Interviewee: Kenn Speiser
Interviewer: Krista Ingebretson
Interview date: November 15, 2003
KS: Is this--this working? Is this mike going right through that little blue box? And then also into your backup tape recorder?
KI: The microphone--with the other-this just has it's own
KS: Are we on? Are we live?
KS: The name is Kenneth Speiser, and date is Saturday November 15th 2003. So let the games begin.
KI: Yeah, so (talk about head phones)
KI: So, why don't we start at the beginning: Where were you born, and can you just kind of describe your childhood?
KS: Well, I was born in Queens, New York, Woodside. Actually the hospital was in Manhattan but I was bom-grew up and raised in Queens-1946. And then my folks moved out to Long Island, and I think I was about nine or ten, at that time. Went through junior high and high school there; came to Rhode Island to interview from the Rhode Island School of Design, fell in love with the place, and just never came home. Because Rhode Island is fabulous.
KI: Do you feel like that your (formative childhood time?) was more in Queens or more in Long Island, or. ..
KS: It was actually in all three. Queens as a kid growing up, we lived in a row house, my mother, my father and myself with my grandparents. So I had the benefit of growing up with a grandfather and a grandmother. Which was interesting and-thinking back-very good. At the time it wasn't always so great. A lot of people around, but I learned how to cook from my grandmother and I have a love of cooking. And we had cousins who lived across the street, and it was a narrow street, so I used to run back and forth and it was a real sense of community and family neighborhood. I could would every where. You could walk around the corner, and my mother would send me out to get the shoes fixed, and at the shoe man there was a big jade plant in the front window of the shoe man and she told me she gave him one little leaf from the jade plant ten years ago, and so there was a connection with the neighborhood. When we moved out to Long Island, you couldn't walk any where. Everything was just so vast. And I was too young to drive, I had to take school buses, ride bicycles. And I had a hard time in Long Island, because I was going through the teens. The twelves, the thirteens, the fourteens, the fifteens, so they were all troublesome years. But I did leam in high school that I could get out of gym by wearing black socks and black shoes. (KI laughs) That was a real insight because up until then I had to go to gym, and I hated sports even through I was good at track, and I was good at field things, I never liked football, baseball, or basketball, or those kind of team sports. And I couldn't stand the smell of the locker room. It was always so steamy and I just didn't like the whole thing. But if I wore the black shoes and the black socks I could get out of gym. (KI laughs) But the whole (tape starts side A) thing about that was they kept throwing me in detention. So eventually after a while they said, "Well here's the waste of a kid, being in detention all the time, and it's obvious he doesn't like gym." So they talked to me, and they said, "Well what do you want to do? What about art, do you like art?" And I said, "Well I don't know, I haven't done that much." So they threw me in the art room, and Ijust loved it. So then I started taking more art, and I was-really my first introduction to art was getting rejected by sports.
KI: Wow, so before then-how old were you then? Maybe?
KS: Well how old are you in junior high school?
KI: Thirteenish twelvish. . .
KS: You get out of high school when you're, what, 18? So 17, 16, 15, 14, somewhere around there.
KI: Okay, so before then--it sounds like you hadn't done much art before then.
KS: Well, my parents were always very, talented crafts wise. My mom always was--craft oriented. She always used to do things with church. Craft projects. My father went to trade school. Was actually a very skilled craftsman. He did jewelry, and used to design--make his own series with knives and daggers that he would hanlmer the blades out of automobile springs. And he eventually went into sheet metal. He owned his own sheet metal company, and he was good with his hands. He built his first boat, a cat-a sail boat, a cat boat, when he was around 20 years old. And he's built about three or four boats in his lifetime. I helped him on some of them, but long before I ever came around he was building boats. And he always had a love of fine craftsmanship--he made a whole line of jewelry for my mother out of soup bones, from-from marrow bones, from meat.
KI: Wow.
KS: And I remember when I was in Woodside, we used to go up once or twice a-well, once a-every other year or so-to the roof, they were flat roofs, and we would paint the roof silver. And we would crawl up a little hatchway, and I'd be up there and look at all the other roofs in the row of houses: they were all black. We had the only silver roof. Because being in sheet metal, he knew that if you painted it silver it would reflect the sun, and it would be a cooler house. And so-- I didn't realize the influence of that until many, many years later when I was looking around I had been using silver to paint my walls in my house, and using silver as a base paint, and I said, "Wait a minute, my dad and I used to paint the roof silver," so these things are kind of connected.
KI: Yeah. Have there been other things that you, sort of, years later realized, you know, that's where it came from? Like you, it seems like in some of your sculptures that I saw on your website that they involve sort of objects, almost found objects, and it sounds like your father was also pretty ingenious in using...
KS: Absolutely. And that was a major influence, again, that I didn't realize till years later was using materials in an unorthodox manner. And in a way you wouldn't normally associate that material to be used that way. Like making jewelry out of soup bones. And making knife daggers out of old automobile springs, that he had to hanlmer out and straighten out of a coiled spring into something that was flat. Yeah, that type of material usage just kind of crept in there. Always-it was kind of like problem solving. My father was an inventor, basically. After he started his own sheet metal shop, he went to work inventing machines that made the product for himself. Then after that, in his retirement years, he started carving carousel horses.
KI: Wow.
KS: So, and he--he first started by buying a carousel horse that needed, you know, a lot of repair. And he restored the broken parts, to him getting hooked up with a buddy of his who came up
with an idea to do a New York state carousel. And they were going to make the carousel all out of indigenous animals to New York state. My father was commission to carve a life size Holstein cow (KI laughs) that was being sponsored by one of the local milk companies. So that the milk company put up x amount of thousands of dollars towards the, the goal of making this carousel a reality. The guy whose idea it was paid my father some of that money, and he built this cow. And then he built the cow, and then he built a 6-foot brook trout, and then he built a rabbit and then a 7-foot tall giraffe, because my mother said, "When you're done with the New York state stuff, I want a giraffe. And I want a rabbit." So he went and built these other things. And they're just beautiful works of art.
KI: Wow.
KS: So, all that other stuff-it was there. It was-the seeds were all there. You never knew when something was going to sprout out.
KI: So, let's see. So we've gotten you up to your first art class, I guess.
KS: Yeah, you've gotten me up to-you mean back home?
