Other Themes  
"My work covers a range of topics and themes-inspirational artists and musicians, social justice, and the power of our personal histories." 

Sandy Hook 2012 (on display at the Uforge Gallery, Boston, MA) Materials used: steel, silver-plated cutlery, pop rivets and fish line Families often take pride in the legacy objects passed along from generation to generation. These include broaches, rings, paintings, furniture, photographs, a bible, a detailed family tree history or silverware. These items carry the weight of the family on their backs, including the family’s inspiring stories and mythology. Tales of struggle and triumph, of migration and misfortune, of compassion and violence. All of that has become absorbed by that family heirloom. A friend of mine gave me the assorted pieces of silver-plated cutlery used in this piece. Over time, I came to understand that these knives, forks and spoons possessed a history of their own. What was their journey? Perhaps purchased to celebrate a wedding, then dispersed by divorce or death, bankruptcy or indifference. Who’s to know? What becomes of a family’s legacy when it is ripped apart by gun violence? The massacre by Adam Lanza in December 2012 of twenty 6-7 year old children and six adult staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT destroyed the heart and soul of these families and the community. The deformed and distorted cutlery in this piece represents the destruction of that legacy. These eating utensils cease to be functional items, their exquisite craftsmanship defiled. They now represent something that has been eternally lost and permanently scarred. These knives, forks and spoons can never be returned to their original purpose or be the legacy object for a family. The children’s clothing arbitrarily placed around the base of the piece-a boot, gloves, a pair of pants-are lost objects I recovered during walks in the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain, symbolic of the lost lives of these precious children.

Case Closed-No Further Action Required (2018) Despite the unbelievable and unbearable level of gun violence, family violence, and the unrelenting number of mass shootings in the United States, nothing seems to change. While a number of states have made an effort to restrict the purchase of some of the most lethal weapons, we are a country awash in military-style rifles and high-powered handguns that continue to rein terror on all of us. When these events occur, we may experience a momentary sense of despair, of loss, of anger and even wonder why our leaders are such cowards. Then most of us turn back to our lives and just go on. Violence certainly didn’t start with us, and unfortunately, will not end with us. The tragedy for all of us is that for the innocent victims, the case is closed with no further action required. “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Decorative Wall Pieces (2013-2015) I like to make a small frame and create a piece of sculpture using scraps of steel plate, rods and pipe. I consider it a good training exercise in material manipulation because ideas for future pieces often seem to emerge.

Conversation (2015) So many of the important discussions we have happen around the coffee table, at the dinner table or in the bedroom. Our furniture becomes alive and animated, absorbing and holding all of the passion, angst, sadness, disappointment and confusion that fill our conversations. We leave detectable traces of these conversations by our dirty dishes, empty bottles and spilled sugar.

The Conversation-Detail

Memoir (2014) This piece captures more energetic times in my life-learning new skills, building new relationships, spending time with inspiring mentors, discovery and spiritual growth. I’ve found that chance encounters, odd twists of fate and serendipity shaped a great deal of my life and who I became.

Cardboard Box Sculpture Painter (2016)

Cardboard Box Sculpture Painter (2015)

Dinner Conversation

Dinner Conversation

Decorative Wall Piece

Danger-Shock Hazard! Door Closed

Danger-Shock Hazard! (2013) Made from a discarded electrical box, steel pipe and wire, this piece captures for me the ultimate warning about living in this world. As a friend once said, “life is not for the faint of heart.” Consider how many forces act against us as we make our journey through life, many fraught with uncertainty and peril. Yet we persist.

Decorative Wall Piece

Title: America, The Beautiful: Take A Book; Leave A Book/ Take A Gun; Leave A Gun (2018) Those neighborhood book exchange ‘library’ boxes seem to be everywhere. Some are quite elegant and even majestic. I sometimes feel like I’ve been invited into the owner’s house for an intimate peek inside! What do these mini-libraries say about us? Take A Book/Leave A Book. It conveys a sense of reaching out, extending a welcoming hand, safety, neighborliness, sharing, giving, receiving and offering. It’s a meaningful and even heartfelt way to seek connections. But these aren’t exactly the sentiments I feel about our country today. Divisiveness, fear, antipathy, taunts, shouts, vulgarity and suspicion are words that aptly describe the state of our country. We are terribly divided, suspicious of the other, fearful of difference and unwilling to listen. It’s become an ‘us against them’ mindset. Take A Gun/Leave A Gun. Yes, we are a country awash in guns. Despite the level of gun violence, family violence, and an unrelenting number of mass shootings, nothing seems to change.

