May 4, 2024 - Mercury 20 Gallery, Oakland CA

Friends and visitors gathered at 3pm in the gallery space surrounded by Ratcliff’s art work on the walls.  An unobtrusive sound track of bird calls provided an aural background. We pulled some chairs together, hooked up a mike or two and Mary Curtis and I settled down for a conversation.  

Mary Curtis Ratcliff:  [to all] I’ve known about Richard for a long time and was hoping he would interview me, so here we are.

Richard Whittaker:  I’m glad to be here in this intimate circle. How many of you have her book, Full Circle? [to Mary Curtis] Do you sell copies of it?

MCR:  I do, I do.

RW:   [to everyone] I would suggest getting a copy.  I was amazed by all that I learned and found the book—it's by David Littlejohn—fascinating. [to Mary Curtis] I didn’t know him, but was told he was a special fellow.

MCR:  Yes. He was a culture critic and professor at U.C. Berkeley in the Journalism Department, and a very dear friend. One night at dinner, I got up the courage to say, "David, would you mind writing a paragraph or two about my work?" And he said, I’d be delighted. So, he wanted everything, my whole career, and he kept researching and doing all these things. His wonderful book came out eight years ago, I think. So I’m glad you enjoyed it.

RW:   It’s quite a read, and you’ve had an amazing life. There’s so much more than we’ll touch on, but let’s start with a little about your roots. I was struck by your parents. You were born in Chicago, is that right? [yes] And you were exposed early on to art and culture.

MCR:  Yes.

RW:   Would you talk a little about your parents and how they contributed in terms of your own art life?

MCR:  Right. My parents were Midwesterners. My mother went to Smith and my father went to the University of Chicago, and they were very intellectual, very tweedy. They were Francophiles. They were Anglophiles. They also drank a lot. So you had that kind of overlay of living with alcoholics, of having an alcoholic parent. They also were very cultured.

We lived near Cranbrook Institute. Each year Cranbrook and the Kingswood School would do a new Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and we’d always go see them. We went to films there, too. I saw the film Crin-Blanc (White Mane) about a stallion in the South of France, when I was probably seven or eight.

We went to the Art Institute in Chicago when I was nine. My mother, my brother, and I traveled from Kalamazoo, Michigan all the way to Manhattan by train, where we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art . We went to see Swan Lake, and I was in ballet class at the time. I was thinking, “I will not stop dancing until I can leap across the stage.” Well, that never happened, but it was really great.

They were into great books. They studied Aristotle, Socrates, and all that kind of stuff. They were very, very intellectual, and couldn’t understand me being an artist. They didn’t get that.

My mother, however, made things. She made all my clothes. I never had a store-bought dress. She had her small Singer sewing machine and just before she died, I had the pleasure of telling her that she taught me how to design. She did. And she said, “I did not!”

“Yes, you did!”

We would go to the fabric store in Birmingham, Michigan and pick out a Butterick, a McCall’s, or a Simplicity pattern. We’d look at the fabric and would get buttons and a zipper, the rick-rack—whatever we needed—and go home.

You’d spread your cutting board out on the floor, put the fabric on it and pin the pattern to the fabric. You’d cut it up with your pinking shears. You’d sew it up on your trusty little Singer sewing machine.

I said, “You made a three-dimensional object.” And finally, that got through to her. I said, “Grandad was an engineer and I used to look at his blueprints for the addition he was building on his cottage.”

So, I just grew up with them taking me and my brother to museums and concerts and plays. I realize that and appreciate it more and more as I’ve gotten older.

Also, my father had a beautiful tenor voice. He knew about 125 folks songs. He came home from work every day angry, fuming mad. He’d change his clothes, come down to the kitchen, mix a couple of martinis, and I’d be in the other room listening for him to start singing… listening—is it safe to go near him? Is it safe?

He metamorphosized from having this temper tantrum and became the nice Ken Ratcliff. Then he was safe. So, I’d go into the kitchen and sing with him. It was really wonderful.