KI: Yeah. Then, then what? I mean, I guess it's interesting to me that you went from-you know, you went from doing art because you wore black socks and shoes to going to RISD in a pretty short amount of time. So, so...
KS: Well, the thing about it, when I applied to RISD, I submitted my portfolio, and I submitted all the drawings they requested of me, but they weren't really convinced at that point that I should be accepted because they had a pretty high ratio. So I had to come up here for a live interview, and part of that live interview was-all the other people who were applying and in the same predicament I was had to one day, one Saturday, they put us all in a room with a pedestal and a chair, and they said, look at the chair real hard, and they took away the chair, and they said, "Draw the chair." Drew the chair. Then they put the chair back, they said, "Look at it again, real hard," they took the chair away, they said, "draw the chair turned around in your head 180 degrees. (KI laughs) So, we did that, and then they had a series of boxes that were coloredthat were empty, you had to color them black and white. And all the combinations: (track six) half black half white, a quarter black quarter white, all the combinations you could come up with. So we had to do that, and a couple other exercises, and then I passed. And then I realized as I was here I loved this place. I never even applied to other colleges. I knew this was the place. First of all, it was not Long Island. (KI laughs) It was Rhode Island, and it was my town, and my parents couldn't look down my throat too quickly. Though they could get here by car. And so I just fell in love with the place. But I had a hard time. And I almost got kicked out of my freshman year.
KI:Why? KS: Well, I was a trouble maker. I always had-I didn't fit in with the other kids, you know. I was making sculptures at the time using parts of dead chickens-like, heads and feet and stuff-cause when I was a kid and grew up my mother always used to take me to the butcher shop, and she'd say to the butcher, "give the kid a chicken foot," and (KI laughs)-I'd run around and put a thumbnail on the back of the foot and that was my toy. I'd make the hand pop up, and I'd be running around going like this (makes flapping gesture with hands with limp wrists) making this chicken foot move. So animal parts--raw animal parts were also part of my childhood. My mother would give them to me as toys. So that worked its way into the sculptures I was doing as a freshman. Which somehow worked its way onto the pillow of the kid in the dorm next to me who wasn't happy one night when he went to bed and found a dead chicken head under his pillow. (KI laughs) So he complained, and you know stuff like that. Just, kid stuff. But then I had a--that was my freshman year. Sophomore year, I also had a-there'd be a model on the modeling table and I was never really happy drawing the model. But I would draw the model, and I would draw the room behind the model. The kids that were facing me, and then the room behind them -And I wasn't really doing the assignment, cause I wasn't drawing the model, I was drawing it anyway, so that didn't really endear me to the life drawing teacher. But in my sophomore year, I had a teacher who could see beyond all the bullshit that I was doing. And say, you know, this kid has got some talent, and just needs to be directed and he was-basically he saved my life, mentally. By just understanding what was going on, the conflict.
KI: Who was that teacher?
KS: His name was Lane Smith.
KI: What was he like? How did he interact with you?
KS: He was just very compassionate, very low key. And I didn't-I wasn't that I saw his work as an artist and responded to it as much as I responded to his kindness as a human being. So. That was very helpful. That got me through that rough spot.
KI: So how, once you were sort of, more directed I guess, what were you directed towards? What changed?
KS: Well that became another problem. Because here I was like a kid in toyland, and I was taking... (door creaks. KS's wife Constance enters)
Co: I'm off.
KS: Are you going off?
Co: Look what I'm taking my pills in.
KS: Constance, this is Krista
Co: Hi Krista.
KI: Nice to meet you. That's a big pill (KI laughs).
KS: I bought Constance-I bought her that pill case. It's a rubber pill case.
Co: Isn't it ridiculous?
KS: It holds pills, in the shape of a pill.
Co: We had to leave it to air out for two weeks because it smelled so much like rubber, and I didn't really want to swallow pills that smelled like rubber.
KS: It was a slight design flaw. (all laugh) It makes all the pills smell like rubber.
Co: Have a good interview.
KI: Thank you. (C-leaves)
KS: What were we talking about? Oh school.
KI: And the next problem.
KS: Oh the next problem with me at RISD was I was so excited to be there, that I was-you know I was taking drawing lessons, I was taking ceramics, I was taking-I had to chose what department to be in.
KI: Right.
KS: And I was taking photography, and graphic design, and sculpture, and filmmaking, I did silkscreen printing, I did weaving, I did-everything, And they said, "Calm down and pick something" (KI laughs), and I couldn't. Everything was just so magical; everything was a door into a whole new world. I wanted it all. And I had-by the time I was a senior I had a focus. Even that was a struggle to focus, because with the world of sculpture-I chose sculpture-even with the world of sculpture they really wanted everyone to pick one material. They had the guys that were eating pretzels and drinking molten bronze. And they had the wood carvers. Then they had the stone carvers. You know, you had to be a something. And I'm working with bakers' dough, and I'm working with cast papier mache, and fabricating things in metal and wood and stone, and animal parts. (KI laughs) So I just had to put it all together enough to just get out of there, you know. It's funny because even know when I see friends, it's always, "When did you get out of there?" It's not like "When did you graduate?" "When did you get out of there?" because I needed to get on to my own ideas. I felt like I had been in school too long. People talking about graduate school, and I was horrified (KI laughs). I need to work. So I got out, and I started my own silk screen printing company. Printing t-shirts and that sort of things. And that was how-actually the first print making job I had was in Boston, for a print making workshop, where you're printing, etching, lithography, and they wanted to set up a silk screening printing operation, and because I had a pretty good background in silkscreen printing, my teacher at RISD whose name is Art Wood knew these people, got me a job up there. Unfortunately for the people who hired me, is that they were hiring a kid out of an art school, who was taught by an artist, and not by a professional printrnaker. So the prints were rather sloppy.
KI: Ohh. Okay.
KS: Because that's the way I was taught. I was taught to make things very artistic, not practical way. So I worked there for a while, but they weren't getting the quality that they needed, and I was, you know, kind of embarrassed. And I had to go back to school to learn silkscreen printing. So Ijust did. And I opened my own company, and I read books, I went to professional seminars, and I just - And I realized, oh what a fool I was going up there and doing it that way, when all the professionals were doing it this way. So I started doing it the professional way, and I opened up my own business, and I was very successful. I was pulling prints for artists in galleries, and advertising agencies, things like that. And then I taught for three years, at RISD, printmaking.
