Conversations – Roy De Forest

CONVERSATIONS

ROY DE FOREST

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Conversations is an ongoing production from Venus Over Manhattan, where artists, writers, critics, academics, and familiars come together to talk about art. Each conversation is published as an audio recording made accessible the gallery’s website, and accompanied by a PDF that features a transcript of the conversation. Listen along at #ConversationsVOM. On April 24th, 2020, Gloria Marchant and Dan Nadel spoke with Anna Furney about Roy De Forest, and the exhibition of his work on view at the gallery in New York. They discuss De Forest’s childhood in the Northwest, his lifelong obsession with dogs, and many of his earliest exhibitions.

Gloria Marchant is the widow of Roy De Forest, and oversees the Roy De Forest Estate. She joins the conversation from her home in Northern California.

Dan Nadel is Curator-at-Large at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at the UC Davis. He contributed an essay to the catalogue published with Venus Over Manhattan’s De Forest exhibition.

Anna Christina Furney is partner at Venus Over Manhattan. She moderated this conversation

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ACF: Welcome everybody to a Q&A with Gloria Marchant and Dan Nadel. Gloria Marchant is the widow of the late-artist, Roy De Forest, who just had a glowing review in the New York Times by Roberta Smith, and whose work is currently on view at Venus Over Manhattan in a one-man show. Dan Nadel is a long-time friend of Venus, and an academic on all things funky, nerve-y, and California. And he’s now curator at UC Davis, at the Manetti-Shrem Museum in Northern California, and so he comes as a real expert on all of this material. So welcome, both of you.

GM: Thank you.

DN: Thank you.

ACF: Since our subject today is Roy De Forest, I really wanted to start with some initial biographical information on Roy, on his history as a young man, as a boy, and then his eventual migration to California and the Bay Area. Gloria, I wondered if you wanted to touch on some of his kind of early life, and provide some background on that.

GM: Sure, I have to give you a disclaimer: when I met Roy, I was 19 years old and he was 36. I met him at a gallery in San Francisco, and at the time I was living in Oregon, and working at a gallery where we showed his work, subsequent to that.

So, basically, what I’ve learned about Roy’s early life—a lot of it I learned after he passed away, you know, during the process of the retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California, and working

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with Susan Landauer on her book about Roy and his work [Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017)]. I learned a lot [laughter]. Because Roy didn’t talk about the past. I mean it was very, very rare that he would talk about things that had happened when he was younger. And he was always talking about his next, new thing—what he was going to do, what he was excited about, in terms of his work. And, so, really, I’ve learned more about him, but this is going to be, not firstperson—I mean, I wasn’t even born...

ACF: You’re the closest thing to first-peron we’ve got.

GM: Well, what I will say, is that he was born in North Platte, Nebraska, in 1930. And his father had lost his first wife very tragically, and some of his children. And he ended up marrying Roy’s mother, who then went on to have four children with him. And they—you know, this was during the Depression—and the lived on a farm, and they became, you know, sort-of farm workers.

And they went from Nebraska, where Roy’s dad’s family lived, and ended up through Colorado, and then up in the Yakima area in Washington.

The one thing he did talk about: his father was ill, and was quite a bit older than his mother. And eventually his mother bought a nursing home to kind of take care of his dad. So Roy had some very strong feelings about those people [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter].

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GM:

DN:

GM:

ACF:

GM:

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Because he had to work there. But, you know, that’s where he became—was an artist. And his sisters told me that he drew on the walls. I mean they had nothing. They were poor. I mean really poor. So it’s kind of amazing that he managed, because he was so talented, to go to school— he went to Yakima Junior College—and then received a scholarship to go to the California School of Fine Arts, which because the San Francisco Art Institute. And one story that I did hear from his sisters after he died, was very interesting insight into his mother, and I don’t think I even told this to Susan Landauer, was that his mother—his father had died, when Roy was about 19—and he got this scholarship, right?

And his mother had the two younger girls, who were still at home, and they were struggling. And the uncles and aunts, you know, the adults in the family, were all very upset that Roy’s mother was going to let him go to San Francisco to go to art school.

Oh, yeah.

He needed to stay home to take care of his sisters, and help his mother. And so, you know, I think she deserves a lot of credit, for believing in him.

I’m curious to know how he was introduced to San Francisco, and to the art school, specifically.

How was that an inkling in his mind?

Well, you know, he used to talk about how he

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was a farm boy. And when he went to art school at the California School of Fine Arts—this is like, maybe, 1950, ‘51, in there—there were GIs, on the GI Bill that were going to school with him.

But he was young, you know, he was a young man. And, as he put it, right off the farm. So, you know, it was a pretty heady experience, to meet really serious artists, and young men who had come back from war, and that went on to have careers. And so I think he was very lucky—I think he appreciated that. He had opportunities to show in kind of ad hoc galleries, during a really exciting time in San Francisco.

ACF: What has he told you—I’m curious to know what he’s told you about his experience at school, his peers, and his teachers—because he had some pretty notable teachers at the time.

GM: Right. Well, the story he told about Clyfford Still, that I heard him say to many people, not just to me—was that Clyfford was doing a critique in a class, and he was very upset with a student’s work, and basically, I think he destroyed the artwork?

DN: Destroyed it, yeah.

GM: Yeah. And that was very appalling to Roy. And I think that it probably shaped his practice as a teacher, when he taught art himself. You know, he was real poor, right? I mean his mother and sisters ended up moving down to California, and I think he lived part of the time with his mom while he

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was going to school. And he was making these early constructions, out of her wooden spoons, and kitchen utensils, other utensils, and, kind of, debris. Making his art–you know, because he didn’t have the money to go buy, you know, fancy art materials. So I think that’s kind of important.

ACF: Yeah, mhmm.

GM: One of the students that he did talk about, was Jess Collins.

DN: Yeah.

GM: Jess was in school with him. And I think that was an important kind of friendship and relationship.

Although they didn’t really see each other later.

I mean, when I was married to Roy, he was so involved in—during the years that I was married to him—working on his art, and then teaching kind of on-and-off at Davis, that he didn’t really see those people, the people he’d gone to school with, that much. It was more the students, and professors that he worked with at Davis. And the California School of Fine Arts, he also taught there.

ACF: Well so he moves to California, San Francisco, in 1950; attends art school; graduates from art school; and ends up staying in San Francisco for a little bit, yes?

