1957 Born Towanda, Pennsylvania

1976-78 Attended Goddard College, Vermont. Studied with Jim Gahagan.

1980 BFA, San Francisco Art Institute. Studied with Hassel Smith, Tom Holland, Franklin Williams, Robert Hudson, and Angela Davis.

1993 Moved to the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer David Levi Strauss and daughter Maya Grace Strauss, a painter.

Exhibitions

CURRENT: 2024 Slag&RX Gallery, New York, New York. Two person show with Peter Acheson April 11th - May 18th. Curated by Phong Bui and Cal McKeever of The Brooklyn Rail with cooking performance by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu.

2023 Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, New York. WOLF in Erie County. Fifth collaborative installation in ongoing WOLF group.

2023. Oakville Gallery, Gairloch Gardens, Toronto, Canada. Five person collaboration with Wolf participants Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb, Gret Sterrett Smith, Pradeep Dalal, and David Levi Strauss.

2022 Art Cake, Brooklyn, New York. Wolf collective collaboration with core artists Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb, and Gret Sterrett Smith. The works of 15 other artists were incorporated into the three-room 5,000 square foot installation.

2021 Wolf Tones, published by Soberscove Press, with work focussing on the collaboration of Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb and Gret Sterrett Smith. Including essays by Stan Allen, Charles Curtis, Pradeep Dalal, Anna Friz, Julia Klein, Ann Lauterbach, Catherine Lord, Matana Roberts, and David Levi Strauss.

2020 Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Three-person collaboration with Wolf participants Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb and Gret Sterrett Smith.

2019 Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn. Three person collaboration with Wolf participants Nancy Shaver, Max Goldfarb, and Gret Sterrett Smith.

2013 Surviving Sandy show, Curated by Phong Bui and The Brooklyn Rail.

Artist Narrative

I was born outside a town of 5,000 souls in rural northern Pennsylvania called Towanda, with a plaque as one entered that said “Towanda, where our great dead are buried.” I thought this was the most interesting thing about Towanda, and my first idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up was an archaeologist. Surely the dead knew something the living in Towanda didn’t.

I was raised as an artist by a group of poets in San Francisco. The images formed in the mind by their words fed my studio life. I never imagined I would be a writer, so I had no claim to make there. It was a free relationship. I was a painter.

After being injured in a car wreck, I worked intensively one-on-one with the poet Diane di Prima on visualization, Helen Palmer on the training of the intuition, Ian Grand on somatic intelligence, Charles Ponce on the Kabbalah, Greg Schelkun with hands-on healing, and an ancient man who lived up a long flight of stairs in Chinatown and spoke no English. I never learned his name, but he taught me about the energy of various animals I could physically embody and harness. This all rooted my imagery solidly within a body in my paintings.

I cared for my mother with dementia 24/7 for over 8 years. Out of necessity, I started inventing a conceptual generator, my own energy source. This was my entrance into a different kind of wall work, my own energetics.

Later, a prolonged and incapacitating illness left me with no bearings. I made some with a stapler, scissors, and an old sweater. There was cutting involved. This clarified my process. Results had to come moment by moment.

The look of my work now is abstract, but it depends on a body. It’s an enactment in physical form. I make sculpture and wall work out of various materials including discards and offcuts. I am a builder. I bind, repair, and incorporate. I de-structure an existing sculptural or visual form, a kind of decollage, to make room for a new presence, unsticking form and shape from the confines of a fixed body.