Eden in Iraq Presentation at Arizona State University, Feb 9, 2017

Eden in Iraq Presentation at Arizona State University, Feb 9, 2017

The Arizona State University Museum of Art is interested in taking the exhibition we will present in Singapore next October.

My adjunct position  at the School of Sustainability was renewed indefinitely and they  are happy to have our project  brought under their umbrella as well.

We’ve finished the Business Plan and fund-raising efforts are beginning.

I had a Skype meeting with the Program director from UNESCO in Iraq  on Monday to  acquaint them with the project and to consider any future  planning we might do together.

I will return to Singapore on March 6th. Essays are now completed for my book and exhibition at the University of New Mexico Fine Art Museum. Eden Turned on its Side and Iraq images  are almost completed. Alan Weisman, author of The World Without US and Countdown has written a fine essay about the Garden of Eden from an environmental and social perspective and curator Dr. Shawn Michelle Smith from the Chicago Art Institute has written a great piece relating the issues in my work to the age of the Anthropocene.

The book will be ready in time for the Singapore exhibition.

There was an amazing essay by Dexter Filkins about the Mosul dam breaking and flooding Northern Iraq in last months New Yorker that was heavily on my mind. Instead a pipe froze in my house flooding it from end to end. So by day I’ve moved 45 years of art work  to Albuquerque and by night kept writing. My best friend, Ciel Bergman, died just after the flood and another close friend, a next door neighbor, has had a recurrence of her cancer  with not good news. So flanked by water and death in the desert here in New Mexico, the idea of Eden in Iraq has kept me going.