RW:   Well, you referenced alcoholism and that would be a possible conversation, but maybe there’s too much other material here.

MCR:  We don’t have the time.

RW:   Right. But that’s interesting to note. We get so much from our parents, and in my case anyway, it took me a long time to understand what I got from my mother. You said you appreciate things more and more and you see how much one gets from both parents.

MCR:  Yes.           

RW:   So, jumping to your college experiences. And you went to a college near Boston as an undergrad?

MCR:  Yeah. I went to a junior college at that time, because academically I was zip.

RW:   Zip?         

MCR:  I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get math. I didn’t get algebra. I didn’t get Latin. So, my parents didn’t know what to do with me, because my brother was so smart. He started getting A’s in kindergarten. He skipped his senior year in high school. So they shoved him off to the University of Chicago when he was sixteen.

I can just see them sitting around thinking, “Well, we got rid of one of them. What are we going to do with the other one? I know, let’s send her to Switzerland!”

RW:   Switzerland?

MCR:  They asked, “Would you like to go to Switzerland?” I said, “Yes,” and I did. I went my junior and senior year of high school to a Swiss boarding school on the shores of Lake Geneva.

RW:   That’s the French-speaking part of Switzerland?

MCR:  Yes. And there were about nine of us dummies from America, who didn’t speak any French.

RW:   You had some boldness in being willing to do that.

MCR:  Yeah. Well, I kind of wanted to get away from my parents, you know—away.

RW:   I see.       

MCR:  I did. But I was lucky, too. I was 15 and was sent from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Manhattan, where I was met by a family friend who twirled me around Manhattan—up the Empire State Building and down—and put me on the Queen Elizabeth. So, I ended up in France. And then got put on a train to Paris. So there I was.

My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, lived and worked in Paris, so there was somebody there. He came and got me at the station.

RW:   So let’s see, your junior and senior year—you’re 15?

MCR:  I was 15. 

RW:   So tell me about your experience at that school.

MCR:  It was a fascinating school. There were about 60 girls there and they were from all over the world, That was an education in itself, just meeting those young girls. I was not smart enough to get their addresses and follow them. I usually do that, if I know somebody. I follow them the rest of their life—like David Burger. (Ratcliff gestures to a man in the audience.) I met him when he was four years old, his mom was one of my best friends—she was a beautiful artist.

Anyway, so I went to school there. The first semester, trimester, I had two Swiss-German roommates. Okay. Now, I didn’t speak Swiss-German, they didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak French, and they spoke a little bit of French. So we just stared at each other the whole time. It was very weird, surreal. I’d go to sleep every night with them speaking Swiss-German and handing me pieces of Swiss chocolate.

Anyway, the school was really great. We got to go to the chocolate factory. We got to pick narcissus blossoms above Lausanne in the Spring, and had six French classes a day.
 So, I probably did learn French, but it was hard because there was so much English. There were two English girls who said, “You don’t speak English. You speak ‘American.’” We were all very embarrassed. But then there was this Dutch girl who spoke Dutch, German, Italian, English, and French, and she was 15 years old. I mean, I think she was a linguist.

RW:   You know, I’ve been to Europe a few times and I get the idea there’s a lot of those linguists out there.

MCR:  Yes. But I was really happy to finally learn to speak French. When I met Peter, it was one of his requirements.

Peter Samis: (from audience): And it gave you another view on America, too, being over there.          

MCR:  Yes, because in 1958, you did things “the American way.” That was how it was done. It was after the war and it was the “ugly American.” They didn’t speak French and just yelled at people because they didn’t speak English. I learned that the American way was one way of doing things—only one way—and there were many other ways of doing exactly the same thing that might have been actually even more interesting and better.

I had great respect for Madame Dedie, who was the director of this school. She had to ride herd on all these girls, and make sure nothing terrible happened to them. There was another school, [Le Rosey] which was next door. It had a few princes and people like that. We didn’t have any princesses or anybody like that. We were much more ordinary, but she had to keep us apart. You know, the raging hormones when you’re 16, 17.