The Slush Bucket (2012) As a clinical social worker working with women who had significant histories of trauma and substance abuse, I needed to develop a strategy to discuss trauma in a way that wouldn’t threaten their shaky emotional stability and early sobriety. That’s how the concept of the SLUSH BUCKET was born. It's that place in our bodies where we hold all of our negativity. The SLUSH BUCKET has two components- the SLUDGE and the SLURRY. The SLUDGE is the stuff at the bottom that we can’t get rid of (in other words, longstanding trauma from abuse, abandonment, violence). On the other hand, SLURRY is the negative stuff (behavior, attitudes, beliefs) that we add to the SLUSH BUCKET because of how we behave NOW. You can reduce the SLURRY by changing behaviors (or “opening the faucet” and draining the SLURRY). This piece captures the concept of the SLUSH BUCKET, the intractable nature of trauma and the possibility of recovery from one’s past.

Apartheid (2015) The struggle against apartheid that defined South Africa for decades both captivated and horrified the world for its brutality, its courage and its many heroes (and villains). Nelson Mandela inspired liberation movements with his description of 27 years of imprisonment on Robbin's Island in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. The process of becoming a democracy happened with minimal bloodshed as South Africa bore witness to the collective trauma of apartheid through its national reconciliation process.

Nude Descending A Staircase- Homage to Marcel Duchamp (2013) Marcel Duchamp, in my opinion, is the most influential artist of the 20th century. Duchamp was a “once every century” artist. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an amazing collection of his work. This is my tribute to Duchamp and especially his singular painting that shocked the art world in 1912.

Memoir- Chapter #1 (2014) What would it be like to “write” my memoir in steel? That was the challenge I posed to myself. What did I think about as I created this piece? The cultural and familial aspects of growing up, understanding who I was to become and responding to those forces in life that can at times be paralyzing and at others, liberating.

My Family Tree (2014) I show this piece whenever I can. My Family Tree is about the scourge of alcoholism. As a social worker, I learned about and treated all types of addiction. It defined a significant part of my work. Drug abuse gets the headlines, but the more serious addiction problem in this country (and around the world) is alcohol abuse. I’ve heard many stories about how alcoholism has destroyed the lives of individuals and families and contributed to abuse, abandonment and neglect. Each year I am touched by how many people share their personal stories with me about the impact of alcoholism on their lives.

My Family Tree (2014) Detail of the many 'life story' tags I hang on My Family Tree which describe the impact of alcoholism on individuals, families and treatment providers.

Higgs Boson (2016) The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory first suspected to exist in the 1960s. Professor Peter Ware Higgs, a British theoretical physicist, emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate (for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.) first predicted the existence of this particle. The question of the Higgs field's existence has been the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics and, according to some, "the central problem in particle physics". The presence of this field, explains why some fundamental particles have mass when, based on the symmetries controlling their interactions, they should be massless. Although it is hypothesized that the Higgs field permeates the entire universe, evidence for its existence has been difficult to obtain. In principle, the Higgs field can be detected through its excitations but these are extremely difficult to produce and detect. The importance of this fundamental question led to a 40 year search, and the construction of one of the world's most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, in an attempt to create Higgs Bosons and other particles for observation and study. On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 was announced. Physicists suspected that it was the Higgs Boson. Since then, the particle has been shown to behave, interact, and decay in many of the ways predicted by the Standard Model.

When I was preparing the eulogy for my brother’s memorial service four years ago, I searched for a way to express the unique connections that siblings have regardless of the quality of their relationship. As I was rummaging through some files, I serendipitously found a poem by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner that he called “Jigsaw.” Poetically, it’s not much to read, but its sentiments are profound. It became the perfect metaphor for my sibling relationship. I’ve created my ‘puzzle piece’ pieces to capture the essence of this poem-our interconnectedness as well as the fragility of relationships that always stand a chance of being repaired. We just need to find the pieces that fit together as they were intended. This sentiment doesn’t just apply to sibling relationships, but to all of the connections we create during our lifetime between friends, spiritual communities, and beyond. It’s so important for us to honor this about ourselves as we each engage with repairing the world. See the poem after my biography.