GM: Yes, he did. But you know, what happened—when you went to art school in those days, you didn’t

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have a degree. So his mom was real insistent that he go and get a teaching credential, because she thought that was the only way that he was going to be able to work. So in the meantime, he got called up because of the Korean War, and went into the army. And so when he came back—he had started at San Francisco State, where he finished a Bachelor of Arts degree—and then he went on and got his Masters of Fine Arts at San Francisco State. And he had some important professors there, too. I’m kind of drawing a blank on the photographer.

DN: Oh, it was the—Gutmann.

GM: Yeah, John Gutmann. Very important.

DN: Surrealist photographer.

GM: And he emigrated from Germany.

DN: Yep.

GM: So, you know, he was a serious student. He was very knowledgeable about art history. He used to say, John Gutmann would ask a question, right, to the class, and then when no one could answer, he would turn to Mr. De Forest, and say “Alright, Mr. De Forest, can you tell them the answer?”

[Laughter].

ACF: I love the anecdote about, you know, once De Forest ends up in Davis, and the only person that Thiebaud would let teach his classes if he

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couldn’t teach was Roy.

GM: [Laughing].

ACF: Because he trusted his academic background enough to not screw it up, which I just love.

DN: Yeah, he [Wayne Thiebaud] even stands by that.

I talked to Wayne about, like, just a couple of years ago, and he was very emphatic that Roy really knew his stuff, and could not only tell the story, but also explain it, and analyze the history of Modernism, in a way that reached the students really well.

ACF: Mhmm. So then the story progress: he ends up in—after having been drafted, in the Korean War, where he was stationed in Washington, and became a sign-painter for a few years, which people have long said heavily influenced his practice.

GM: Oh, to interject, I think was a sign-painter while he was in the army.

ACF: Right, right.

GM: And that’s where—yeah, right, right.

ACF: And then when did he end back up in San Francisco? Because I remember this great story about him working at SFMoMA [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, then the San Francisco Museum of Art], right? Where he—

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GM:

Right. Post-school, he worked putting up shows and behind the scenes at the museum. And he took every class you could take at the same time, because they had studios where, you know, ladies and, you know—would come and take art classes. And he did that because it gave him a place to work, a studio.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: So eventually he got a job teaching up at Yakima Junior College, where he’d gone to school when he was very young, before he went to San Francisco. And he worked up there for a couple of years, I believe, and he got fired. He ran the art gallery, and taught classes.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: And he got fired and moved back to San Francisco.

DN: Why did he get fired? I didn’t know that.

GM: Yeah, well, it was something he was quite proud of. And it’s the darnedest thing that happened.

[Laugheter]. As it turned out, I think Roy felt it to be a badge of honor. But he took an artist named Gaylen Hansen’s place at Yakima Junior College, because Gaylen had gotten a job at Pullman, at Washington State University. And so he made artfriends, that he had for the rest of his life, while he was there. But anyway, when he came back, to

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DN:

GM:

DN:

GM:

DN:

GM:

San Francisco, there were little galleries—I don’t know, Dan, you probably know the sequence better. You know, King Ubu, and— King Ubu and the Six Gallery, and of course, Jess— Yes, the Six Gallery.

—Jess brought him into that world, basically.

Batman, and all that, yeah.

Yeah, because Jess had—Jess started King Ubu, and Roy showed there, and he was part of that milieu, for just a short while in the ‘50s.

Well, eventually—and this was before, of course, I knew Roy— but eventually Jim Newman, from the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco—what I really remember about that is Jim kind of launched Roy’s career. Roy was living in Richmond with his mom—Richmond, California, this little town— and Jim was paying him five hundred dollars a month in advances for sales for a show, so that Roy could work. And I think he was at that time he was teaching at San Quentin. He eventually taught at California School of Fine Arts, but, I mean, California College of Art and Crafts, excuse me. But jim was a great supporter of Roy’s work. And sold a lot of his early work. And really, I think you could say he launched Roy’s career.

ACF: And, I mean, other major figures in California

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were shown at Dilexi: Lynn Foulkes, [H.C.] Westermann—I mean, Dan, you know the lore of this story...

DN: Yeah.

ACF: ...far better than—

DN: Yeah, H.C. Westermann, Jess, Foulkes, Jeremy Anderson. It was a great gallery, and of course Jim Newman had been Walter Hopps’ first gallery partner, in Syndell Studio, earlier, in L.A., in the early 1950s. And together they had shown Roy in 1955, in a show that Hopps did—

ACF: That was—was that at the carousel? The carousel project, or?

DN: The carousel project, yeah, yeah, 1955. So it’s interesting—and I think Hopps remained a fan of Roy’s for quite a while.

GM: Oh, yeah. I mean I met him once. He gave a lecture in the Herbst Auditorium, when the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco was still in a war memorial. And that was years later.

But Roy had a great deal of respect of him. I felt fortunate I got to meet him [laughter].

ACF: And I think also, for those people who don’t know Walter Hopps’ history, he was probably least-but-most famous for starting Ferus Gallery in L.A., and then ultimately, ran the Pasadena Museum of Art in Pasadena. And very famously

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DN:

gave Marcel Duchamp his first solo presentation in all of the states when he was working there.

Yeah, and then went on to the Corcoran, and was the primary advisor to the De Menil—to Dominique de Menil and her collecting in the 1980s.

ACF: He was a real slouch.

DN: Yeah, real slouch.

ACF: [Laughter].

DN: Terrible [laughter].

GM: There was some kind of—when they split up, he and Jim Newman, I kind of remember Roy saying they flipped a coin, and Jim got San Francisco.

And that was kind of how the Dilexi, the split happened, between southern and northern California.

DN: That makes sense, actually. That’s interesting.

I’ve never heard that before, but that makes sense. Yeah. Dilexi did all sorts of interesting things, I mean you had TV broadcasts, and really interesting projects across the board. But Roy had multiple shows there, all through the sixties.

GM: Yeah.

DN: Six shows.

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GM:

I was living in Oregon, and this was about the time I met Roy, and I remember going to see a show at Dilexi of Westermann’s sculpture. You know that wooden knot.

DN: Sure.

ACF: The Big Change.

GM: I remember seeing it in Jim’s gallery. And I think it was on Clay Street, kind of in downtown San Francisco.

DN: Yep.