KI: How, what was that like? Did your relationship with art change from teaching at all?
KS: Yeah, yeah. I realized I didn't really enjoy teaching that much.
KI: (laughs) Okay.
KS: Because, the way I was teaching silkscreen printing it was highly technical. I didn't want kids graduating the way I had graduated. I wanted them to know how to do it right. So I was not concentrating so much on what they were printing, but on how well they had mastered the technique. And so, that resulted in me hearing myself say the same thing over and over and over again, and so I got really bored with myself. So after three years of that I decided the world if business is a lot more exciting, because there more-new information is coming from me, whereas in teaching I was the source of the information going out to the student.
KI: Okay.
KS: And I found that was really quite as fulfilling as the flow of information going in, so I preferred the world of business, and I like the challenge of trying to market my business, market my talent. How do you get more business, how do you make sales? Where do you find clients? What's the strategy? I enjoyed that plotting strategy. Cause it made me think. It made me think not in a linear fashion, but in a lateral fashion. Instead of thinking cause and effect I would think around the problem. But while I was at RISD, one of the things I did in print making was a lot of experimenting with silk screening. Everyone else was pulling prints with squeegees and silk and screen printing ink. While I was taking the same frames everyone was using, and I went to a fabric store, and I would et these yards of lace, white lace, and I would stretch the screen with white lace.
KI: Wow.
KS: And I would use the same squeegee, instead of using ink I would go to the market and I would get blueberry pie filling (KI laughs) and pumpkin pie filling, and I would pull these prints through lace with the shiny, syrupy pie filling which would dry hard and shiny and with little bits of blueberry seeds in it, just to see where it was going. I kept experimenting, even at that stage. I kept using materials that were not (track seven) intended for that specific technique. Which is how I got here and now. You can see around here in the studio now I am pulling prints with rust.
KI: Right.
KS: And for me it is exciting. That print over there on the top, I did last summer, and that was part of a series of about 400 prints that I pulled using 40 grit sand paper pads.
KI: Okay. I like the texture.
KS: You can see where I cut them in half and I cut them in quarters, and I would ink up parts of it but not ink up the other, and that's just the uninked part of the sand paper. It leaves this blind embossing.
KI: Wow.
KS: And the one underneath it, are plastic bottle caps. I put them all together and ran it through an etching press with some rag paper, and the press pushed it in to the bottom part of the bottle cap, and make it pucker. You know, made it pouch, like a little pouch. I inked it up with green ink, ran it through, it made these little pouches, and then I went back and hand painted inside the little disks. I was--I was doing all kinds of stuff. I was running computer floppy disks, 45 rpm records, all kinds of stuff through the etching press just to see what it would look like, until I found that the 40 grit sandpaper was really where the action was. (KI laughs) So that is part of a series. I recently was working with this idea of printing rusted wire, using the rust as the ink instead of ink. So experimenting. Experimenting is really important, and it's material. That's what keeps me excited, the materials. Like these fingerprints over here. I did a series called "self-portrait right hand," and I went into a store in Warwick that sold police supplies, and I got a finger printing kit. So I got the finger prints from my right hand, thumb through pinky, then blew them up real big as you can see, 22 by 30.
KI: Yeah.
KS: Then a real common, simple office paper punch. I found five different materials. The first one, my thumb, were 35 millimeter slides. And if you take 35mm slides and put them out on white paper, the ones that are underexposed or have a lot of color, if they aren't back lit, you'll see the color.
KI: Okay.
KS: And if they're over exposed and they're really dark, they'll go black.
KI: Okay.
KS: So I separated them out into two piles. And all the ones that I could see had color, I would take out of the plastic mount I, I would punch them up in to quarter inch discs. And I followed all the loop and swirls in my thumbprint with those 35 mm slides.
KI: Wow.
KS: Then, all the ones that were black, I used for my index finger. And then I found some 35mm color movie negative film. And I punched out of that for my middle finger. And there was all of that beautiful red, rusty color, was part of the color negative. In between the frames of the color negatives, there would be a little space bar. And that was this beautiful rusty orange. So concentrating on just punching out that section, you can see the rusty color. Then for my ring finger, I went to the RISD store and they had the film making department the movie film, different color leader material.
KI: Yeah.
KS: So I bought all the color leader material I could find, and I was punching that stuff out, and (gets up) it's not here, but it's the catalogue I -Red yellow blue green brown grey and there it is. And that's the one I used for my ring finger, because I thought that after I was done it looked kind of like a giant fire opal, or some kind of gem stone.
KI: That amazing because-I project film.
KS: You do?
KI: Yeah, I just learned this semester and it's amazing because definitely I recognize these colors.
KS: So what do the colors actually mean?
KI: I don't know if there is a meaning. I don't know all that much about it, I think part of it is just to protect the film because obviously the ends get really bunged up.
KS: But there is a reason for the different colors, because otherwise it would al be the same color. somebody told me because-this is why I'm asking because I don't know-that red might have been documentary, blue would have been comedy, green tragedy, or something like that. If you find out, let me know. Because I'm kind of interested in why they are different colors.
KI: The Marx brothers were green. (both laugh)
KS: Maybe comedy is green. And then my pinky, I did as the last one-I had a doctor friend of mine gave me some expired X-rays, and that's the blue one up there
KI: Really!?
KS: Yeah, those are all medical X-rays.
KI: They're so blue.
KS: Yeah, and they were so many different shades of blue. And again, some of them were so dark that when laid out on a piece of white paper they were almost black, and others were so light there was almost nothing there, depending upon the density of whatever they were Xraying. My wife Constance gave me one of her mammograms, so that's in there. She always likes to be a part of my work
KI: I guess a very intimate part of her is in the work.
KS: Yup. Whenever I'm working on a piece, she always says, "Oh let me pin that in." Every one of my pieces she's pinned something in, or she's painted one little corner of a disc in that piece there. She always has to get something in, and I like that. It's nice.
KI: Are you in her work? She's a photographer.
KS: She is a photographer. Yeah, cause what she'll do is she photographs a lot of portraits, and she was doing a portrait of the governor at the state house. And I helped her schlep the gear over there to get set up before he arrived in his chambers, and I got to sit in his chair so she could get the right exposure, so. I sit in as an exposure model.
