Grief is a theme in my art viewing. I walk galleries to fill the loss spaces. I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager and now middle aged, I continue the habit. I have experienced a great amount of loss in the last few years, but through this I have never felt so alive. Back from CES, processing the plethora of technology and innovation a year after the fires started, I decided to spend the afternoon at one of my favorite local art spaces, the Marciano Art Foundation. I went to see the Corita Kent show before it closed, but it was Ugo Rondinone’s “Clockwork for Oracles II” that made me pause, stop and think about Rosa.

The last time I spoke with Rosa de la Cruz was a few years ago when I went to visit her house in Miami. It was the Monday of Art Basel and it was their tradition to open the family home for the day. For many years I had heard about this event, but I only was able to visit a few times. The first time I went was 2021 and it was magical. Glen and I stood on the deck and marveled at the bay. It felt like we had been dropped into the most beautiful place in all of Miami.

I returned in 2022. Rosa and I had met a few times at her collection , which to this day will remain one of my all time favorite collections for its championship of conceptual art and for its empowerment of its staff. Everyone at the foundation was trained to engage with visitors and talk about the art. It was through the foundation that my interest in Felix Gonzalez Torres went from acknowledgement to superfan and inspiration for my own practice.

On this particular day in 2022, the den at the De La Cruz house was newly installed with the massive Ugo Rondinoni installation floor to ceiling, across the entire room. I complimented Rosa on it and she went into the story of the piece with its windows representing time and pointed out that every time Ugo installed it they would paper the walls with international news of the day. The day that they had installed it at the De La Cruz’s was the day after the Queen had died. In the seams of the wall were images of Elizabeth from newspapers around the world. Rosa kept pointing them out to us. It was joyous. I snapped some photos.

That was the last time we talked.

I’ve thought about Rosa regularly and especially in the last few months after learning the news that my other favorite person in the art world, the Italian gallerist Helene de Franchis, passed. Helene and I were much closer as she used to travel to LA to spend time with my second family and I loved taking her out and showing her my city. Art was very serious to her. Our time together was like getting a personalized masters in Italian minimalism and conceptual art. I always felt like she wanted me to really question why I made it. Few people ever asked why I chose to paint over write. At the time I preferred painting over writing because I heard stories all day and sometimes writing them was too much. Painting felt original. It also helped me clear my mind. I enjoyed the process. I still do. I don’t really care if I ever get perceived as a serious artist. I have a growing body of work. That sense of completion is priceless to me. That is what matters.

Earlier today at the Marciano, I found myself hunting for the exact date of their Rondinone windows installation. I walked to the seams of the wall. It was hard to discern the dates. It was a Wednesday in October, but what Wednesday? I started googling the headlines. I walked to the other side of the wall. A headline read “Venom will battle” and then was cut off. I searched for the date of its release. It was October 5, which would make the paper the 3rd or something like it.

I looked for my photos from that date in October 2018. I time traveled back to the below.

Downstairs at the Marciano is “The Sorcery of Images” a slideshow exhibition of 1,100 of Corita Kent’s photography taken from a recently digitized archive of 15,000 photos the celebrated artist and nun took during the years she worked just up Western at Immaculate Heart. They are a resplendent glimpse into another era of LA, a kaleidoscope of letters, fonts, flowers, people, skies and symbols, other worldly fragments. The darkened room watched in silence. A woman next to me kept also taking pictures of images she liked and we sat together in communion for a half hour, relishing our individual lost memories of people and places we loved.

1.10.26