This past Summer, as I’ve continued my self-exile in Switzerland, I’ve accelerated my creative focus on the tribulations of our modern times.

Through acrylic collage works building mainly on early post-WWII East German sheet music featuring Johann Sebastian Bach sonatas, and nature-inspired color studies, as well as a series of hand-painted paper bags building on both of these motifs, I’ve explored various themes: the rapid decline of democracy in my homeland and across the world, humanity’s expanding degradation of itself and the planet, and the role of art, music, culture, faith, and community in resisting the worst of present trends.

The Leipzig-produced music sheets I’ve incorporated throughout this collection are from circa 1950. They are poignant for their straddling of both the repressive Nazi fascism and Soviet communism that stifled the East German landscape during the middle- to late-20th century. But, on the upside, even those horrific epochs in modern world history could not–and did not–erase the beauty or the magic of nature, nor the human works of art, culture, and music that have always informed the best of life’s meaning and purpose.

As the United States ‘celebrates’ its 250th birthday in the throes of upheavel on both the domestic and world stage, I have been thinking a lot about the America of my youth and the many ways in which our civic culture and quality of life have been degraded over the past half century. I have been thinking especially of my first introduction to the nation via a fateful cross-country drive that I made with friends from Los Angeles to New York City in 1976, when I was only 16 years old, in order to participate in the bicentennial festivities of that year in the Big Apple. My latest blog revisits that journey with an eye to what I experienced along my way and what it means in the context of current American and global issues. My missive takes special account of the role of artists and creatives in shaping a better path forward, arguing that both then and now so much of our success and vitality as a working democracy is finally rooted in the vision and audacity of our creative class and youth culture.

On November 9, 1989, a wall that had divided the peoples of the East and the West in continental Europe (and around the world) since the early years following WWII came tumbling down.

For nearly five decades, the Berlin Wall had stood as a symbol of state-imposed repression. On its western side, artists, students, activists, and average people had long shown their displeasure with the divisions between East and West. They painted graffiti all along the wall, stretching for miles, to reveal to the world in words and images what it meant to express dissent in the face of official repression and to demonstrate their solidarity with the people restrained behind its concrete.
In effect, the graffiti all over the Wall was a visible manifestation of the best of democracy. It underscored the will of the people and their freedom to actively register their deepest passions about the state of the world and their vision for a better future.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the most significant and yet unexpected developments of the 20th century.

Recent major changes in my life and in the world have inspired something of a renaissance in my creative undertakings. For much of the past five years, as I pursued action scholarship at The New School University’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, my responsibilities as a public intellectual prevented me from finding the

While developing a new series of paintings this fall, I’ve been reflecting on the profound legacy of Romare Bearden. Last year, I had the honor of masterminding a multi-media exhibition and national symposium to re-introduce this mid-20th century icon to contemporary audiences. The project, a collaboration with The Romare Bearden Foundation and others, explored the

During late 2020, while spending the year-end holidays with my family in Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland, I got sick with COVID. What a lousy way to spend Christmas and New Year’s Day. It was before any vaccine was available, and a lot was still unknown about the virus. Many people my age and older (I was 60