About

Thirty-eight years before I was born, the Great Chelsea Fire burned half of Chelsea, Massachusetts, to the ground. Soon after, boatloads of Eastern European immigrants came to Chelsea, my grandparents, Yiddish speaking Jews from Odessa, Ukraine, among them. They bought a partially burned house on the cheap and fixed it up. The charred black rafters in the attic crawl space still told the fire's story. It was in that house that I was brought up.

The fire also gave birth to hundreds of junkyards salvaging what they could from the fire. Each one specialized in certain commodities: paper, cardboard, metal, stone, car parts, etc. This land of junkyards was my playground. I rode my bicycle down into the junk district to look at fragments and to pick up a prize pieces of junk to take home to my playroom, the boiler room, in the basement of the house - my first workspace. What I do now is not that much different from what I did in that boiler room: breaking, fixing, rearranging.

At 18, I entered the University of Massachusetts but was expelled and immediately drafted by the US Army to serve in Vietnam. I maintained my sanity as much as possible with words, by writing poetry. After I was discharged from the Army, I traveled extensively in Europe. I found that the words I had depended on were somehow failing me. But in their place was art, architecture, painting, sculpture and stone.

I attended art school on the GI Bill, received my MFA, and then served a 3-year apprenticeship with a stonemason in Massachusetts, before moving to New Mexico to begin my career as a sculptor, to recreate that boiler room of my youth. I have been working with stone for 45 years.

I met my wife, ceramist Betsy Williams, in 1999. She inspires me. Together, in 2005, we opened Rift Gallery adjacent to my stone yard in Rinconada, New Mexico. In the gallery, we feature a carefully curated selection of contemporary two-and three-dimensional work.