GM: So, you know, that was a fantastic period, for Roy. By the time we were married he was a fully mature person. His art career was launched. He was totally dedicated to his art. In the decades we were married, you know, we had a family— but our whole life revolved around his art, and his, you know, his studios, and materials, and you know, gallery shows, museum shows, all that kind of thing. He was very, very, you know, focused on his work.

ACF: So, then, to get a little personal, Gloria—so you two met when?

GM: We met in 1967 at a little gallery off of—in the Marina. It was Louis Siegrist, and his son, were having a show, and Roy was there with Hal Schlotzhauer, and I was there with my thenhusband, Louis Bunce, from Oregon. And Louis

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had been a professor, a university professor at UC Berkeley, and he went into partnership with a woman named Shelly Judd in Portland, Oregon, to open a gallery. And we just happened to meet at this opening. And then because of that, Roy introduced Louis and I to other artists that he thought might be interested in showing in Portland, Oregon. And eventually Manuel Neri did it, and Hal Schlotzhauer, and Roy, Harold Paris, and I think even Sidney Gordon, Jeremy Anderson, all showed in Portland. And that’s how I kind of got to know Roy. But then, when that marriage, for me, ended, I moved to New York. And Roy had a National Endowment [for the Arts] Grant—I think maybe a sabbatical—and he came back to New York. I was going to school there, and kind of convinced me to move back to California, where he lived. And so that’s how it happened.

DN: And I heard a story, I think from Franklin Williams—I shouldn’t assign blame to anyone—

ACF: [Laughter]

DN: —but, [laughter] I think from Frankln—that Roy ran into you in New York, and you were working at a restaurant, and that, or that he ran into you and then, you know, and then basically chased you down the street, because he remembered you...

GM + ACF: [Laughter]

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DN: GM:

...from San Francisco. From meeting you this one time, and then pursued you.

Well that wasn’t exactly the way it worked out.

He and I...

DN: [Laughter].

GM: ...had kept a correspondence. We wrote letters back and forth to each other. And I was a student at the New York Studio School. And I arranged, with Mercedes Matter, who was the director of the school, for Roy to give a talk. And I gave him my address, which was in a big warehouse building on Bleecker and Elizabeth, and when he got there, to the building, the bottom several floors were burned out...

DN: [Laughter]

GM: ...and he thought I’d given him the wrong address.

[Laugher] It took us a while to kind of connect.

But anyway, I was living in this warehouse, and what I remember about the talk he gave, is that he just had a few slides in his shirt pocket—and this is really true—and he showed the slides different ways, like he’d flip them over...

ACF + DN: [Laughter]

GM: ...and show them upside down. [Laughter].

DN: I believe that.

GM: And, you know, the Studio School is kind of a

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serious place. Philip Guston was one of my teachers, and when the lights went back on, most of the students had left. So that kind of taught me something, too—that that wasn’t a good place for me to be. [Laughter].

ACF: So then he convinced you to come back to California shortly thereafter.

GM: Yeah, I had a good friend who was living in Berkeley. And so I did. And about that time was when he was working on his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with the photography curator John Humphrey. And I think that John had been a friend of Roy’s when he worked there, because he wasn’t really like an art curator, he was really into photography. But Roy was copying slides, and they were doing all this work. So I very much remember the opening, and this fabulous show, which is, you know, wonderful, in the old war memorial, with big skylights, and beautiful light. And that was where I really, for the first time, met his mother, and I think his sisters; we weren’t even married yet. And I have a little story about that show, too. After Roy died I was down in Palm Desert.

John Buck—or, I forget if it was him or Debbie Butterfield—was having a show at Imago Gallery.

And Frank Hamilton came up to me. And Frank Hamilton and Mason Wells were collectors in San Francisco, and on the board of the museum. And Frank told me that the board wanted the director of the museum to show more local artists. And they took a tally of everybody on the board, of

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whose art the people owned, and the reason that Roy got that retrospective is that the majority of the board members already owned his work.

[Laughter].

ACF: Amazing. And that show traveled to Fort Worth, to the Fort Worth Art Center, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the University of Utah, and then the Whitney, from ‘74 to ‘75.

GM: Yeah, I was pregnant with our daughter, and so I didn’t go to all the openings. I did go to the one in Fort Worth. But I wasn’t at the Whitney Museum opening.

ACF: Mmm.

GM: Later, I think, when Roy turned sixty, we went to New York, and we were at the Whitney, you know, the old Whitney, and the painting that they owned, was just hanging, you know, by an elevator—it wasn’t part of a show or anything— but it was kind of cool, that it was hanging.

[Laughter].

ACF: I love it. That’s like last time I was in Paris, at the Pompidou, there was a huge painting of Roy’s that they own in the entryway, front and center.

Which makes me, actually, think that we could do a little pivot to—so much of Roy’s history is based of California, and that’s how so many people know him, but also, you know, he had Darthea Speyer as a dealer, really from the mid-to-early seventies, through the late eighties. I’m curious

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GM:

to know: did you ever meet her, or work with her, kind of, through Roy? Oh yes. When I was pregnant with Pascal—so this is the summer of 1977—she decided she wanted Roy to have a drawing show, and she wanted him to come and make the drawings there. So she arranged for us to live at the Cité des Arts, which is an international artists residence in Paris, in the summer. So they didn’t give him a studio— they gave him an apartment, really, that was like a musicians studio, because that was what was available. And it was up several flights. Darthea was there when we first got there, and we got to go to her apartment, which was on the Champs de Mars, behind the Eiffel Tower—fabulous apartment, full of art—and what I remember really about this is that Roy was bowled over that you could take your dog into a department store.

DN: [Laughter].

GM: And you could go into a restaurant, and a dog would just be there. [Laughter] He just loved that. And Darthea was a dog owner, too. I can’t remember what breed, maybe a dachshund, but don’t quote me on that, I can’t remember. But she was getting ready to go to Greece, I think to Hydra, or someplace where she spent the summer, and she always flew with her dogs on the plane, which he thought was also fabulous.

[Laughter].

ACF: [Laughter]

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GM:

But anyway, she was quite wonderful, and a big support of Roy’s work.

ACF: Did you ever meet her brother? I heard her brother was a total character, too.

GM: Yes, I don’t remember if I did. Jim Speyer. I don’t remember. But he was at the Art Institute [of Chicago], right? He was the curator.

