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.

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. 

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.