KI: Okay. (KI laughs) So you are involved.
KS: I do get involved.
KI: So, one of the things that, actually, came to my mind just when I was looking at your website, is you had that section that was sort of organized by material. How do you come-how do you approach a project. I mean, some of them were for companies that do manufacturing, and you seemed like. I'm trying to think of the particular one when I thought of this, I can't remember right now, but do you have, sort of a like first an image and then how can I best project it, or do you have materials that you want to use...
KS: The materials tell me what they want to do. I talk-I let them talk to me because, basically, for example there's a company in Pawtucket called Apex(?) and they make garden hose.
KI: Okay.
KS: And I had been working with garden hose all along for some of my sculptures, and I have a friend who's in advertising business, and he's---this company was one of their accounts, and he said, why don't you go and talk to them and see if maybe their interested in having you do a commissioned sculpture out of their garden hose; you're already doing it. I said great. So I went there. I showed them a slide of the work I had made out of garden hose for other things, for my self, and they like the idea. So they said, "How do I start?" and I said, "Well, you gotta give me product." So before I knew it, this truck pulled up, and they gave me 50 feet of every color they made. (KI laughs) It was wonderful. So, now I had the studio full of hose. And they gave me boxes of brass farrels, you know the male and female ends, so those were there. And I started playing around, and I came up with this idea philosophically that garden hose, that it moves water. So I liked the idea of constructing these Grecian urn shaped jugs out of garden hose. And the jug also moves water, it moves liquids. You know it-they were built up like coiled pottery, but not in a spiral. Each one is a concentric ring, and each one went from small to bigger to bigger to bigger, and I developed a system where there's no armature on the outside where you can see it. It's all internal. The armature's all inside the core of the hose.
KI: (looking at catalogue) Those are these here?
KS: Yeah. That there. And when I bent the hose around, where they met, I covered the seam with the brass farrel. That nicely covered the seam. So then I put and extra and then I sewed the whole thing together with braided wire. Inside. And again, I did a piece for Dexter Shoe, up in-there was another advertising agency that had Dexter Shoe as their client, and they wanted to honor their client by having me make a sculpture out of their product. So I went up to Dexter Maine with some people from the agency, and I went dumpster diving. But not for garbage, you know, just for leftover pieces of shoes. (track eight) For me, if you gave me a shoe, that's a finished item. That's already done. But for me the excitement is to go and find the pieces that went into that shoe. So I made the sculpture for them out of pieces of their shoe parts. and that-that was a wall sculpture that is up on the office in Boston. And that's sort of kind of the way I work. I did a sculpture for Gtech, which is a lottery company in Rhode Island; it's actually one of the largest lottery companies in the world. And they had just opened up a new wing for their high technology section, and I built a sculpture out of --for them with--a five foot by seven foot sculpture on the wall that's made out of pieces from their lottery terminals. I had-the back yard was full of lottery terminals that were dead. And I disemboweled them and took out all the tubes and transistors and diodes, and all the keyboards, and I made a sculpture our of that stuff. And I kept doing that. id did a piece for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery. I built a cube. A ten foot by ten foot by ten foot cube out of refrigerators and washing machines. That are at the front of their visitors' center, cause they have a lot of tour buses from schools, show how recycling goes. And so they would-It's all bolted down to this concrete slab, it's a permanent piece. And it's accurate to the half inch.
KI: Wow.
KS: You hold a plumb line and it's straight down. it's all really tight. And it's all held together with crossbar and wires and threaded rod and nuts and bolts. And then I filled up all the doors were off of the refrigerators so you had compartments where the freezer was or where the frost thing on bottom where the tray was and then I went to other sections of the dump and I found teddy papers, and toy trucks, and screen doors and lawn furniture and I just started filing up all those compartments with those other elements. So I don't--I work backwards from what the materials are rather than putting my idea on to it. Like these rust prints they're kind of telling me where they're going. I just kind of set up an idea. Again, these wood cuts, these cuts over here (gets up and goes to other room) I did a series of ten wood cuts-I wanted to get back to the print making, this was (looks closer) 1991, I don't know if your mic's going to pick up in here. And I hadn't done any print making in a long time, so I came up with the idea of doing a series of prints basically all the same subject, but--all the same size, but the plates were cut in all different types of techniques. Like this plate here is a piece of plywood, you can see the same subject matter-a piece of plywood, and I took an electric pistol drill. and I put a bit on it and I would go maaarraaarrraaa (grinding noise, KI laughs), and I would just kind of gouge out all this stuff and I would make the edges really nasty. And then I would treat it up with this nice pink paint. This one, this blue one, was a sheet of masonite. And I had a wood burning kit. And I plugged it in and it had a real fine point, and I didn't know it at the time, but I burned a little hole in the masonite just the way it's made it would blister up like a little volcano. So what happened is I would burn a little hole and the outside would blister up like this, so I made these dots, I made all these little dots.
KI: Ahh.
KS: And when I went to ink it, it only inked up the high spots here, which left all this white right around it. Which made these wonderful, strange kind of a line. So the whole series was done quite differently. This piece here was one of three. Exactly the same subject. There were three in the series. All done in different techniques. There were three in the series, where I took the picture and divided it up into two inch balsa wood squares.
KI: Okay.
KS: And I took the grain of the balsa wood and I checker-boarded the grain and I printed just the negative, just the positive, and then I printed the positive and the negative together, which is what this one is. The negative was the dark red, and the positive is the light red. But on the others, it would be just the dark red, or just the white. And then this is the two together. Then another one I got this--these big sheets of gasket rubber. You know when they cut the gaskets out for automobiles the rubber comes in sheets.
KI: Okay.
KS: And it has this nice linen finish to it. So I cut that out and glued it down and inked it up and used that as my printing -' So I kept working using different types of printing press(?) . then I have a whole series. And that's what I'm planning on doing right now with these rust prints. I'm going to do a series of-right now, I don't know, it could change by the end of this interview-(KI laughs) but right now I'm planning on doing a series of these butterflies, all different butterl1y configurations, about all the same size, made out of different types of rusting metal. This one's out of wire, the next one might be out of nails, the next one might be out of thumbtacks, the next one might be out of a thinner gauge wire, maybe a bigger one out of a heavier gauge wire, but that sort of thing I just want to run the idea for a while.
