Wandering around Baltimore, I couldn't help notice that often you see things in the city that don't seem exactly real.  Part of it has to do with the sky, I think. I've been a lot places, and I've never crazy skies occur with this kind of frequency anywhere else. But sometimes it has nothing to do with the sky. It just has to do with Baltimore. Sometimes, I had a DSLR camera with me, but I don't always carry it. So I  bought a small camera that I could carry around in my pocket to try to capture the phenomenon. Partially, I think, I wanted to prove to myself that I hadn't just imagined everything. The camera has high resolution, but (since it fits in your pocket) it doesn't have a great lense, sometimes that adds to the effect, as if it's filling in with pixels what it can't see clearly in the first place -- the way your memory would.

The East Village 1980s Memory Series is a look into my past. Using gouache and ink on watercolor paper, with decoupage, calligraphic text, and handmade, gilded, distressed frames.

Moving about a year ago stirred a lot of emotions, especially when I came across photos, letters, etc. from a long time ago. In middle age, there is a poignancy in coming across the artifacts of youth. A simultaneous feeling of intimacy and alienation, possession and loss. Intimacy and possession – because I possess the richness of memory. Alienation and loss – because the person I one once was is forever lost; and the places and people I once knew, are forever changed (if they still exist). This series is an attempt to visualize that state of mind.

I have lived most of my life in one city or another. I'm obsessed with streetscapes, and feel edgy and slightly lost if I'm not around concrete for extended periods. But in the end, it's the people who are in those streets that make a city what it is. Although I didn't move to Baltimore until 2012, I visited my Grandparents here going back as far as the 1960s. And I feel that history informs the pictures. Although, I'm not sure exactly how it informs them. But the people of Baltimore City have always seemed effortlessly colorful to me ever since I came here as a small boy, and I think you can see that in the photos.

Funded in its initial phase an Original Work Grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, The Forgotten History of Staten Island, was/is an interdisciplinary, conceptual, public arts project. Its subject is the unreliability and mutability of history.

In the piece, the history of Staten Island, a location which is (oxymoronically) famous for its obscurity, became a metaphor for the ambiguous nature of history itself. The project took the form of a celebration of real and imagined historical events told through the eyes of the mythical, Dr. D. I. Kniebocker (Staten Island’s self-described “greatest" and most controversial historian), in a series of on-site installations, a pamphlet, a website, and a live performance at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center (A Smithsonian affiliate institution) on Staten Island September 17th, 2011. Onsite installations were maintained on the streets of Staten Island, from that point, until the end of the year, 2011. There was an additional chapter (Alice Austen) that was introduced at The Wonderland Show at the Staten Island Museum – Dec 10, 2011. The Forgotten History continues to live on as a blog and a free downloadable PDF. Future physical manifestations of the project can never be ruled out.

What I was trying to do with the Forgotten History, was to find an entertaining way of making a serious point: That history is malleable, unreliable and should be read as such. “Fact” and, (sometimes) bizarre, fiction are interwoven in the the Forgotten History in order to provoke the viewer to question what is "real" and what isn't.

It seemed to work. I regularly visited the installations and engaged people I found reading the text, and (after finding out I was the creator) they were eager to know what parts I had made up.  I was more than happy to go, point by point, and tell them. But I also pointed out that -- the information I had garnered from historical sources might also have been simply invented by someone, and that much of it was contradictory and/or counterfactual.  Although, I thought this was kind of a complicated idea, it seemed to be easily understood and appreciated by the woman/man in the street -- literally, as my installations were on the streets of Staten Island. 

I feel that, now, in the current era of  'fake news,' the Forgotten History of Staten Island has even more resonance.  For more details, visit its website. 

As an unpublished manuscript, Peter Pigeon of Snug Harbor won the 2006 COAHSI (now known as Staten Island Arts) Award for Literary Excellence sponsored by JP Morgan Chase and Poets & Writers. It was published in 2009 by Rocky Hollow Press. At that point, the book was illustrated by me. It is still available on Amazon.

