Here’s our Conversations newsletter #55. Let me warn you that the content, four interviews, is old-fashioned - that is, these are long reads. Veteran subscribers wouldn’t expect anything less. And if you’re a newcomer, let me encourage you... Stalwarts avow over and over that the time invested is worth it.
     In pondering what a fitting headline would be, a caffeine-influenced phrase appeared - From Wild and Crazy to the Sublime. But today the caffeine has worn off, and cosi fan tutte pops up. I'm not an opera buff nor versed in Italian. But once a question came up about the meaning of Mozart's title. "Something for Everyone"? I guessed (wrongly). But given the depth and breadth what's gathered here I think that's a good fit for #55. So here's our line up.

1.  Elizabeth Pimentel-Gopal.
I met Liz long ago at a ServiceSpace gathering. She was lively and active in SSp activities, and her husband Anand worked in clean energy. In the days before the pandemic, we’d often carpool down to a weekly Awakin Circle in Santa Clara at the home of Nipun Mehta’s parents. All that was interrupted and we lost touch with each other.
     Then one morning about a year ago I was half listening to something playing in the background as I worked at my computer. It was Pat Benincasa’s "Fill to Capacity" podcast. I’d interviewed Pat before she’d launched her podcast (w&c #38). She's a pistol and, with her podcast, I knew she’d found her métier.
     So I was at work on my computer when I heard the name “Elizabeth.” A few minutes later, there it was again. The conversation was going on about dancing of some kind. Wait a minute…  dancing for the Golden State Warriors. An older group of women (“The Classics”). Hmmm... Wouldn’t it be crazy if this was the same Elizabeth I knew? But no way.
    And then, a few minutes later, there it was again. Now I was listening more closely and I was trying to recall Liz's last name, when there it was on the podcast - Gopal… Ohhhh, my! How do you describe a crazy moment like that?
     I called Liz immediately after the podcast and - well, read all about it here! - this long-shot journey into performing in front of thousands of Golden State Warriors fans in their chamber of total amplification - the Chase Center in SF.

 2.  Artist Mary Curtis Ratcliff.
This is a different kind of wild story. In years past I’m sure Mary Curtis and I met. But we never quite connected. Then recently circumstances aligned one day when she asked me to interview her for her art opening at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland CA. As background, she sent me a book, Full Circle, a biography about her written by UCB professor David Littlejohn (Journalism). Reading that book is how I discovered her extraordinary life story, which she shares generously here in our conversation. For instance, at 15 she was shipped off to a Swiss boarding school. She recounts, “I had two Swiss-German roommates. I didn’t speak Swiss-German and they didn’t speak English. So we just stared at each other the whole time. I’d go to sleep every night with them speaking Swiss-German and handing me pieces of Swiss chocolate.” She was at the Swiss school for two years.
     When she got back to the states, she was off to the Rhode Island School of Design. From there, her story picks up in Manhattan where, as she tells it, her boyfriend David Cort who was making videos met someone else shooting videos, Parry Teasdale. The two of them began shooting events in Manhattan. Soon Parry moved in with Mary Curtis and David and it wasn’t long before the three of them formed “Videofreex” (“videofreeks”).
     “We were hippie types,” she explained, “and were into the counterculture. We’d go out and shoot whatever we felt like shooting. We’d hear about a dance performance or a music performance, and we’d get all our equipment and schlep it over and just shoot what was going on.” And, “It wasn’t long,” she tells us, “before a guy who’d seen David and Parry at the Woodstock festival helped us make a connection with CBS.”
     It’s just the beginning of this remarkable, true life adventure…

3. Elizabeth Sher
Back in the days when I was involved with the Berkeley Art Center, I found myself interviewing Elizabeth Sher and sculptor Bella Feldman in front of an audience at the world premier of Sher’s documentary film Bella, Bella (2007). It was a packed house, and heady stuff. Sher had learned about me through a collection of my interviews that had been published earlier that year by Whale and Star The Conversations – Interviews with 16 Contemporary Artists. I don’t recall the details, now but the overlapping led to the live conversation that followed the screening.  Afterwards our lives took us in different directions. And now, once again, an exhibit at Mercury 20 Gallery has been the cause for our reconnection; this time via Sher’s exhibit, “Bound, Unbound, Rebound.”
     In a wide-ranging conversation, Sher talks about her own complex art journey that spans student years at UC Berkeley, her visual art and film-making (I.V. Studios) and teaching media arts at California College of Art. She also talks about the Bay Area Women’s Legacy Project of which she has played an active role.
     Here’s a portrait of a complex, unbound life of an artist who refused to settle for less than fidelity to the creative flame.

4. Eva Bovenzi
This conversation takes us on a quieter journey. I spoke with Eva Bovenzi in front of an audience at Pastine Projects Gallery in San Francisco. The occasion was an exhibit of her recent paintings titled, “The Traffic Between Heaven and Earth.” They were shaped during her month-long residency in Italy at Assisi’s Arte Studio Ginestrelle in 2022. As she recounts, “I remember the first few days. I would look out my window and think, ‘I’m living in a medieval town.’ I just couldn’t believe it. There were narrow, cobblestone streets. It was very beautiful. And Assisi still has a sort of vitality of its own as a spiritual mecca. Groups of monks and nuns come there to go on a pilgrimage, and there are many small convents and monasteries. It’s not just a tourist place. It has its own spirit.”

     A friend was also in the residency. And they started going to the Basilica almost every day. “We would go at around noon when the tourists would start to thin out and often find ourselves there just about alone. So I had the amazing privilege of just looking at these frescoes at leisure, being able to revisit them day after day. By the end of the month, I was looking at those scenes of the Passion and thinking, ‘This is a very poignant story.’ I see the sorrow. It’s not just something I ‘know’ about—I see it.”

     An interesting companion in Bovenzi’s life as a painter is her 25 years of Zen practice under Norman Fisher (Everyday Zen), which she also talks about in this conversation. I’m reminded of something Laurens Van der Post said in a talk he gave in SF in the 1970s. He was speaking about his production of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. In something like a summation, he felt that in that play his message was “that art can only take you so far, and if you want to go further, you have to turn to religion.” It’s stayed with me all these years as something to ponder.  - RW