KI: Do you find most of your work turns into series where you experiment?
KS: Oh very much so. Yeah. I work very much in series. Cause then I go-- I'll take and idea and I'll run through it. Like the finger prints. And after I did "self-portrait right hand" I had no need to do my left hand, my right foot, or my left foot. (KI laughs). Cause it's--it's a small idea, you know, it's not a huge idea. It's just an idea that has a peripheral vision, and then after that there's no reason to keep going on it. Like these books. That's part of an idea that I had. I was really excited about the concept of-people used to buy books-you running out of tape?
KI: No, I'm just going to move it a little closer.
KS: People used to by books by the yard to put in their house as a decorative thing-
KI: Oh wow.
KS: --to make people think they were really well read (KI laughs), but they were just there as objects, and I was sitting upstairs watching television, and above the television is a bookcase, and Constance has all of her paperback books that she likes in the bookcase. And I'm sitting there and thinking, that's a really beautiful object. So I went back and I started to work with that idea and I came back and made this bookcase--had this bookcase made, and I made all these books. Out of wood. (gets up and goes to bookcase on wall) And another aspect of what I like to do is make my work interactive. And these all come out.
KI: Oh wow.
KS: These all come and you can do that, (banging noises) and some of them have a sound element (shaking of rattling noise) some of them have a (another, lower clankier rattle noise) little weight to it, some of them are heavy, some of them are very light. And you can put these books anywhere you want.
KI: Uh-huh.
KS: As your mood changes. (sitting down again)
KI: So when do you know when you've come to an end of your series?
KS: Well I don't, because sometimes I'll just get bored with doing it, I'll put it aside, and then I'll come back to it again a year later. Or two years later. It's-nothing is ever over. It's all connected. And where it pops up and how it pops up, I never know which is what keeps me getting up in the morning. (both laugh)
KI: Yeah, that would be a little sad if you knew exactly how everything was going to go. Very boring. Where do you find your materials?
KS: Well, it depends on the project. If I get-if it try to get a commission from a corporation, I get the materials from them. Right now, with the wire I called a friend of mine up whose a sculptor-Jonathan Bonner-and he works with wire, so I asked him, "Jonathan, where can I get some really nice soft wire that I can bend with my hands, that will rust easily." So he said, "Well, go down to the RISD Metcalf store, and they've got some stuff there called baling wire." I went and I got the baling wire. and then I had to try to figure out how to rust it. So what I did is I had some, I had some--an aerosol canister of something that cleans metal. And it had an 800 number on it, so I called them up and I said, "You folks are in the business of making chemicals that clean rust off of wire. (track 9) How can I make rust? You must know, because you're killing rust you gotta know how to make it." (KI laughs) And they said, "Oh, what you should do is clean your wire real well, and then, wearing rubber gloves, take some steel wool and steel wool the wire real good, and then spray it with salt water. Because--making sure I'm getting my greasy hands off of it and setting it up to be clean so it will therefore accept the rust. And that's what I did. Took the wire, straightened it out, I degreased it, hit it with the steel wool. Then I, wearing the rubber gloves while I was working, make my spiral like you see over there (phone rings) put it outside, got a plant mister-my wife has a lot of plants so she has these misters around-and I filled it with salt water-I did two of them: salt water and vinegar. And I hit it with salt water, put it outside,let it rust, it started gently. Then I hit it with vinegar, and that-it took about two or three days for it to get a nice bloom, but once it got started, it was going like crazy. It was cooking. (KI laughs) And I could pull two prints a day. Without depleting the rust.
KI: Wow, that's amazing.
KS: So I did 8, and then I decided I wanted to get on to a different image, which is why I'm building this. And this takes the longest amount of time, is building the plate. This plate is taking, you know, days and days and days for me to do.
KI: Yeah, bending wire is tricky.
KS: And trying to figure out how to-you know, how do you transfer the picture to the homosote? Cause I couldn't use carbon paper; it didn't work. I had to-the original drawing, then I put tracing paper over that to make my final drawing, then I had to transfer the drawing to that, so I figured out a way of-basically you take a needle through you drawing and you make dot dot dot dot dot dot dot. And then you connect the dots.
KI: It looks like your dots are color.
KS: Well, if you look at the left side, those are the holes that are connected with the pencil. and then I took the drawing-because butterflies are like a Rorschach test, they're symmetrical-I flipped it, it already had the holes in it, I took a red pen and I went through the holes and I mad the red dots.
KI: Okay.
KS: Cause then I didn't have to make the hole again, just use the hole. And then bent the wire. And I had to figure out how I was going to attach the wire to the homosote, because whatever I was going to use was going to show up. If I used stainless steel it wouldn't rust; it would be a white spot. And if I used steel, it would rust and the become part of it. So I was looking around, and I found these cotter pins, which, again. (gets out cotter pins). Here. Those things.
KI: Oh wow. And they are steel, so they will rust.
KS: I had to make sure to get steel so they would rust. Those are steel. But they're too long. So now I had to figure out how I'm going to cut each one down. So I came up with this device. I got a little piece of drinking straw. (gets out red drinking straw to show)
KI: Uh-huh.
KS: I got a drinking straw, and I cut off a little piece of drinking straw, and I was able to fit this in right over there, I get my pliers (gets pliers. Snap) cut it off, and I have the right length
KI: Oh wow.
KS: I had to figure that out. you know, a lot of what goes into all of these pieces is trying to figure out how to make it. And this-once I get that done, I can then just crank it out. The actual pulling of the print is the easier part. Except you have to figure out how to build the press. - KI: (laughs) Which-I mean, I saw, but maybe you could describe it again, just while we're taping. KS: Oh, well, it's based on the concept of a veneer press, which are these three quarter inch black pipe veneer press-veneer clamp attachment. Which at one time was easy to get, and now every time I called up they were out of-they were discontinuing-that store was no longer carrying that particular accessory. So I had to go through about three mail order catalogues to get the sufficient number of that floating accessory, so that when I get to building my larger, 22 by 30 inch prints, I'll have the parts and I won't have to just, wait for these parts to come in, or find out after waiting three weeks that they're discontinued. (KI laughs) but I got a good supply of my-it's made my a company called Pony, p-o-n-y, and it's a real nice product, I don't why it's not easy to get anymore. But I can get part of the system at Home Depot. The other part of the system I have to special order.