So anyway, I stayed there until I was 17. By the time I got back to the States, I was a total snob, you know. I’d been to Europe and seen all these beautiful old buildings. I’d look around, “Ugh, that building is only 200 years old.” It took me about a year to get over being a snob.

RW:   From there, why don’t you take us to RISD and your experiences at RISD?

MCR:  Well, the good thing about going to school outside of Boston—I went to Pine Manor Junior College, a two-year school at the time, and had an instructor who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in sculpture, and I had an elective. (I’ve made things my whole life. I didn’t know you could be an artist as a career, I just did it.) Anyway, I took Mr. Ray Lavin’s class. It was supposed to be a two-dimensional class, and it turned very quickly into a three-dimensional class.

RW:   For you, or for everybody?

MCR:  It just turned out that way for the whole class. We had a project where we built a figure of a mother and child. We started with chicken wire, and then plaster gauze, and then plaster, and then we’d file it down to form it. I was doing my work in the studio and I realized Mr. Lavin was watching me. I thought, “Uh-oh,” and he went away. Then a couple of weeks later he was watching me again and I thought. “Oh, my goodness!”

 He said, “Would you come into my office?”

 And I thought, “Oh, dear, what have I done?”

 He said, “You should go to the Rhode Island School of Design.”

I said, Whaat?”  You know, “Hunh?”  I was 19. What did I know?

Anyway, he said, “I’ll write your parents and tell them.”

I said, “But my parents are in Tel-Aviv.” My father was working for the State Department at that time.

He said, “That’s okay. Just give me their address.”

Anyway, I ended up going to RISD. But first you had to go through a six-week summer school—“Foundation.” It was like art bootcamp.

RW:   I see.

MCR:  You had five classes, and each day was like a week. If you missed a day’s homework you were a week behind. So you could not go to sleep each night until you finished all your work. I came out of that summer seeing differently..

RW:   The bootcamp was a Rhode Island School of Design thing?             

MCR:  Yes, it was their summer school. In order to get into winter school, you could have a Ph.D. at Harvard, but you still had to go to this summer school first. It’s a very rigorous place. It’s a marvelous school. I really wished that I could have stayed longer because there were all sorts of things I wanted to do. I majored in sculpture. I’m kind of a practical person, so I thought, “Well, I’m not going to walk out of here and get a job as a sculptor. It’s not going to happen.”

So I thought, what else can I do? So, I went down to the industrial design department and looked around. I thought,  “Well, maybe I could get a job if I knew how to do this from an industrial design point of view.”

It was 1965. They didn’t want any women in there. They didn’t, and I didn’t get in there. They really discouraged me because I was a female. It was before the women’s movement, and I was still being very polite and unassertive. I had to learn that part.

RW:   So I gather that you left Rhode Island School of Design without a degree?

MCR:  No, I got a BFA there, but I did what a lot of women do—turned it into a degree in Art Education, with a minor in Sculpture. My father used to say sneeringly, “If you can, do. If you can’t, teach.”

I tried to get into the Industrial Design department, but they didn’t want women there. This was in 1966, before the rise of Second Wave Feminism. So as a fallback I got a teaching degree. [laughs] At least I could earn a living—which I did.                     

RW:   I see. But now—and I’m taking a lead from your book—it says that you found sculpture much to your liking. And this developed somehow at RISD?

MCR:  Yes, right. Well, I just always made things from the time I was really, really little.

RW:   So it all goes together.

MCR:  My brother and I used to draw all the time and we made stuffed animals. We made erector sets. I knitted. I made dolls. I was just always making something. And it was mostly three dimensional.

RW:   Okay. So we’re in the mid-Sixties now. At what point do you become part of this group called Video Free X?

MCR:  Freex, Videofreex.

RW:   Like, “freaks.” Okay. So, talk about that. That sounds interesting.

