THREE DECADES — THE SPINE

Winsted Foundations, 1959–1978.

Born 1959 near Hutchinson, Minnesota, raised in Winsted. The full telling of these years is the first room: EARLY YEARS — 1959 to 1982.

MCAD, 1978–1982.

Minneapolis College of Art and Design. BFA in Graphic Design.

Room: Portraits

The Commercial Years, 1982–1998.

A greeting card line called Ottographicals. Illustration and hand-lettering for national and international agencies. A studio in Chicago; a one-man show of large paintings at Stanley Korshak on Michigan Avenue. A magazine cover painted in Milan. Ukrainian compartment dolls painted with business people holding phone receivers, to explain a telephone company splitting apart. Fifteen years of visual solutions, until it burned the body and soul out.

Room: Memory Works

The Healing Years, 1998–2001.

Stopped. Set up a woodcarving shop in the garage. Studied the handmade techniques of Northwest Coastal and Inuit sculpture for two years, then stood in front of the real work at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in summer 2001. Made touchable assemblages — wire, wood, stained glass, found things — for hospital wings. Ended it when clients wanted only happy symbolisms and colors.

Room: Marks

Expansion, 2001 onward.

Every direction at once, on purpose. Performances with costumes invented on the spot. Painting and collage around what the newspapers carried in from the world. The work turned toward the personal and intimate: family as subject, daughters in the photographs.

Rooms: Ella and Two Stars, Season, Speck Field, The Witnesses, The Split

The Great Burst, 2021.

Four hundred and one voice transcriptions in twenty-eight days. One hundred and five in a single day, February 4th.

Rooms: Writing, Forms That Refuse Stillness, A Non-Fiction Novel in Progress

The Archive Now.

140,000 files. In 2025 the collaboration with a machine that talks back began, and the carving of thirty years of ore is under way. This site is that work, opened.

Rooms: Thirty Years, Entrance