KI: Okay.
KS: And the homosote is my substrate. And I like that because I can just cut that into any shape that I like with just a utility knife. I don't even need to use a band saw or a table saw, which creates too much dust. Just cut it with a knife.
KI: Yeah, that's-that's pretty convenient. You can't beat that.
KS: Yeah. Whenever possible I like to be able to just do it myself, without relying on machinery, or equipment, or anything else. And I built the press here, out the clamping system you saw, and I cut the homosote here, I can cut wire here, I can straighten the wire, I can rust the wire, and it's really, it's a nice tight thing. I don't need to rely on a big operation.
KI: All of these skills--do you feel that with every project you have to build new skills, or are they all based on your crazy experimentation in your RISD days, or...
KS: I'm always reinventing the wheel. That's the problem. I don't have the benefit of coasting on previous knowledge, because when I get done with a series, and I've learned exactly how to make all the work that went into that series, I would be on rote. I would just keep going. I would know exactly what to do. I would change into the series, I would have to learn a whole different set of skills, to the point that if I went back to any of the old work, I would not even remember how to do it. (both laugh) Because it's on a need-to-know basis. Once I no longer need to know it, unless of course, it pops up into a different configuration of need to know somewhere else. But if I had to start silkscreen printing again, I'd have to start all over and releam the whole thing even though I did it for about 12 years, or more. Professionally. And taught it. But-that's, that's one of the difficult things. I wish I was a painter in a way, because you stretch your canvas the same way, the brushes you know what you use. You got the line of inks and paints and acrylics, and whatever it is that you use, and that work for you. And then you got your ideas, and there you go-for example you're a landscape painter, or a portrait painter or you paint dogs or what ever it is, and you just go paint. But you know, I just can't paint that way. The subject matter, it's just too arbitrary. I would need to figure out how to paint the landscape with the wooden end of the brush instead of the brush end. (both laugh) And then what type of wood works better.
KI: You make it difficult for yourself.
KS: I've been told that. So you've noticed, already.
KI: Yeah. Short period of time.
KS : Yeah, if it's easy, why do it? I was in a show, at Hamilton College, and it was curated by a guy who was showing with me at a gallery in New York City at the time, and it was-the show was based on labor intensive art. And it was just the three of us. It was him, me, and this woman from New York whose name escapes me right now. But, that was the common denominator. It was the art of hours. Labor intensive art. I'll give you the brochure.
KI: Okay. (KS gets brochure)
KS: What I was, when I was having the interview with the people at the garden hose company, I was trying to figure out a way that I could show them in a drawing what I would do for them sculpturally. One of the (track 10) ideas that I had was to take their garden hose, bend it into half round loops, and weave them like this (shows sample made of macaroni) into patterns, They came in many colors. but in order to show them the idea, I built this thing out of elbow macaroni.
KI: (laughs) This is, this is great.
KS: And then I put this on a Xerox machine. And I took Xeroxed copies and then I was able to take that and put ink on it and give them an idea of shadows, and three-dimensions, and I couldn't draw that. Cause I don't usually draw very well. But that was the concept.
KI: That's great, garden hose out of elbow macaroni.
KS: Right. (pause) Somebody was asking about that, and I lost track of this little thing, but I've kept it around. (puts it away)
KI: So you, when you said you-when you came for your interview at RISD you fell in love with Providence.
KS: Yeah.
KI: Can you talk more about that? Just what about it?
KS: Well, it was 1964, and Providence was really rough. It was really rough around the edges. You would never have recognized it, because literally blocks and blocks of it were torn down. North Main street, where there's a fire station on North Main...
KI: Right before it sort of bends to Charles, or...?
KS: Close-near RISD. You're coming down Angell street, and you make a right
KI: Okay. KS: On to North Main, and then there's-Martina Wendel's jewelry store is on your left. There's the Mill Tavern restaurant is on your right. That whole building-that Mills Tavern building used to be a building called Pilgrim Mills, which is how they kept the name Mills. And I had a studio in that building. The first floor was my landlord and was all dry goods and stuff. I was upstairs, with other RISD students. And across the street, which is now Olives, a restaurant, and there's jewelry stores on there, then to-further down to the right there's a big park which is where a wide green space is. Well that used to be buildings, from one end straight clear to the other end. It was row after row after row of buildings. And they were most of them were meat buildings. So that's where I'd go and I'd get these slabs of sides of beef ribs. They had cut all the meat off, they were just the ribs. And I dragged them up to my studio over the Mills Tavern now, at the time it was Pilgrim Mills, and I had to hang them off the fire escape. So that they would, kind of-birds would eat them and they would rot, and I could use them. (KI laughs). And then down further on that same side which were all buildings, there was this one company, all they would do was there was this little old guy, would sit staring at a box with a light bulb in it, candling eggs. ,
KI: Wow.
KS: The whole room was filled floor to ceiling with crates and crates of eggs. One side were ready to be candled, the other side he had already done. And he was looking for double yoked eggs, he was looking for fertile eggs, and separating them all out. And they only way you could tell was by candling them, and he was doing that by hand. (KI laughs). So Providence was like that. There were all these bars around, and there was--one bar was there, called the Crystal Tap, and a number of the older kids who could drink would work there. They would have at the end of the bar a big pot of pasta fagiole. And it was all free. It was really hot and spicy. As long as you were drinking beers, you could have as much pasta fagiole and you wanted. (KI laughs) And beers were 15 cents. It was just a wonderful place. It was amazing. There were pool halls and tattoo parlors, and dives.
KI: I'm just going to flip this over (flips over tape)
KS: I don't know if that thing's still on. Would you like some more tea?
KI: I'm good, thank you. (pause tape)
KI: (track 11) I'll check this again.
KS: Is that working?
KI: I think so.
KS: You can hear it?
KI: Yeah. Yeah.
KS: The-Providence back then was like the Wild West. It was just, you know, it was justwild. You could just basically do anything you want. People were having street parties, and people were just walking around. it was just very open. Not as restricted, not as many rules. It's like, I was unaware--being a student I was unaware of it, but it was just a very corrupt place apparently. (KI laughs) But the corruption was in a world aside from my world. I was like-l was like under the rock. I was like some kind of like toad to those people, and they were busy doing whatever it was they did. Some of the RISD girls would be going out with some of the gangsters.
