How It Worked

  1. Participants chose an artwork they’d like to have from The Gallery.
  2. They sent the item number and the title of the piece to info.thealbatrossproject@gmail.com
  3. Then they received a Gift Agreement/Delivery Plan to complete and return. (See sample below.)
  4. Once I received their completed Gift Agreement/Delivery Plan, we sent the selected artwork to them.
They were asked to create and email a digital response to the piece after living with it for a while. They further agreed that their response could be used in whole or in part in Aloft…, an ongoing, ever-evolving video project that is publicly screened whenever and where ever opportunities arise. You can visit The Gallery & Responses to see the artworks that were offered and the responses received in their entirety. Visit Aloft… to see the frequently changing video project that contains fragments of the responses and other connective tissue. As more responses are received, the video will continue to expand in depth and complexity.

Sample Agreement Sample Agreement

Go to The Gallery

A SHORT BACKSTORY

I’ve been involved in the visual arts since 1969, when my high school art teacher suggested I consider going to art school, specifically the Atlanta College of Art. I went and through the intervening years I’ve made art, written about art, curated exhibitions, co-founded Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), and Art Papers (Atlanta, GA), and taught art courses at several colleges and universities ending my teaching career in 2020 as Professor Emeritus of Art at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. To me, that totality was always “my art.”

I’m currently storing 125 artworks created between 1969 and 2016. Of them, 78 are framed and have exhibition histories; the others are unframed drawings and photos that range from simple visual experiments to preparatory notes or plans for finished pieces. My artmaking was never motivated by a desire to sell my work, it was motivated by a desire to turn ideas into things, experience making the things, and sharing the things through public exhibition. I never refused to sell a piece, but I think if someone had ever asked me to give them a specific piece, I would have gladly given it. The idea of the ALBATROSS project started coming together a couple of years ago at a party when a woman I had recently met said she’d like to have one of my pieces, I said, “OK, I’ll give you one.” She seemed to think I was joking, but the idea excited me since I had been feeling an emotional weight from having so many pieces wrapped in plastic and sitting in darkness far too long. The project slowly developed in the months that followed – the primary intention was to put my pieces into the lives of people who will see them, live with them, and hopefully love them. When a piece is re-homed, the receiver will send a response to me which will become material in a new, ongoing video work that will be considered “finished” anytime an opportunity to screen it arises. In a sense, the video will honor the original pieces and will give me the opportunity to make new connections between the disparate aspects of my practice as they evolved over nearly five decades.