MCR:  Yeah. That was, as we used to say, “a trip.” Anyway, yes. I went to Manhattan. I thought I was going to get married, but that didn’t work, and I ended up on the Upper East Side—99th street. I went up with my college degree and walked around Spanish Harlem to every school I could find. Finally I found a Catholic school that needed an art teacher. Then I found another Catholic school across town on the Upper West side on 89th or something. So, those were my first jobs—teaching art.

Then I met a man through a friend by the name of David Cort. David graduated from Brandeis in the theater department, and was doing a job in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, which was not gentrified at that time. Anyway, he had all this studio equipment. So I got introduced to it. Now, I’ve had a still camera in my hand since I was a child. I’ve always taken photographs, but this was a different kind of thing. These were moving images—and it seemed really natural to me.

I went to see my grandfather in Michigan and was looking at the news, and it showed Woodstock. I thought, “Oh, I just know David’s there.”

RW:   David?

MCR:  David Cort, my boyfriend. So, when I got back to Manhattan I said, “David, were you at Woodstock?”

He said, “Yeah. It was great, man! I met this guy, Parry Teasdale, this young guy with another video camera. And we videotaped everything, but the music—the audience and behind the scenes. Everyone was tripping their brains out on acid and I even got that on tape.” Then he said, “By the way, Parry is going to come and live with us.”

I said, “Oh, really?”

Luckily, Parry turned out to be a lovely young man. The three of us—about two months later—decided to start a group called Videofreex, F-r-e-e-x. So we were in the counterculture in Manhattan. We were hippie types and we’d go out and just shoot whatever we felt like shooting. We’d hear about a dance performance or a music performance, and we’d get all the equipment—which was heavy—and we’d schlep it over and just shoot what was going on.

Then through a guy in the mailroom who’d seen David and Parry at the Woodstock festival, we made a connection with CBS. The assistant to the director of CBS wanted to have us document the avant-garde movement of the late 60s. We said, “Okay. I guess we’ve got to do something.” And we started hiring people.

So the three of us original members became ten. Then it became this collective, and we went all over the place. One of the most interesting places we went to was Chicago to videotape the conspiracy trial.

David Cort had gone to school with Abbie Hoffman. So we got to talk to Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies—and Jerry Rubin was there. Then we got some great footage of Abbie talking about the revolution, “Man, we want dope!”

Then somehow through that connection, we made a connection to talk to the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers in Chicago were being funded by a wealthy woman who had a condo. The connection was, “Okay, let’s go to the condo and talk to Fred Hampton.” So we did that, and it was really an incredible experience. He was only 22 years old. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

When we got back and put everything together to show it to CBS for their approval, he’d been killed by the Chicago police.

We realized that in the video tape he was sitting, and on the left , there was another guy there, and another guy on the right. One of those two guys must have been the snitch, because there was an underground person in the Panther party who opened the door for the police at four o’clock in the morning so they could slaughter him. It was just really amazing.

So, when it came time to show CBS what we’d done, we had a loft on Prince Street. We’d set up a meeting for them. The doors open and these three dudes from CBS in their trench coats come out of the elevator. They looked around like they were deer in the headlights. I mean, they probably had never been below 42nd Street. So we put them in the loft next door and piped in the show on a monitor after giving them a six pac of beer.

Before that happened, the person who hired us, Don West, came into the control room with Parry and David and me, and said “We want you to show this [a CBS video] tonight about Fred Hampton.” It was this sappy, watered down version of people looking at Fred Hampton’s coffin as they filed by, and we said, “No.” Parry looked at him and said, “If you want us to show this thing, I’m going to pull every plug in the studio.”

So we mutinied and showed our program. CBS was not pleased with us because what we did was actually… up to that time, ABC, NBC, and CBS only showed scripted things on television. There were just those three channels. And we were showing what was actually happening. We never had scripts. We literally just videoed what was happening, that’s all.