KI: (both laugh) Wow.
KS: And the sons.
KI: So what was your world? I mean, I guess the man candling the egg--what parts of Providence did you interact with?
KS: Well, I didn't drive. I didn't drive a car until I was about 23 or 24 years old. Even on Long Island where you needed a car I always had a bicycle.
KI: Okay.
KS: For some reason I didn't take drivers ed because I didn't really want to relate to-I never really related to automobiles. I'm not a motor head. Cars are for getting me to where I have to go. So I never had a car until I was late in life. And Providence was totally walkable. Wherever I went: there was an art supply store at the memorial hall at RSID, and there was a great art supply store called Oaks on the Hill which is now where the Providence Arts Club Dodge House gallery is. That was a fabulous art supply store. You could walk to that. There was-there were two art supply stores downtown in the city. So within walking distance I could go to four art supply stores, get anything I needed. I could walk around-being a kid, a student I didn't really eat out in restaurantsKI: Right. (KI laughs)
KS: --but I could walk to many grocery stores. There was one right on Thayer street
KI: That would be nice.
KS: Which is gone now. And there were mom and pop--there was a grocery store right on benefit street where that - pizzeria is, next to it. The sandwich shop.
KI: Okay
KS: It's...Joe's? Joe's sandwich shop. That used to be a grocery store. So yeah, I could walk there to get food. I lived in apartments all over Providence, never in the same place twice. It was just a wonderful place to be. There were still cobblestones on the streets downtown.
KI: So how have you-I mean you've lived in Providence ever since...
KS: Yeah. I came here and never really left to live anywhere else. I left to go home and visit family, and I've left to travel, but I've never left to live anywhere. I just loved it here.
KI: How have you seen it change?
KS: Well, it's gotten-now, as an adult, and because I've always had a love of food and I like eating out now. I have ever since I was married. And I had a job and I could eat out, (KI laughs) I've noticed that that the restaurants has just blossomed. Providence is a real food town. With good restaurants, good grocery stores, and a food mentality that is just supportive of that. I have friends who I went to school with who own two of the best restaurants in town: New Rivers, and Al Fomo.
KI: Okay
KS: And we all were at RISD together.
KI: Do you get to eat free? (KI laughs)
KS: No I don't get to eat free, but I do get good treatment. And as a matter of fact, my friend Bruce Tillingham who owns New Rivers, he and I went to Woodstock together.
KI: Wow.
KS: We slept in a tent in the mud.
KI: How about the arts community? Going to RISD, you must know a lot of the artist who are active in Providence.
KS: I know quite a few artists who are active in Providence, and quite a few artists who have left Providence and are active in other cities and states. Like Dale Chihuly is in Seattle, Washington.
KI: Yeah, I'm from Portland
KS: Oh you are?
KI: Yeah, and we had a huge exhibit of his work at the Portland Art Museum.
KS: Cool, cool. Yeah, Dale and I were friends here. We used to go out and drink and date and do all kinds of stuff. Not each other (both laugh). Double date. And Jamie Carpenter is in New York City. And a lot of people-yeah Jonathan Bonner is still here. And then I see all these people who used to be my teachers dying. Arto Peck just had a memorial the other day, and Ken Honeybill died, and all these people. Friends and, you know. .. you see the march of time that way. Friends I went to school with having babies, and other people who taught me, dying. So it's interesting.
KI: How about as an artist? Do you feel that-I mean, you do so much experimental stuff it seems like-I mean, do you have people that you feel influence your work, or bounce off, you know-ideas off of other people, or anything like that.
KS: I don't feel-I don't generally talk about art. I'll ask people if they know where I can get something. Like I'll ask Jonathan Bonner where I can get this specific type of wire, or he'll call me and say where he can get something that I might know about. So I exchange that kind of information. I do go to some openings of people I know. Though not very many. I read some art magazines, I go to the museums-art museums once in a while. I much more prefer talking to people who are non-artists, or artists who don't talk about art. I'd rather talk about food, or fishing. For example, this coming weekend I'm going up to Vermont. It's a yearly event that I've been doing for 22 years. It's the Bradford, Vermont wild game supper.
KI: Okay
KS: It's put on by the congregational church, And they do it once a year on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. They-I'll read you the menu. (gets up and gets menu)
KI: Oh! Okay, great.
KS: (KS comes back. KI is looking at a basket of dried beans in their pods) Yeah, those are Constance has this fabulous garden, and she grew a lot of pole beans. So what we did is we let them ripen on the vine, and I picked them, and now they're drying out. And I'm gonna have dry beans to work with. Again, it's another process I've really been interested in. How do you get dry beans? I mean, you buy dried beans to make Boston baked beans, but I've never thought about what the process is for drying beans, and I found out.
KI: So are they for eating or for art?
KS: For eating.
KI: Oh, okay.
KS: Those are for eating. Okay. (paper rustling)
KI: When I, when I first-I came to Providence right before I came to Brown, my best friend's mother had just been on vacation here. And she's a chef. And she was like, "Oh, Providence is great, you can eat here, and here and here," so I'm really excited to hear what you can eat in Vermont.
KS: Yeah. Well this is a yearly event. It is the 48th annual Bradford Vermont wild game supper, and the United Church of Christ Congregational Church Vestry. And the menu this year is: bear, moose, beaver, buffalo, pheasant with rice, venison, wild boar, rabbit, and our own venison sausage. And you go down-what's interesting about this is you go down-you get a ticket for a time slot, you wait until your time is called. You go downstairs to the basement of the church, which has got the most-brightest blue fluorescent lights you could imagine. the whole place is light up like a, like a runway. Rows and rows and rows and rows of tables. You go on line, and it's a buffet. You get a plate, and people start putting in these little clumps of unidentifiable brown meat. (KI laughs) And as they put a clump of this brown meat, they put in a colored toothpick. And they give you a chart. So yellow means venison, blue means buffalo, green means beaver-because it's all brown. You can't tell what's what. (KI laughs). Some of it's shredded, some of it's cubed, some of it's sliced like steak; (track 12) different shapes-you get done it's all brown. Except for the pheasant with rice. Which is white. (KI laughs) And beige. And then you sit down at these tables, which have got big bowls of potato salad, er, mashed potatoes, squash, coleslaw, pitchers of cold fresh cider, and the venison pate, and then they give you gingerbread with real whipped cream and coffee, and then you're out of there. And then the next seating goes through. And they do about fifteen hundred people.
