I had the honor of joining Leon Golub and Nancy Spero to preview a Max Beckman show one evening in 2003. Leon needed help physically getting around at this point in his life and I was honored to lend him a shoulder to lean on.

His flags and maps from the 50s are great but this painting shows, in a humble way, all of the doubts, questions, and ambiguities he had about America.

Looking back, I am amazed that I was attracted to them at all; my tastes skew towards the insanely complicated and these pieces were really just simple line drawings.

After a long winter and a cool spring, I find that my inspiration stems from color, arresting me and connecting me in time.

I decided to write about Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts): Part II by Julie Mehretu. Although I’ve followed her work for a while, it has become the piece of hers I have seen in situ the most.

I first came across Laylah Ali's paintings in graduate school and immediately felt enamored. Her works were refreshing and filled me with validation.

Joyce Kozloff’s If I Were an Astronomer (Tasman), 2014, has a magical, rich, nocturnal silver-blue light that unifies the work and allows an exuberance of imagery to be seen as a whole.

The first time I saw an Ivan Albright painting was as a sophomore art student, in an art history class at The Columbus College of Art and Design. That was 1970.

I discovered the work of Karin Mamma Andersson as an undergraduate while scanning art magazines in the library.

In Self-Portrait on Bed, made in 1973-74, Gregory Gillespie paints himself as a not-quite young man, some years older than I am as I write this. He sits on a mattress that sags toward the floor.

I recently visited Robert Gober’s The Heart is Not a Metaphor at the MoMA, and at the core of the exhibition was a dark room with Gober’s Slides of a Changing Painting.

“Okay, go ahead and look all you want, but it's going to be unpleasant for both of us.” - Lisa Yuskavage in an interview with Mónica de la Torre in Bomb magazine[i]

Bridget Riley described the experience of viewing her paintings as an “active, vibrating, pleasure,"[i] and was surprised and annoyed that others considered her work painful to look at.

In my memory the painting is titled, “Me and Joe.” It is small, maybe ten by fourteen inches. I am looking at the painting from behind the backs of several classmates who stand clustered around it.