So it was kind of like reality TV before reality TV.  Mike Dann, the head programmer and his two colleagues said, “We will try to avoid putting this kind of thing on television for the next seven years.”  Of course it was twenty years before they actually showed things like what we were shooting, and they called it “Reality TV.”

Anyway, I’d been doing this for three-and-a-half-years, and after that whole thing, I got tired of being in the group. I wanted to do my own thing. So I ran away from home and came to California in 1973 for good.

RW:   Okay.  And you’d gone out to California to document the Avant-garde. So, this was not your first trip to California?

MCR:  Right. It was thanks, actually, to CBS that I got out here first, because they sent us to California as well.

RW:   Where did you go in California first—L.A.?

MCR:  L.A. We landed in L.A. with all this equipment and they rented a big motorhome for us. We threw all the equipment in there. It was a three-monitor system. So there were three cameras and three monitors. I basically stayed behind the camera the whole time, because editing videotape at that time, was like editing audio tape. You had to splice it and put a little piece of tape on it, and I was too impatient. So I just stayed behind the camera. We came out and in about three weeks, we shot about 30 twenty-minute tapes.

RW:   So were you shooting mostly artists?

MCR:  Sometimes. We went to Pacific High School in Los Gatos and everybody was on some kind of drug.  Everybody—the kids, the staff, and the Hog Farm was there.

RW:   With Wavy Gravy?

MCR:  Wavy Gravy had broken his back and had this big cast on. He was just holding court. It was really great.

RW:   Who are some of the most memorable figures you met?

MCR:  Well, Fred Hampton. There was a guy named Doctor Hippocrates. “Doctor Hip.” Do you remember him?

David Burger:  As I kid, I saw him—didn’t he have a column in The Chronicle?

MCR:  Yes—“Doctor Hip.” We videotaped him. David Court and I did that.

Peter Samis:    Didn’t you document the Exploratorium?

MCR:  Yes. In those days, the Exploratorium was this huge, open space. Some people from the Pacific High School had made an inflatable—this whole 80’ x 15.5’ galleria— it was that big. It was huge. Then they put this electronic music on and it was really tripped-out. I spent my time on one of those forklift things that goes up about 40 feet in the air.

Peter Samis:   A cherry picker.

MCR:  A cherry picker. I just was on the camera. I’d just pan it back and forth for about two hours. So that was great. Who else did we videotape? Well, Abbie, you know. Abbie Hoffman was really an interesting guy.

RW:   So you came out first to L.A., and then ended up coming up here to the Bay Area?

MCR:  Yeah, we came all the way up. I walked into a grocery store in L.A. at about ten o’clock one night, and saw all these vegetables all over the place. I thought, “Oh, my God! This is California. Look at all these vegetables! It’s so beautiful! All the colors.” Parry looked at me and said, “Well, if you like Southern California, wait until you get to Northern California!” So when I came out here, I knew where I was going to escape to..

RW:   I totally understand that. So, was it Berkeley, or just California at large?

MCR:  Well, San Francisco. I started on Potrero Hill in San Francisco.

RW:   And when was that exactly?

MCR:  1973.

RW:   Okay. Now somewhere around that time, I understand that you encountered “the Goddess Movement.” Does that mean that you read something by Marija Gimbutas?

MCR:  She was part of it. In the 70s, a lot of the feminists were into the Goddess movement. There was a big conference down in Santa Cruz in 1978 called “The Great Goddess Re-Emerging.” Carol Christ came from Harvard and said, “This is the best, the most important, religious movement in many, many decades.” And stuff like that. But it was just that feminists—and we—were really sick of the patriarchy. We’d just had it up to here. I’d been married and divorced by then—so I’d really had it up to here.

RW:   Okay. Now, that marriage was probably to this man who was connected with the Lakota Sioux. Is that right?  I’d love to hear about that episode in your life.

MCR:  Well, before I came out here permanently, I went back east to get my stuff and I met this man, Cy Griffin. Cy was really an amazing person. He had worked on Madison Avenue in advertising.