DN: Yeah, in Chicago.

GM: Yeah. But Darthea was really an unusual person.

And the last time that Roy and I saw her was actually—we were in Washington, D.C., and she was at some relative’s home, and she was much, much older. She loved Roy’s work. And it was a wonderful opportunity for him to show in Europe.

ACF: I’ve heard great anecdotes about Darthea Speyer, and I’ve heard this rumor—I don’t know if you can confirm it, Dan, or Gloria—that she was, actually, her gallery in Paris was actually a drop for the FBI or the CIA. Have you heard this?

GM: [Laughter] No. That’s cool.

ACF: That she had this secret relationship in concert with the US Government in Paris. And I don’t know if that’s because, you know, her gallery infamously had that black front, those kind of blacked-out windows—and if the genesis of that rumor came from that, or if that was true, but I

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DN:

ACF:

DN:

ACF:

GM:

love that.

I love that story, yeah.

Have you heard that story?

Only from you. [Laughter] I’m starting a rumor! Oh my gosh. [Laughter] No, that’s wonderful. I mean, she was really something. I wouldn’t put it past her, that’s for sure. What I do remember is that when we got to Paris, we went to the gallery first. And she was in the process of, sort of, closing the gallery down for the summer. And the restaurant where she had a tab or something that was near by, had sent staff over to pay her bill. And I had taken four years of French in high school, and I’m listening to her speak to this, you know, restaurant person, in the worst French I’ve ever heard.

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: I mean, it was really bad. And then, a minister of something-or-other, some government official, walked in the gallery, and her French completely changed. [Laughter] And, you know, probably, Roy didn’t notice it, because he didn’t know how to speak French. But, boy, I did. So she was an unusual person. Let’s put it that way.

ACF: All you had to say was government official...

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DN: Yeah.

ACF: ...and my theory strengthens.

GM: [Laughter]

DN: So Gloria, when did you all move to Port Costa?

GM: Well, when Roy was living in Richmond, and he was teaching at California College of Arts and Crafts, he got a job teaching at Davis. So he started looking for a place to live. And I know he lived over in Benicia, and he found this little place. I think he paid eleven thousand dollars for our place.

DN: Wow.

GM: And it was on the CalVet loan, because he’d been in the service, and it was very low interest.

So that’s where he lived when I came from New York. And Clayton Bailey, some years later, the artist, Clayton Bailey...

DN: Moved next door.

GM: Mhmm. He was right next door. So the two houses were on an acre, surrounded with a big ranch that they ran cattle on. Kind of a little bit outside of Port Costa. And Clayton still lives in the house. His wife is passed away, but...

DN: Yeah.

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GM: Yeah.

DN: You know I took Peter—Peter Saul—Peter Saul and I went to see Clayton.

GM: Oh good.

DN: So I’ve seen that house, and we went to see Clayton, and, yeah. I mean Port Costa’s just gorgeous. It remains beautiful.

GM: It was a pretty special place to live.

DN: And you’re the ones who suggested Peter move there, I think, but maybe it was Clayton, I can’t remember.

ACF: No, Gloria got—

GM: No, I think it was Roy. When Peter moved downtown, then he and Clayton made all this sculpture together.

DN: Right.

GM: He was, you know, he lived in a little apartment.

Oh, one funny story I could tell you about that period. [Laughter] Roy—Peter came and Roy was working on a big painting, it had a big dog in it.

And Peter’s telling me all these different things— and I hope Peter will back me up on this, and this is what the story was, and I remember. And Roy was very proud that the whole time that Peter was talking to him he never used a paintbrush.

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He was like wrapping wire around rollers, and every possible other thing. I think it was kind of a performance and Roy had that kind of aspect to his art, it’s got a little bit of performance [laughter].

DN: Mhmm.

GM: And, you know, he like the idea the was having some kind of effect on Peter [laughter].

DN: [Laughter] And so did you often watch him work.

Because the studio was right there. I mean, did you see...

GM: Well, yeah, it was. Not really. I mean, I had little kids, and I was going school, and getting a degree in photograph at [the California School of] Arts and Crafts. So I wouldn’t say that. But I was around—I certainly walked through, and knew it, and my son Pascal, he really spent a lot of time in the studio with his dad. And I do remember, one time, when I had left the kids, they were really little, maybe even before Pascal was born and Oriana, was probably, yeah, two and a half or something. And my grandmother called, and Roy was finishing a show. He was finishing the last painting, and he goes to the phone to talk to my grandmother, and Oriana got a brush of pink paint, and she painted the bottom of his painting [laughter].

ACF: Oh!

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DN: Ohh.

ACF: That’s funny. I’ve heard a great story about Robert Ryman, too, whose son took whiteout to one of his paintings thinking his dad wouldn’t notice, and he, of course, did.

GM + DN: [Laughter]

ACF: Different kind of mark-making [laughter], color palette. That’s so funny, though. So when Roy started teaching at Davis, did you guys stay in Port Costa? Or did you move up there?

GM: No—there was a period in the eighties, where Roy thought—he was so busy, he was having a lot of shows, and teaching, and he thought “well maybe it would be easier if we moved up there.”

And so we looked in Davis, and we looked even in Winters, and different places, Woodland, and he decided that, you know, if we don’t buy a house, I can quit teaching. And so that’s what he did. You know we lived in this really cheap place to live, which we owned, and so for a few years, he didn’t teach. And then later, the university brought him back as a full professor, and had him work for half-time. And so he had really two different period of teaching at Davis. He started in the, maybe, ‘65, I think...

DN: Yeah.

GM: ...which was before we were married. So during the time when I first knew him he was teaching

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DN:

GM:

there. And Davis was a great place to work. The whole time we were married, he never taught three consecutive quarters. You know, as soon as he had built up enough time to take a quarter off, he would, because he was so busy in his studio.

And during those years when he didn’t teach at all, you know, that’s what he was doing: he was working.

Did you get the sense that the “made shows”— that he painted, sort of, complete shows? Or did the paintings accumulate and then it was time to kick the ball?

No, no. He never had enough work. And a show would go out and the studio would be empty.

This is something I did really notice—I mean it was consistent the whole time we were married—Roy would start work, you know, after his studio was emptied out, by drawing. And there wouldn’t be, literally, like, a cartoon for a painting, or anything like that. But he—that was his idea generator, I think. I mean he would make a series of drawings, and then pretty soon he’s working on paintings.

