My life experiences are the primary research for the development of my work. I have always been interested in culture and the many ways that people respond to the riddle of human life on earth.

I have a 35 year relationship with Africa, especially with Mali. Since my 1995 Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship, I have spent several months every year engaged in a wide variety of cultural projects including collaborations with Malian artists. My wall installation, Negelan, is in the permanent collection of the American Embassy in Bamako, Mali.

My research has included my own Eastern European Jewish genealogy. I have been an activist for as long as I can remember.

A master welder, I work in three dimensions as well as drawing and collage on paper. My work is displayed on the floor, on walls, and suspended from the ceiling, indoors and outdoors. Recent work has included photography, video and sound.

Whether public or studio, my work is often culturally and historically specific to its site. Working with the community as well as my own research are important to the process. Usually exhibited as installations, I invite the viewer to enter into my thoughts and constructions.

The interplay of texture and pattern combines with an off-kilter geometry that gives my work a special immediacy and excitement. My sculptures thrive on small tensions between light and shadow, positive and negative, organic and precise, playful and serious, political and personal.

My work combines energy, abstract and classical forms and ideas as well as ages old motifs and skills. It records and reflects human scale, labor, body ornaments, utensils, community and traditions as well as the new. It is quiet and open at the same time. My work achieves a unique cohesion where themes recur and overlap, appear and disappear, then reappear in altered form.

An active participant in both American and Malian culture over the last fifteen years, my thoughts and world view are always simultaneously American and Malian. My involvement with Malian culture is sometimes viewed with suspicion assuming a power imbalance involving cultural theft, domination or exploitation. Differences always need to be negotiated.

My collaboration with Malian artists has been the key to my experience and understanding of Malian culture. It began due to our remarkably similar world views, across culture and education and is based on mutual respect and admiration, curiosity, dedication and passion amongst an international community of artists.

We have let each other into our lives and our artistic process so all are simultaneously researcher and subject. Our common purpose has to do with cultural preservation in the aftermath of the disruption of slavery and colonialism. This work involves research into the past and bringing our findings into the present and the future as saved artifacts and concepts, ways of thinking and being and as contemporary works of art. My anchor within the family of artists has fostered my involvement with the wider culture. I have been involved in projects with and about Malian women over the last ten years.