'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.

These are a series of free associations between my experience of artmaking and how policy could change to protect the Earth. My focus is on the working landscape I see of how our world works in ways that end in ecocide. What particularly prompted these reflections has been trying to understand relationships between personal behaviors and public repercussions in the face of ecological disaster.

For several years, I argued with the "hope-ists," writers who extolled this, that or the other new solution to mitigate climate change. I argued that most people conflate sentimental nostalgia for an illusory past with a way forward that will "solve it all". I often wrote that we had to move forward from the wreckage of our past by accepting the devastation of our present.

As I write, President Biden has withdrawn from the Democratic campaign, paving the away for Kamela Harris and perhaps Gavin Newsom. Speculating on future world politics, brings up the question of what the United States considers a head of state should look like? Instead of answering that question, I will explore the implications of appearances and how that inflects something bigger.

The bigger question is that the world has a very serious problem. Powers that be are hurtling us over a cliff of self-destruction whose legal term is ecocide.

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States granted the convicted the former President of the United States broad impunity from criminal activity and the consequences of what has looked like treason to many.

Some years ago, I taught a drawing foundations class in the Art Department at Stonybrook University about how to draw on a surface. The first day, I took my students through a number of art historical slides that illustrated all the ways around the world that we recognize as aesthetic expressions of formal ideas like line, shape and texture. We spanned a range of American, Asian and African tropes from court imagery to animal art (animals that make deliberately creative objects and events we recognize as beautiful).