And he always was interested in the sculptural part of his work. And when he was showing with Allan Frumkin, you know, years ago, Allan was always asking him to do another show of constructions. He did do some later, but most of the time while we were married, it was a lot of paintings. And then very elaborate sculptural frames, and he started putting three dimensional things right on the canvas. And one of the things that I did notice is that he loved materials, and

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when he died, I would say there was like the equivalent of ten art stores in his studio.

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: And his wood shop: he was always buying tools. It was always to make his work better, or to be able to be do something he couldn’t do because he didn’t have the right tool, or the right materials.

And that generated ideas, and I think it was a really important part of his work. And later, as a matter of fact, he taught a materials class at Davis. And Jerry Heffner had conservation lab there when we were first married. And then Jerry left, and [Roy] taught materials, and he’d just cook up stuff [laughter]. Oh my gosh. But he was very knowledgable about the craft of art—very.

And not to mention art history, and artists, and contemporary art. But he was very interested in materials. And he was always trying to make his work better, you know, and more unusual, or more unique.

ACF: So that makes me wonder, too, in your recollection of Roy and his recollections of him talking about his work: how aware was he, whether it was subconscious or very actively conscious, of his peers in New York, and his peers in other pockets of the US making art? Because one of the things that’s so revered about this group of California group, like the Chicago group, is that they were insulated from being lemmings as artists—they were really individual voices because of their geographical distance from the quote unquote

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GM:

art world, right?

Well, I mean, Roy—I remember him telling a story where he sent a show of constructions to Allan Stone’s gallery in New York. So this was a long time ago. And he bought army surplus dog kennels [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter].

DN: No kidding.

GM: But when Allan got them, he didn’t like them.

And he sent them back, I guess. So, you know, Roy—he was ambitious. He believed in his work, you know. He wasn’t afraid to do his own thing. I think he was really quite aware. The one magazine that he did not take—you know he had Art in America and ArtNews, and stuff—but he didn’t like Artforum too much.

ACF + DN: [Laughter]

DN: Yeah.

GM: He used to be real proud if he could talk about some obscure artist that Wayne Thiebaud didn’t know about.

DN: Right.

GM: I mean he, he had thousands of books. I mean you cannot believe the number of books and what he read about. Tons—and after he died, I

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gave the art books to his friends, and a lot of them were still teaching, some of his students, who had teaching jobs. And then, you know, the other collection of books, about airplanes, and cars, and history, and Indians, and you name it, and history, and so on: philosophy, and science, and you know, he always took Scientific American; he always took National Geographic.

I gave those books to our county library. And I did make—I think I sent it to the Archives of American Art—I made a list of all the books, the titles, just because it was so far ranging. A very important part of his life was books, and reading.

You know, he taught himself how to play tennis by reading a book.

ACF + DN: [Laughter]

DN: Did he play with Wayne?

GM: I imagine they did.

DN: Wayne played tennis.

GM: Yeah, Wayne was really seriously into it.

DN: Still is.

GM: I’m sure they did.

ACF: He still plays tennis?!

DN: Well, not right now. But as of last September, yeah.

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ACF: For his hundredth birthday, he played a match?

DN: [Laughter] It’s coming up!

ACF: That’s amazing.

DN: Yeah.

GM: But anyway, Roy, he did play tennis with students.

I think he and Wayne lived too far apart to really play.

DN: Yeah, of course, right.

ACF: Well, you know, Gloria, back to the books: it’s so funny, because, so many people have written about Roy’s interest in biology, and cellular structures, and also Aboriginal painting as influences in his practice. Are there any other things that you remember him talking about, or reading about extensively, that haven’t been touched on, that you feel were big influences in the way he thought about art-making?

GM: Well, you know, he did a lot of drawings of airplanes. He had all kinds of books about airplanes. My mother—my father had died, and my mother remarried, and she married a guy who became a pilot. In fact, my mother became a pilot. And so the first time my step-father came to Port Costa to meet Roy, he was talking about some plane, and what bowled Jack [Gloria’s Step-Father] over, was that Roy knew all about

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that plane. I wish I could remember that plane, but he knew all about it. And he thought, “why would an artist know all about these engines, and airplanes,” you know? At the end of his life, after 9/11—I quit teaching, I was teaching elementary school—Roy and I went on some trips. We went with the Oakland Museum’s Nature Guild, and we went to Chile, and then we went to Peru, and he and I also went to Australia. We went to Australia to see tennis—but of course we saw a lot of Aboriginal painting. And when we were in Peru, we went to the Peruvian Amazon, and in Chile, we went to national parks, and traveled all around with this group—who were nature people, not art people. And it was, I think— it’s what he’d read about his whole life, and he actually got a chance to do that, and to see those things. It was pretty exciting.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: He taught [laughter]—he taught, when were up in the Amazon, when we were on this boat, and we brought all these art materials with us, and they said that the Museum would pay his way if he would teach an art class on the boat. And so there are all these doctors, and lawyers, you know, professional people, retired couples, and stuff, and they’re on these—looking at birds, and butterflies, and stuff. But anyway, most of them hadn’t done any art since they had been in grade school. And he taught them how to make jungle paintings [laughter] –

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ACF: [Laughter].

GM: On the boat! Oh gosh, it was just one of the most fun, wonderful things. And then when we left, the Peruvian, Amazon people that were on the boat—he gave all the art materials, and books he brought, and brushes, and paper and everything to them, because over on that side of the Andes, believe me, there’s no stores. There’s no roads, there’s no nothing.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: And so, I also kind of wonder what happened to all the art stuff.

ACF: That’s such a wonderful thought.

GM: Yeah, yeah.

ACF: Well it’s interesting, because so much of what you talk about is, you know, inadvertently is environment, and nature, and you mentioned the acreage on the land where they could run cattle, and him having grown up as a farm boy.

So, so much of his life kind of was imbued with an appreciation of nature, and that makes me think of his artwork. Because he’s always talking about making art in terms of where he is, and what he sees, and what he knows. But, you know, it makes me want to talk about something that we haven’t touched on, which is so central in his work, which is the role of his dogs...

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GM: Oh [laughter].

ACF: ...and their relationship to his practice, and what the significance and meaning is in his practice, because I think they are so much more than just the caricature of the dog itself, right?