Peter Samis:   For J. Walter Thompson.

MCR:  Yes. For J. Walter Thompson. He wore fancy suits and stuff like that, but he rebelled because, all of a sudden, one day he had three generals from the Army sitting in his office, asking him to sell their Vietnam War.

He just quit. He just packed up and quit. He refused to do it. The problem was he had four children. I met him at a party, and I saw his shows; he had these amazing audio and visual shows with not one word. Using two slide carousels, Cy would fade one image in and out came another. It had all this beautiful magic. I learned how to do it and ended up doing it for two weeks when the computer broke at the exhibition we produced for the Everson Museum in Syracuse, N.Y.

He lived on West 89th Street. One day he needed a slide ruler and found out that somebody two apartments below him had one. He knocked on Richard Erdoes’ door and Erdoes, originally from Vienna, I think, was this amazing person who’d taken his whole family in a Volkswagen bus around to the Hopi, the Navajo, the Lakota Sioux and all these different tribes starting in the early 1960’s. The photo-documentation he made is now at the Yale Libraries.

So Cy started talking to him and, for some reason, Erdoes told him they were going to do the ghost dance again. Now, the ghost dance had been outlawed in this country since after Wounded Knee. You know the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee? It treated that era when the government came in and slaughtered the Lakota Sioux.

So, Leonard Crow Dog, who’s a medicine man—he was actually the head medicine man for the American Indian Movement… Do you remember that from the 70s? Cy got to know him and his family—his father Henry Crow Dog. He’d gone out to meet the Lakota Sioux on Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, maybe three times, and had become blood brothers with Leonard.

When I met him he said, “Would you like to go to a Sun Dance ceremony?”

I said, “Sure.” I come from an atheist family, so I had no religious background. But I learned a lot about Native Americans and spirituality. We drove from Manhattan with two of his children, and another video artist, Frank Cavestani. About halfway there from Manhattan to South Dakota, we heard that the Sun Dancers had been arrested. It was because they wanted to do—as a symbolic gesture—the Sun Dance in the little hamlet of Wounded Knee. There were seven Sun Dancers and they all got arrested and thrown in jail.

We said, “Well, are we going to go back to Manhattan, or are we going to keep going all the way to South Dakota?” We said, “Let’s go!” And by the time we got to South Dakota, the Sun Dancers had been sprung out of jail and had set up a Sun Dance circle, which is 40 feet in diameter. There’s a pole in the middle from a cottonwood tree, and dangling down from the pole are strips of cloth. One for the white race; one for the black race; one for the red; and one for the yellow. The Sun Dance circle was being smudged with sage.

So, the Sun Dance ceremony went on for three days and three nights. The Sun Dancers were in the sweat lodge in this altered state, and they continued to be in the altered state. They were fasting and doing sweats at night. The idea with the Lakota Sioux is you want to access your ancestors. One of the ways to do it is go on a vision quest, which you’re kind of familiar with. Another is being buried underground for ten days; so it’s sensory deprivation. The third method is to do the Sun Dance.

So Leonard was the medicine man who kept chanting. There was chanting going—and drumming, and singing. It was just really… Like you know, here’s this white girl from the Midwest. I’m thinking, “Oh, my gosh! It’s cool.” I tried to be as cool as I could be. But I was responsible for recording the sound. There’s a picture in the book of me with some headphones on.

So then comes the third day. That’s the day when they pierce their breasts with an eagle bone and tie themselves to the top of the tree with a leather thong. Then they lean back like this [showing] until they break the skin.

For some reason, it makes it possible for them to access the ancestors. I don’t know if it’s through the pain or some kind of vision, but by then they’re in a totally altered state from the fasting and the sweat lodge—doing all these things. It was really extraordinary. I mean, it was an extraordinary experience for me. It really affected me, and it affected my art work.       

RW:   When you tell the story now, I can feel that you probably can go right back to that memory somewhere. Right?

MCR:  Right.