In short, the Modern Venus Series combined pin-up art with the modernist compositional structures that led to abstract painting at the beginning of the 20th Century. As I put it at the time "my goal was to combine a modernist abstract compositional sense with the fervent representationalism of classic pin-up art." For a more complete understanding of what I was up to, read the PDF, "Modern Venus, a Context," which is in the details section, to the right. It places the Modern Venus series in the context of 25 thousands years of art, and references everything from the Venus of Willendorf to Michelangelo and Tom of Finland.

Keep Baltimore Inexplicable was a conceptual public art piece based on the concept that Baltimore is inexplicable and should remain so. It was a celebration of the complexity and quirkiness of Baltimore.

It was inspired by hearing several notable figures appropriating the famous Austin slogan and suggesting that we "Keep Baltimore Weird." I thought this was a terrible idea and that the slogan did not sum up the city at all. I have lived here since 2012, but Baltimore and I go back much further. My Grandparents moved here during WW2 and never left. So, I first came to Baltimore over 50 years ago when I visited them. What slogan would sum up Baltimore, I wondered? Then it struck me that Baltimore could not be explained in a simple slogan, and that was a good thing. So instead I created a slogan, and a conceptual art project, that wouldn't attempt to explain things, but would emphasize the fact that Baltimore can't be easily explained.

These days, much of the high end of the Art Market is leveraged with sophisticated marketing campaigns to maximize profit. I wondered, if at the other end of the market, where I dwell, I could create a cheerfully unsophisticated faux marketing campaign that was a piece of art in itself. A campaign that was selling nothing other than a consciousness about the city which I felt other people share, but had not yet found the words for.

I thought that the best way to put forth this proposition was with a multi-media campaign that would highlight the complexity of this fascinating city centering around the crazy quilt of personalities that have made it what it is today. I wanted to get some top Baltimore celebrities, so I decided to garner endorsements from historical figures and do a series of posts with figures whose lives overlapped, but who would seem incongruous next to each other  --  Frederick Douglas & Francis Scott Key, Billie Holiday and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway & Gertrude Stein, etc. I also started compiling an Archive of Inexplicabila (used in blog and social media posts). To house this content, I created the website http://keepbaltimoreinexplicable.wordpress.com/  I also began on a music video, bumper stickers, and posters. And I had plans for a petition drive to get a ballot question that would force the City to officially declare Baltimore inexplicable. However, after the killing of Freddy Gray, and the city's shift in mood, I felt that the project's whimsical approach, to examining what Baltimore was all about, was no longer appropriate. Baltimore needed to take a look at itself, but it would have to be a hard look at that point and not a celebratory one. So I put the project into mothballs.

In the summer of 2016, from my performance piece the Onyx Fool were added to the permanent collection of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Although I have been in a few in a couple of exhibits at museums, I was never in a collection before, so it was kind of a thrill. The material included original art (a painting I did for posters),  photographs, slides used for rear projections, scripts and ephemera.

The Onyx Fool was a serial that I created, directed, and performed in, with a mind-bogglingly large and talented cast and crew (30-40 people) that in its totality was every bit as oddball as the project’s creator. It started at 8BC in the fall of 1984, where episodes 1 through 6 ran on a weekly basis. Each episode was performed twice – once on Sunday and once on Wednesday.

Just south of Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village, tucked in between shooting galleries and crumbling tenements,  8BC was the fulcrum of the avant-garde performance scene of that era. 

Later in 1984 there was a staged reading at the Mark Taper Annex in Los Angeles (with a cast of local LA actors) and there was a consolidated performance of episodes 7-9 at the Courtyard Playhouse. A 2 part condensed version was presented in 1985 at the Nameless Theater in 1985 under the Title Danger’s Back/Is Danger Finished.

In the summer of 2016, original art (a painting I did for posters),  photographs, slides used for rear projections, scripts and other emphemera from my performance piece the Onyx Fool were added to the permanent collection of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Although I have been in a few in a couple of exhibits at museums, I was never in a collection before, so it was kind of a thrill. 

Below are photos containing about a quarter of the wonderful cast.  They are by Lynne Kanter. The color photo (from 30 years later) is of Mary Savig, Smithsonian curator, holding up an original poster that is now in their collection.