DN: I also wanna add to that question...

ACF: [Laughter]

DN: ...that Anna posed, and that I know that you and Roy were very involved in conservation efforts in Port Costa...

GM: Well, yes.

DN: ...and sort of preserving that, the hillsides. So, yeah—start with Anna, and then roll us into—

ACF: Start with conservation, and then we can roll into dogs.

GM: Okay, well—

DN: Ohh, okay.

GM: Okay, well, René di Rosa, you know, he was just a fantastic person, he was just such an ebullient collector and believer in California, California wine, California art. Anyway, he was very much involved in conservation up in Napa County.

And so, there was a time—I guess this was in the seventies—where the property around Clayton’s

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house and our house had been sold, and it was slated for development. They were gonna build five hundred houses, you know, overlooking the Carquinez Straits, and kind of, just overwhelm this quaint little town of Port Costa, which only had 300 people in it. And so René connected us to environmental attorneys in San Francisco, and that changed everything. In fact, Roy and I, and our neighbors, were founding members of a land trust—a non-profit, which is still going on, all these years later. I think it was established in 1979, and it preserved all that property around Port Costa. And now, the East Bay Regional Park System owns it and runs it. And there’re hiking trails, and so on. So, yes, Roy was interested in that. But on the other hand, every other year, we would drive to New Mexico, because he made prints, lithographs, at Tamarind, which is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And he showed in galleries in Santa Fe. So that was a big part of our life, driving through Nevada, and Utah, and into New Mexico and Arizona, and visiting the Indian historical sites, and all the galleries, and that whole beautiful environment.

It was a bit part of our lives, and the kids’ lives when we were married. But back to the dogs.

ACF: [Laughter]

DN: Yeah. Let’s get back to the dogs.

ACF: Back to the dogs.

GM: Dogs. The dogs [laughter] are a really big part of

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our life. Actually, Roy’s last dog, Cato, just passed away this year. He was sixteen years old. And I wasn’t going to get another dog, but we adopted a rescue dog, my husband and I, and it’s kind of nice to have a dog around. But Roy couldn’t be without a dog. It just couldn’t happen. I guess, this is maybe kind of controversial, but I think Roy really believed in the intelligence of living things, you know? I don’t think—he’d never believe that you could tell a dog what to do. He admired their wildness. That worked out, sometimes okay, sometimes not so okay. But eventually we got the kind of dog that could deal with it’s owner, which were these cattle dogs. They were herding dogs. And they could kind of figure out what he wanted them to do, without him having to tell them what to do [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: He walked his dogs before he went into the studio. And I think that the dogs kept him alive, you know, health-wise, longer than he might have otherwise. It was just a really big important part.

So we had many, many, many dogs [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: In fact at one point we had four. That was a lot [laughter].

ACF: Well Dan you’ve kind of thought about the dog as, you know, as a character, and it’s kind of greater meaning in the context of his practice,

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and written about it a bit. I remember there are a few quotes from Roberta Smith’s review where she was talking about, kind of, the dog as a jumping off point, you know, in the same way that a lot of these figures are—just, in the sense of talking about “Nut Art,” which we haven’t gotten into yet. Do you want to expand on it? As our resident academic?

DN: [Laughter]

ACF: Professor?

DN: Oh, yes, yes. I mean, my sense of the dogs is that they’re his way to situate the viewer in the space.

And also, sort of a form, like a familiar form that he could play with, and tell you—it was a way to situate the viewer in space and also to make himself a part of the painting, in some ways...

ACF: Mhmm.

DN: ...because he never paints himself. So there’s still sort of this primary way in, and then there’s this cast of characters in the way that he populated the paintings. But the dog—and of course, it goes all the way back to his childhood. This idea that he had—the legend was that he had at least eighty dogs over the course of his life.

ACF: [Laughter] I was wondering what the number count would be. That’s very helpful.

DN: It was at least eighty, according to some.

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GM: Well, I don’t know about that [laughter].

DN: [Laughter] Yeah, it seems a little far-fetched.

ACF: Roy had eighty dogs and Darthea Speyer was a gun—pistol-toting spy for the US [laughter].

DN: Yeah! At this point.

ACF: Yeah, exactly.

DN: Yeah, so I imagine—and it was such a big part of his growing up, and I think that’s what’s interesting about Roy, and about, you know, Arneson, and these guys, is that they really kept that close to them, the things that really meant a lot to them as kids, or the things they carried all the way through. That it wasn’t something they felt like they had to outgrow, but something that they could explore, and push forward.

ACF: One of the things I like reading about, too, or like thinking about, is this idea, you know, in the early De Forest paintings, for example, that we have in the show on view, they’re these really abstracted but beautiful paintings with this heavy impasto that’s been built up, and the most beautiful thing, for me, in the show itself, is that you really—I mean Roy, like a lot of artists, but in such a comprehensive way—if you see a lot of his work from the late fifties and the early sixties, all the way through, you know, the early-to-mid aughts, you see the arc of his practice, but you

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also see the continuity in his practice. But what I love about the dogs in those seventies paintings is how you start to see these anthropomorphized figures, and there are paintings within paintings, obsessively, which is so great. Whereas later on, the dog becomes almost just a dog, and he’s thinking more about space, and the form. But I like the continuity, in the sense that there are these figures that he returns to, that ground the practice. But Gloria: he did make literal paintings of a lot of his dogs, though, too. I’ve seen cameos from some of your famous and infamous pets.

DN: [Laughter]

ACF: I remember Albert—we talked about Albert when I was visiting you, and I found a painting of Albert online. The infamous Albert. He’s the one who chased joggers?

GM: Yes, he was a—oh my gosh. He was kind of a bad dog [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: But he was the wrong breed. The kids and I got Albert for him. He was a black German Shepherd. And German Shepherds need a real strong owner, you know, very elite, to be their leader. And Roy was not like that. So he was kind of hard to control. [Sigh] He got out one time and bit a woman who was jogging by our house.

And I ran out there to, you know—”Oh, are you okay,” and all that. And Albert was kind of over in

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the bushes and then he went and bit her again.

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: You know, so, we—our vet took Albert. He needed a guard dog on his ranch, and he took him. So that was kind of a learning experience.

Then we kind of settled back into cattle dogs...