RW:   That’s just a signature thing, memories that stay intact in us like that, don’t you think?

MCR:  Definitely. Because I started making fairly elaborate pinwheels, which I peddled at the Renaissance Faire. And I was doing props with David Burger’s mother Ann, who built a 20-foot giant for the Renaissance Faire. I decided to make a big pinwheel hoop and walk around selling pinwheels at the Renaissance Faire. Then one day I picked up that hoop, with the ribbons falling down at an angle, and saw all the ribbons come dripping off like that. I sat down and made about ten different drawings and that was my first series of sculptures. And afterwards, I continued to make circular pieces. I kept saying, “Where did all these circles come from?” Then I remembered, “It’s the teepee, the sweat lodge, the drum, the firepit, the Sun Dance circle—they’re all circular.” So they’d gone into my consciousness  and then came out without me really being conscious of it—and I’m still doing it.         

RW:   Now you mentioned that your family was very intellectual—your father particularly, right?

MCR:   Not any more than my mother.

RW:   They both were.

MCR:  Both, very.

RW:   So you and I are about the same age and the philosophical fashion of the day, so to speak, was Existentialism. Did you ever take any philosophy courses or get into that?

MCR:   I did not. I think my brother took them, but I did not.

RW:   I was wondering because after Existentialism, Sartre and Heidegger and Kirkegaard—after that, down the road came the Post-Modern critique, and that invaded the art world in a big way. I just wondered if you got distracted by any of that or you just continued your artistic path without worrying about this stuff?

MCR:  Yeah. No, I didn’t. It’s interesting because my brother actually became an art critic in Manhattan and he’s still, after 50 years, an art critic in New York.

RW:   And he probably dealt with that in whatever way he felt about it.   

MCR:  I’m sure he did. But he would never write about me—except when I was married to Cy Griffin, because then I had a different name. He said “nepotism.” So it’s really infuriating. But he’s supportive. He’s actually doing a very interesting blog now on Substack. He writes every couple of weeks.

RW:   Okay. Now, we were chatting a week or two ago and I asked if you’d had any acting or performance experience.

Peter Samis:   Then your hoops and ribbons pieces were used in Bay Area—the art actually entered into—performance spaces in certain ways.

MCR:  Right. That was really fun. At that conference in Santa Cruz at the University of Santa Cruz, I had a big sculpture called "Amelia"—a big, white, satin circle with ten-foot wings, ribbons dripping down. That was hung in the stage during the whole conference. It was great because it kept turning. It was kinetic, so it kept turning in space. Then for a dance performance, they threw light on it—yellow and red and green light on it.

I made a wearable sculpture called “Dance Wings” out of mylar. You saw those Dance Wings, didn’t you? You put them on and you just start dancing, and it’s really great. They make such a wonderful noise. Then if the light is beamed on, it’s like a mirror like the bottom of a swimming pool. It reflects all over any surface. So those are pretty spectacular.

RW:   Well, you’ve done so much. You’ve done a lot of photography, sculpture, performance, and I was interested to see these little drawings. You draw very well. I mean you paint, do photography, sculpture. What would you say? You’ve had a life of artmaking. You’ve had a life that’s been rich, in terms of all the interactions, all the places you’ve gone, all the people you’ve met. It’s really kind of astonishing. Do you reflect or ask yourself what are the deepest things about this? I mean, looking inward and asking something like that?                       

MCR:  Yeah. I am exceedingly grateful. I’m really grateful that, all these years, I’ve been able to spend my life making things and getting my creativity to become three-dimensional, so it’s not just in my head. It’s out here where it can be shared with people. I just feel really happy about that.

RW:   Are there things that, when you reflect, stand out? You know, things that feel closest to the heart of something?

MCR:  Interesting question. Well, I think this show—I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had dreams of flying. And you see a few wings around here. I like birds and pelicans; I just think pelicans are extraordinary. As they fly, they look down. So this show expresses that whole idea of flight, and being able to soar. Actually, the closest thing I found to flying is downhill skiing. On a sunny day, you know, swoosh, swoosh, that’s the closest I came to it.