Title: Ascending Puzzle Pieces 7 (2018) Artist: Allen M. Spivack Dimensions: 30”h x 10”w x 6”d Materials: Plate Steel While preparing a eulogy for my younger brother’s memorial service seven years ago, I stumbled upon a poem by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner called ‘Jigsaw’ that describes the unique interconnectedness of siblings and others in our world. Afterwards, I used puzzle piece motif in the poem to create a series of sculptures. The sentiment expressed in the poem speaks to a lifelong pursuit we are tasked to do-connect to and repair our world.

The Color Wheel is for the artist what the dictionary is for the writer. It describes two essential building blocks for a painter, namely (1) the relationship between the primary colors needed to create a painting and (2) the interconnectedness of these primary colors. As you have no doubt experienced, the proximity of colors in a painting greatly influence the color our eyes see and mixing two primary colors creates an entirely new color. Additionally, the thickness of the paint on a canvas drastically changes how we experience the colors used. Stand in a room of paintings by Mark Rothko and you will see what I mean. His paintings with the juxtaposition of subtle colorations literally create visual vibrations that feel dizzying. My piece, The Color Wheel (2017), addresses these same dynamics (uniqueness, relationships and interrelatedness) as it relates to our biology, demography and cultural diversity (think about such categories as age, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicities). Each category has its unique characteristics but, simultaneously, needs to be considered in relation to and interrelated with one another. Consider how ‘interrelatedness’ happens through marriage, rape, intimate love, the ravages of slavery, work or serving together (as in the military or a social movement). Spin the wheel and consider the color and what made that color possible.

Cemetery Marker (2016) ​I thought it was time to create my cemetery marker. Getting older means that my thoughts turn from time to time to my eventual death and burial. We’ve purchased burial plots in the Baker Street Jewish cemetery in West Roxbury, MA. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with cemeteries, marveling at the different cemetery markers and learning about the lives of the dead. Why not enjoy my own marker while I still have the chance! Making this marker lets me consider how I’d like the world to remember me. As you will notice, this piece contains personal memorabilia as well as my hair, fingernails, earwax, toothbrushes and bloody band aids (from making sculpture!). Why include such intimate items? Because my cemetery marker is also a reliquary, a container for revered holy relics. These relics may be the purported or actual physical remains of saints, such as bones, pieces of clothing, or a special object associated with a saint. I’ve seen a variety of reliquaries of all shapes and sizes displayed in churches and museums containing bones, hair, fingernails or teeth. These human remains are saved for posterity to worship and are potent reminders of a religious life devoted to the most profound spiritual quest. We each revere our most personal (and often everyday) objects. Each of us cherishes the ‘things’ that give us comfort, joy, memories, uplift. What will you take with you on your journey to the place beyond consciousness? ​ ​I thought it was time to create my cemetery marker. Getting older means that my thoughts turn from time to time to my eventual death and burial. We’ve purchased burial plots in the Baker Street Jewish cemetery in West Roxbury, MA. I’ve had a lifelong fascination with cemeteries, marveling at the different cemetery markers and learning about the lives of the dead. Why not enjoy my own marker while I still have the chance! Making this marker lets me consider how I’d like the world to remember me. As you will notice, this piece contains personal memorabilia as well as my hair, fingernails, earwax, toothbrushes and bloody band aids (from making sculpture!). Why include such intimate items? Because my cemetery marker is also a reliquary, a container for revered holy relics. These relics may be the purported or actual physical remains of saints, such as bones, pieces of clothing, or a special object associated with a saint. I’ve seen a variety of reliquaries of all shapes and sizes displayed in churches and museums containing bones, hair, fingernails or teeth. These human remains are saved for posterity to worship and are potent reminders of a religious life devoted to the most profound spiritual quest. We each revere our most personal (and often everyday) objects. Each of us cherishes the ‘things’ that give us comfort, joy, memories, uplift. What will you take with you on your journey to the place beyond consciousness?