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: ...that could work with Roy. You know, cattle dogs are part dingo. They have a kind of a wild streak in them. They were bred to herd cattle in Australia, and Roy liked that. He liked the up-sticking ears, he liked that wildness.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: But herd dogs, they are—you know, they herded Roy [laughter].

ACF: So the master—the owner to dog relationship was sometimes inverted, and Roy liked it that way.

GM: Oh yeah, I would say.

ACF: That’s great.

GM: The dogs walked Roy?

ACF: [Laughter]

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GM:

Oh yeah, his highest service was his service to dogs [laughter].

ACF: That’s so wonderful.

GM: Yeah, well. But—you have to think about this in terms of art history, too. I mean, you remember when, during the sixties, when all this stuff—I mean, kind of before Pop, but—Abstract Expressionism, the idea of telling telling a story, or having a figurative elements in it was just not okay. And Roy, you know, his work was pretty abstract for quite a long time, and then the figures—the little figurative hand; a little dog head, or something—kind of came into his work.

He even made white paintings for a while.

DN: Yeah in the early sixties. Those are beautiful, yeah.

GM: Right. But, you know, they started having these little figurations in them. And I think by the time, the late sixties and early seventies, then it was sort of, you know, he had the confidence in his own vision to do what he wanted to do. He wasn’t held back by what you were supposed to do [laugher].

DN: Yeah, it took a—yeah, that’s interesting—I mean, he grew through it. I mean he was almost at ground zero for West Coast Ab-Ex at the California School of Fine Arts in 1950. I mean that was where it was happening. But he evolved in in such an interesting way. Like a lot of those

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artists did. I mean Deborah Remington started out as an Abstract Expressionist.

GM: Yeah, and Deborah was one of his friends.

DN: Yeah.

GM: Yeah, he—the idea that art couldn’t be—that you had to be serious was not, didn’t fit with him, you know.

DN: Yeah.

GM: You know after he died, I got a letter from a student who had been at Skowhegan—this was in 1985, when we were there for the summer, the kids and I and Roy—I guess, you know, this kid wrote this letter—I think he was somebody from Texas, I don’t really remember him, except I remember this in the letter—he said that Roy told him that the work that this kid did for fun was more serious...

ACF: [Laughter]

GM: ...than the work that he thought that he should be doing, you know.

DN: Right, right.

GM: And that letter is in the archives.

ACF: Mhmm.

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GM:

It was just so true. Because Roy was not funny, you know. A lot of him expected him to be funny. He wasn’t funny, he was extremely serious [laughter]. But unusual. He kind of liked—but he kind of liked doing what you weren’t supposed to do, you know. That was one of the motivating forces, I think. But it was an exciting life, with him [laughter]. I have to say.

ACF: You kind of wonder about those early influences, you know, from the first generation of Bay Area figuration that’s teaching him, and Clyfford Still, and, you know—you know you think so much about how his paintings use these building blocks, you know, and are a reflection of his deep knowledge of art history, but also, like you said, his complete rejection of what quote unquote the rules are, which is so nice.

DN: Yeah, because he know—partly, I think it was because he knew the rules so well.

ACF: Right.

DN: I mean, he really knew how—if you’re gonna reject it—I mean he certainly knew what he was doing, and could teach it.

ACF: Mhmm.

DN: So it’s all the more interesting to me, to kind of invert it, and kind of go his own way.

ACF: Mhmm.

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DN:

And I wondered, I mean, Gloria, when you knew—you came into his life, I guess, a little after the Funk show. I mean he had been included in some kind of early Pop Art show, but that had sort of passed. And then the “Nut Art,” thing, I think—

GM: That was slightly before.

DN: Yeah.

GM: Yeah.

DN: And that seems also just sort of something that came and went, it was pretty informal. I wonder, I mean, did he think of himself as part of something larger? Or was he totally unconcerned with that?

GM: Well, I think he was—I think he kind of knew he had a lot of freedom. You know? It was kind of maybe a good thing to be on the West Coast.

And I think being at Davis in those early years was remarkable. It gave him the time and the finances to be able to really do his work and push it. So I think he was very lucky. I mean he took advantage of it. You know, maybe if he’d stayed in Yakima, things would’ve been different.

You know, that’s what I mean when I say that him getting fired from that job was best thing that ever happened to him [laughter].

DN: [Laughter] Yeah I think it would have been different if he’d been in Yakima [laughter].

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GM:

DN:

Yeah. Yeah.

Safe to say. But it’s interesting that there’s this whole—that you were in Oregon—and there’s also kind of a hub for these guys in Seattle, too.

There was some Northwest connection there, which makes sense, but—

ACF: Yeah, who else was up there? Hudson was from up there? Was it Hudson?

DN: No—Rob Hudson, no that’s down in the Bay Area.

ACF: But who was the other artist that was from up in Oregon, or Washington State?

DN: Oh! Up in Washington, well up in Washington, Hudson and [William T.] Wiley.

ACF: Right, Hudson and Wiley.

GM: Oh, oh, oh, oh.

DN: And Allen—was up there.

GM: And Bill Allen, yeah, right. They were from Richland, and the Tri-Cities, in South-Eastern Washington.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: Walla Walla. Kind of in that area. But Roy didn’t

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DN:

GM:

DN:

GM:

know them then—that was— No, no.

Yeah, that was different. I would say the artist that he knew was Gaylen Hansen. And you know, he’s kind of an interesting artist, too. He taught at Pullman, and Roy took his job at Yakima Junior College. I have a little construction that came from Gaylen’s ex-wife, through a gallery in Seattle that I bought after Roy died because Roy had given away all those early constructions. He sold them, and the ones he didn’t sell, I think he gave away.

Oh, is that right? I always wondered about that.

Yeah, as a family, we didn’t have one. That was the thing, Roy would have these shows, and they would all sell [laughter]. You know, he sold a lot of work, and then he’d have an empty studio to start over again.

DN: Yeah.

GM: I mean, that was pretty fortunate. You know one thing that we haven’t talked about and nobody’s talked about, really—a little bit, Roberta—is the role of color in his work. And you know he—I think it’s a really important part. I think it really conveyed a lot of what he was trying to say.

And his family were all like that. His sisters, his mother—in fact, in January, the kids and I and my husband, Brian, we all went to his last remaining

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sister, Lynne, who passed away, to her memorial in Sacramento. And it was at city hall, because she’d been on the city council, and it was a big auditorium full of people, and everyone was dressed in black except for the De Forest row. All the— [laughter]

DN: [Laughter]

GM: All the family, including us, all had colors, bright colors on. And so theres’ just—you know, it stood out.

