New Legacy Project Part 13: Completion

Dear Friends and Fans,

I have good news to tell: For the Love of Form: Confessions of a Morphophiliac and its attendant book proposal are now ready to show to a publisher. Yesterday I finished correcting all the last of the known errors—typos like a missing word space or an en dash instead of an em dash, which is meaningful to those of you who know the difference (I myself never paid any attention to the difference until I wrote this book). I then converted all the text-editable files to PDF format and combined them using Adobe Acrobat Pro into one single, 61-megabyte file, i.e. THE BOOK. It weighs in at 108 double-sided pages and contains over 130 illustrations, including a frontispiece, and a bibliography.

Frontispiece for the book. A melange of details from various paintings spanning several decades.

On April 1, I leave for San Francisco with a draft print-out of my book in my carry-on. First stop will be the book launch of the paperback edition of Everything She Touched, a biography of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase. Second item on my agenda: visit the retrospective of Ruth Asawa’s artwork at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; later the show will move on to the New York Museum of Modern Art, perhaps the most prestigious modern art museum in America. Ruth died in 2013 so she will not be in attendance, but her children will be there, and I hope to see them and some of the fellow artists that I knew in the 1970s and 1980s when Ruth was alive and well. It is worth noting that Ruth applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship more than eight times in her life and never received one. Heed this, all you serious artists who expect to be recognized immediately for your gifts! Sometimes the world is not ready for you…yet.

Ruth and her friend, Sally Woodbridge, established the Alvarado Arts Workshop in 1968, during the American war in Vietnam (1968-1975), and later advocated for what became, in 1982, San Francisco’s public, audition-based, alternative Ruth Asawa School of the Arts high school. During all those years, Ruth and other dedicated artists and parents had to work hard to persuade bureaucrats, administrators and politicians of the value of having actual artists create art with, not just for, others.

As I write this blog, I think about the current toxic destroyers of America’s public education system who are dismantling everything that the Alvarado Art Workshop (now the San Francisco Arts Education Project) was creating. Discouragement and despair are rampant. To young people today I say, “Seek out people, individuals or small groups—not corporate marketers and influencers—but people with integrity who have admirable values and high standards and who inspire you; then support them and work together to create something positive, however small it may be, that will nourish you through this Trump-Musk nightmare until the tidal wave subsides, the winds shift, and society can return to a healthier state.

To end on a happier note: while in San Francisco, I hope to make contact with a publisher or two about my own book, especially, if I am lucky, Chronicle Books, publisher of Everything She Touched. It will feel good to be back in San Francisco, see old friends, walk in Golden Gate Park, make footprints in the sands on one of the various beaches, eat dim sum in Chinatown, and drink a “boozy, Prohibition-era hot chocolate” cappuccino at the Tosca Café, then saunter across the street to City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. See ya’ later.