As in real estate, location is everything in the art world. Location can make the difference between whether even the most powerful art statement is trivialized or has its due impact and on what audience.

The title of this aricle refers to Schubert’s famous work, Death and The Maiden. That allusion could be a separate treatise about the build-up to October 30 in the past month. This could be a very long article about how artists have used time as another color in our palette. I am thinking of John Cage’s, “.4'33'” That may be the subject for a future article but tonight I don’t have time.

The evening of October 30, we will be asked to judge two people for ecocide. Both are fictional. The verdict will be decided in a gallery setting. The context will be the Anita Rogers Gallery. People will be able to attend and participate both live and by Zoom.

The audience will hear a "Wife's Lament" about her husband, who is being tried for ecocide. We will listen to soloist Alison Cheeseman sing about aspects of their marriage, their youthful joy, her present loneliness and her nightmare. Her dream describes the world her husband is accused of creating. We will watch Rishauna Zumberg perform as the wife's alter ego, expressing her heart's struggle.

Clearly, in the aria to be performed for Blued Trees in New York City; The Sea Will have The Last Word, the wife did not have some important conversations with her husband. We don't know why but we know that one consequence is that nothing stood in the way of his stardom or her loss. Now everyone has to pay the piper for ecocide and the sea will have the last word on his career.

'I was standing naked in a cold winter wind in a dead forest,' is a phrase from an aria I wrote last spring for live performance October 30 at the Anita Rogers Gallery. The libretto describes how a fossil fuel executive's wife's unconscious breaks through her denial of her husband's personal and global betrayals.

Ecocide is murder, whether you consider a forest sentient or calculate how many people die because their habitat is destroyed, it is a crime against humanity that ends in death. Halfway through the new aria to be performed by the soprano Alison Cheeseman at the Anita Rogers Gallery October 30, the wife of the fossil fuel executive accused of ecocide sings, "I was standing alone, naked in a dead forest." How did she end there? As she laments her cold marriage and the Earth her husband has scorched, her alter ego, played by the dancer Rishauna Zomberg, wrestles with a large blue-painted branch from the dead forest, the reality she had been oblivious to see.

How Feminism Might Still Save the World

Halfway through the new aria I composed last spring for Blued Trees, which will be presented Oct. 30 at the Anita Rogers Gallery, the wife of a fossil fuel executive accused of ecocide, sings, "… now he shines brightest for his shareholders." In the gallery, I will also show the documentation of the preview for the opera we produced last summer, in which the character of the executive and his patriarchal world is somewhat revealed.

The portrayal of negative and positive space in two-dimensional work in every culture describes the distinction between where and how an artist makes a mark and the context for that mark, whether on a flat surface or in how anyone perceives life. On a surface, that may be the calligraphic mark of a Chinese brushstroke. In urban design, architecture and sculpture it may be in how a human body moves around or through an object in space. In social sculpture. it can be the history of the helping professions and collaborative teams in public art that change people's expectations for their communities.

Right now, my practice is no longer theoretical or even about modeling systems change. Core to my practice now is whether and how I might move my legacy out of the way of sea level rise. And yet abstract ideas still matter. Abstractly, sea level rise comes down to boundaries and consequences.

Right now, I am documenting sea level rise daily, 3’ from deep water in a studio that storms left surrounded by seaweed on January 10, 2024. It is a terrifying exercise in perception.

Art school taught me to think. I am still learning how to apply the lessons I learned there. Sixty years later, on October 30, 2024, I will have a chance to exhibit what I learned, at the Anita Rogers Gallery in New York City.

I attended art school in the mid-sixties, most intensively at The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. I also went to classes at several other schools, including studying anatomy at the Art Students League, print making at the Museum of Modern Art, and additional life drawing classes at the School of Visual Arts.