same in every culture, and grief has to do with loss of contact, abandonment, and rejection. And in every culture, it’s felt in the very same way. Every human feels it in this way.

JW:  Well, I’m really interested that some cultures want women or want girls.

GYH:  Yes. Tibetans want girls. It’s a big blessing to have 5 girls. And why? Because they represent the 5 tallest mountains in the world. Yes, Asian cultures really like girls, and they’re the shamanesses and the holy folks, and they’re smarter. That, uh, you know, living in every culture, seeing what’s done on a daily basis, seeing who’s respected and who isn’t, um, also the, uh, the variety of belief systems, um, was tremendously useful for me. Because it erased all sense of judgment, that everyone has their own context, and within their context, they’re usually right.

JW:  Anything else you want to share?

GYH:  I’ve decided to give my house and the studio building to an arts— maybe you know it— Beyond Baroque, which is a very well-known arts organization. That’s one of the 1900 buildings on Venice Boulevard. It’s also— it was the first City Hall of Venice, and it has been for many years the center for literary visual arts, as well as playwriting and performances and all kinds of Arts. And so it’s only 4 blocks from my house, and Beyond Baroque has long outgrown their building, and they’re now known in Europe, and artists are coming from Europe to present here and to teach here.

And, you know, it’s a, it’s like a small university growing all the time in the arts. And so I will be giving my house and studio to be on Baroque, to be used as a satellite for all their programs. So visiting artists can stay here, performances can happen here, literary events, publishing, you know, all these wonderful things that nobody has room for. And all the time that I was working on this house, I was thinking it has to have an afterlife. And this is— everybody’s very excited about this. And, you know, it’ll happen after I’m gone.

And in the meantime, there will be a few programs that will happen here that will be by both sponsored by Beyond Baroque and, and myself. So they’ll be getting a sense of walking the 4 blocks. And 2 weeks from now, the entire board will be here. And it just feels really good because all these years that I’ve been working on this house, which has been a huge project, and having to find the craftspeople for everything because everything is handmade and fighting with the termites.

And all the tours that come through and have come through all said, this has to be a museum. What are you going to do with it? And I had offered it to many universities, by the way, and institutes, but everybody wanted it, but they wanted an endowment, and I don’t have an endowment. So, but Beyond Baroque, no problem. They will raise whatever money they need to keep it in its prime shape. Yeah. So that’s a new and exciting and A feels-good development.

Well, I had a retrospective, a very huge retrospective in ’22, and for me it was amazing to see work from all the different periods, and it made me all the more curious to see what’s going to happen next. Now, one of the things I didn’t mention is that I’m always looking for different materials to use. So when I was in Egypt, I bought a lot of papyrus, and I’ve been working on papyrus for the last 2 years, and it is a very special medium to use, and nobody else uses papyrus. Um, and so, um, You know, curiosity. I’m addicted to finding newness and how I can use that newness to make work that is beautiful and spiritual and something that’s going to make you feel good. I’m not an advocate of horrific images.

JW:  Oh, that sounds incredible. Well, thank you. I’m going to check out your website right away.