RW:   That’s wonderful.

MCR:  But I’m really interested in flying. I mean, I’m a little obsessed with it, I think—once you look around.

RW:  That just is a beautiful thing. Something about the dream of flight speaks the possibility of freedom in ourselves—a kind of freedom we may not even know about perhaps, but intuit.

MCR:  Right.                  

RW:   That necklace there [on the wall]—I was thinking that probably Nefertiti would be happy to wear it if it wasn’t as big as it is. Did you feel any connection with something Egyptian when you made that?

MCR:  Yes. My father and my mother went to Egypt, I think, when I was little. They came back with a little bust of Nefertiti with a wonderful headdress with a flat surface on top. As a child, I really tuned in to Egypt. In sixth grade I wrote a paper about wigs. I started in Egypt and learned all about wigs, and the fact that the ruling class had shaved their heads. The women shaved their heads, and they wore all these fancy-schmancy wigs. Then they would put little balls of perfumed wax—you know it’s very hot in Egypt—and the wax would start dripping down the face, and I thought that was amazing.

Then I wrote a whole report going through the ages and went up to Marie Antoinette. Do you know she had 300 different wigs? The reason why the doors at Versailles are so tall is because some of those wigs were this high [gestures], so the women could walk through with their wigs on. And of course, they powdered them with flour, so the white is all over the place. Sometimes, they’d have ships on them, and the wigs were just extraordinary. So, I went from Egypt to Marie Antoinette in one fell swoop.

MALE:   Well, I’m fascinated by this work around you right now, Murmuration—this group of birds all in flight. Can you talk a little bit about the process of doing it and where the inspiration came from?  

MCR:  Yeah. I’m fascinated with birds that do this. These are starlings. I watched a lot of videos of them swooping and swooping and turning. In a nanosecond, the whole thing changes. It’s just amazing. Why they don’t all run into each other and fall to the ground, I have absolutely no idea. I want to do more research, but I got the idea of doing one here because I wanted to do some new work. This is 50 years of work, and it happened to be about birds in my career. So I wanted to do some new work and I looked at many videos. This is actually a still from a video. So I had 600 birds laser cut out of black paper.

MALE:   How many different bird shapes are in this—because I’ve seen so much variety.

MCR:  There’s really only three.

MALE:   That is amazing.

RW:   And I noticed that, in the circular piece up there, you used those same birds and  painted a few feathers on them.    

MCR:  I did because, in reality, they have iridescence around their throats.

RW:   And then you did a painting of little birds on the wires.

MCR:  Yes. I have three more. In order to get those beveled edged canvases, I had to order them from an art store in Miami. They wouldn’t send me just one and I have big ideas about what I’m going to do with them. They’re going to have to do with starlings, too.

RW:   So that’s a passenger pigeon up there?
(photo - Dana Davis)

MCR:  That’s Martha, “Martha the Messenger.” She was the last passenger pigeon in this country, and died in the Chicago Zoo in 1927. That’s an homage to Martha. Passenger pigeons apparently were all over the place in the 1900s and the 1920s. People used to just slaughter them for sport. It’s like the buffalo—for sport.

But the other thing is that messages are sent through letters, and that was a collection of stamps my father had. So I put it all together. The maps are from Peter’s mothers. Those are wonderful National Geographic maps from the ‘40s and the ‘50s. They had beautiful color, and so I just kind of put it all together for that composition.

RW:   And that piece up there with the wire and the feathers hanging—it’s sort of ineffable so that the slightest breeze moves the feathers.

MCR:  Yeah. And those are cockatoo feathers.

RW:   Well listen, it’s a lovely exhibit. And thank you for sharing a quick passage through a wonderful adventure in life and art. May it continue for many more years. And I say this for all of us, too.

MCR:   Many more years. Right. Thank you very much, Richard.  ∆