DN: Yeah.

GM: To me. I think that he was a genius with color.

Well, anyway, I mean—you’re the art historian, but, I think that people don’t talk about it enough.

DN: Well, yeah. I mean that’s the thing about—that’s why in the essay I was sort of emphasizing— this idea—people get distracted by the subject matter—

GM: Mhmm. Mhmm.

DN: —and think that, yeah. He was just this masterful colorist, both in drawing and painting.

GM: You know his favorite artist was Mondrian.

DN: Yeah.

GM: You know he’d talk about Paolo Uccello and

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Mondrian. And all of those early constructions— they all balance on one nail. So that was how he took what he learned from Mondrian. It all balanced on one nail. So he used the things—I think—now, reflecting on it, but he learned about history in his own way. But when you look at PostImpressionist artists, which he’d do a lot of, they were very experimental with color and how they defined art.

DN: Yes.

GM: You know, the paint on the canvas. And I think he is very knowledgeable, and very serious about his work.

ACF: But Dan that comes back to your point, of like, in a way the risk taking was a reflection of his confidence in art history.

DN: Yeah.

ACF: Which is so perfectly put, you know, because, as much as his paintings can come off as maybe chaotic or humorous, at the end of the day they were all so serious and all so kind of academic, in a way.

DN + GM: [Laughter]

DN: Yeah, I mean in a funny way, yeah, I mean there are aspects—and I think one reason for a certain amount of critical pushback was that, the seriousness of them wasn’t evident because of—

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because of how much color there was, especially in the seventies, when you weren’t supposed to use color, really. And how embedded in the American-European tradition they are. Like he really imported these archetypal American ideal—it’s kind of astonishing in a way. And also not afraid to play with technology.

ACF: Mhmm.

DN: Which is something—it’s funny. Earlier, Gloria, you mentioned those road trips, and that makes so much sense. Because you can kind of imagine him picking up ideas along the way. And I’ve always wondered if was inquisitive. Like if he asked a lot questions of people, and if that stuff made it into the paintings. Wondering about people and what they did, and what they thought.

GM: Well, you know, he was fun to talk to and with. I like to cook—we had lots of parties, and people came to our house, and it was always fun. When I first met him, I have to say, I couldn’t understand what he was talking about.

DN: [Laughter]

GM: You know, it took me a while [laughter]. He didn’t really talk like people talk. He was a really unusual person. So yes, he was inquisitive in the sense that he was always learning things, and always reading about stuff, and you know he—but it was like our life was just, it just totally revolved

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around his art. I mean, where we went, and we had a place on the Oregon coast for quite a few years, when the kids were real little, and so he made a lot of drawings, and he built a big studio up there. Allan Frumkin came out and visited one summer.

DN: Huh.

GM: So, you know, that environment—we lived on Port Orford, which is right on the coast, the Oregon coast, and, you know, he was making paintings with islands, and dogs on them, and airplanes flying over.

DN: Wow.

GM: Yeah, so—that doesn’t exactly answer your question, but, yeah. I think he—it was like, whatever he could use.

DN: Right.

GM: Very visual.

GM: And [laughter]. It makes me laugh to think about it, actually. [Laughter]

DN: Yeah.

GM: Well, I mean, I guess this is one thing I did want to say. He was a tremendously generous person.

And I think he—he was even generous in his art.

Like his art gave you more than you were asking

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for. And I think that was a big part of him. That sense of generosity.

DN: Mhmm.

GM: And kind of—he was not a Minimalist [laughter].

He wanted to give you more.

DN: Right. Right. They’re not withholding [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter]

DN: No, no.

ACF: Well, you guys. I think we’ve had such an nice talk about the work, and I feel like we could go on for another few hours, it’s so easy to talk about the work, because everybody’s so excited about it. But I wonder, Gloria, if you could leave us of a famous Roy quote, or memory, or anecdote, that makes you laugh, that you’d like to share.

GM: Well, I do have one, it’s kind of funny, and it kind of involved dogs. There was a really great gallery in Folsom, California, called the Candy Store.

And I know, Dan, you know about it— DN: Yeah.

GM: —and probably you do, too, Anna.

ACF: Mhmm.

GM: This wonderful woman, Adeliza McHugh, owned it. And Roy was always trying to help younger

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artists and new artists that he met, and he’d say “Okay, let’s have a show. We’ll have a show together.” And so he worked up this show with Adeliza with an artist named Joy Broom, who, as it happened, lived not to far away from us, in Crockett. And so Joy brought all this work over [laughter] to Roy’s studio. And at the time we had two cattle dogs, and we two basenjis. But anyway one of the cattle dogs’ names was Ratu.

And Ratu went over to Joy’s framed watercolors, which were in a stack, and he lifted his leg, and just peed on them.

ACF + DN: [Laughter]

GM: And Roy, Roy kind of went, “well, Joy, Ratu’s never wrong.”

ACF + DN: [Laughter]

GM: [Laughter] I mean—

ACF: That’s so good.

GM: And, you know, of course, they got cleaned up, and everything was fine. But, you know, that was his—

ACF: That’s so great.

GM: It was pretty funny. Yeah, it was pretty funny.

DN: Wow.

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GM:

And Joy thought it was funny. We all did. I mean it’s really funny.

DN: It’s good she thought it was funny.

ACF + GM: [Laughter]

GM: [Laughter] “Ratu’s never wrong.” Ratu, by the way, is “cheese” in Fijian [laughter].

ACF: [Laughter] He was the boss of the house.

DN: Mhmm.

ACF:

The critic.

GM:

Well.

ACF: Thank you guys both. I really appreciate it. This was so fun. I could keep going on and on,.

GM:

Yeah, this was fun.

ACF: But thank you, Dan. Thank you, Gloria.

DN:

Yeah, thanks, Gloria.

GM:

Yeah, it was fun for me, too. I mean Roy died almost fourteen years ago—next month. And it’s fun for me to think about all this.

ADF: Well he’s quite the figure, and I’m really hopeful that so many more people in New York, and kind of out there in the world, will get to know the

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work as we continue to show it, and talk about it, and celebrate it.

GM:

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Wonderful, yeah. Just wonderful.

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