KI: Wow. They're just churning people through.
KS: They're churning them out. It goes from 2:30 to 7:30. And in the five hours, they turn out about 1500 people.
KI: Wow. (KI laughs)
KS: It's-it's a ritual. This is our 22nd year. And we've got about 19 guys that are going up. It's all guys. No wives or girlfriends in our group, though there are plenty of families at the church. People from--local people. Husbands, wives, kids, grandparents; they're all up there. But for 22 years now-my friend Bill Hall and I have been doing this, and we keep adding new guys, and people can fall in and fall out. So, it's coming up.
KI: So, have you ever had-I guess, in earlier years have you had beaver or venison. . .
KS : You mean prior to this event?
KI: Or, um, do they serve the same thing every year?
KS: Same thing every year.
KI: So what's your favorite?
KS: Well, I find that the beaver is the most interesting, because it is the most unique. The beaver is an aquatic manlmal, so it kind of tastes like freshwater algae. (both laugh)
KI: How does freshwater algae taste?
KS: Well, the only way I can kind of compare it is to snapping turtle. If you think of a meat that tastes like-if you think of algae-did you ever have a fish tank?
KI: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I have.
KS: You know the smell of algae.
KI: Yeah.
KS: Smell that, and you're chewing on a piece of meat. Put those two ideas together, and that's what eating wild beaver is about.
KI: Have you ever had nutria?
KS: I've never eaten nutria.
KI: Apparently they were imported to replace beaver as meat.
KS: Really, I would eat nutria, but I've never had an opportunity to have it in front of me. (KI laughs) I like to experiment with my food too. That's the other thing about why I like working here, with the first floor down here. I'm in my studio working, and as I'm working, I'm thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner, because I do most of the cooking. 90 percent of the cooking. So I'm thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner. I'm going to take a break, go shopping, get the ingredients, come back to work. And I'll be upstairs making the dinner and be thinking about the project downstairs. So I got two studios: one for cooking and one for making art. And there's kind of a convection that happens, that keeps moving up and down, and it's a nice feeling. I once had a studio in a building where I didn't live. I had a studio in East Providence. And it was a cold winter night, and I was in my-this is not where I'm living now. I had an apartment. I had a studio in this other building. And it was a cold winter night, and as I'm finishing dinner I had an idea. So I had to get dressed, lock the house up, get in the cold car, drive across the bridge, park in the lot, get in the elevator, go upstairs to my room, my space, turn on the lights, turn on the heat, and then try to find the idea. It just wasn't working. Where here it's all tight. I can just-if I get hungry and I get an idea for a great sandwich I can just run upstairs and make it. Or if I'm up there cooking and I get an idea I can make notes and put it down on my table so I can work with it later. That's the best way.
KI: Does cooking inspire a lot of ideas? From the activity, or...
KS: Well, just, it's part of the activity. It's part of a thinking process. Not that I've been cooking something and I say oh I'm going to make a piece based on a particular dish that I'm doing. I'm not going too-I'm making a pot roast it doesn't mean that I'm going to go downstairs and make a pot roast out of something.
KI: Right
KS: But it's a creative act. That's what it is. It just keeps those little brain ends wiggling around up there. (pause) So what are you actually trying to do with all this? how are you going to wrasstle with this information?
KI: Um, well first I'm just going to just transcribe the interview. And sort of absorb all that it's-the rest of it is still very up in the air. I mean, definitely it is going to-our whole project is going to turn into some sort of an exhibit and the Rhode Island Historical Society, but exactly how that is going to happen is less clear.
KS: Right.
KI: So there is-a couple of people in my class have been working with Professor Buhle, who is my professor, since the summer. And they sort have been in discussion with the curator and (dog bark) whew! at the historical society. But I think-I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen.
KS: Well that's part of your process. I mean it you knew exactly where it was going to go, it might not be as exciting.
KI: Definitely.
KS: But, now, so you're pretty much doing your project the way I do my projects. Very similar. You start off gathering your raw materials. Your information. And then you take get to next stage, which is you got to organize it. You say, what have I got? And maybe there's nothing there, or maybe there something that is radically different. Or maybe it's nothing by itself, but once it's put up against the other projects that the other people are doing, it becomes something.
KI: I think that's one of the most interesting things. I mean, some people have done interviews that are a little bit different. There's a deaf girl in my class, and she interviewed people whoyou know, using ASL and her interview were focused more on activists in that arena. And so at first she was like, "Well I'm not sure how this fits into the idea of the avant-garde," but then from talking about what that really means, what innovation is really about, she sort of was like, "Yeah, it does fit. There is a place for this." So.. . that' s interesting
KS: Maybe even her own approach to it, being deaf, was part of avant-garde. Where the process is as important as the product. I mean, that's definitely what's going on here with my work. It's not just coming up with an end product, it's a process. The journey.
KI: Not to be really chronological, but after you were--spent three years teaching at RISD, what year was that? About?
KS: 78, 79 80? Somewhere around there.
KI: Okay, then what happened?
KS: Well, prior to teaching at RISD, I had (mini disc ends) a silkscreen printing company, which I was getting real sick of. So teaching at RISD. I was teaching part time. I was teaching there one day a week. Which was a good break. Then I was teaching-the following year they renewed my contract for two days a week. The following year they renewed my contract for three days a week. And they RISD was going though a real turmoil at the time, politically. The president at the time, lee hall, was getting really. The administration, and the faculty, really upset by her policy. So she drove them to unionize.
KI: Wow.
KS: Just to protect themselves. They had nothing to unionize prior to her. So, in order to protect themselves, they decided to form a union, and they wanted all the part time people to form a part time union. And I chose not to, because I had no gripe. And I was getting sick of teaching there anyway. So when they-when the faculty said to me, when the administration said to me, "We'll make you full time if you vote for our side," and the faculty were saying, "We want you to vote for our side," I was like, "I'm out of here." So just-they were paying me a lot of money part time. I was coming from the real world. I had a printing company. I had to pay payroll. I knew what was going on outside and inside the school, my salary they were paying me was more than I was paying myself on an hourly rate. So I said, "This is not realistic." So I left teaching, went back to silk screening. But I had a friend at the time who was teaching there at the time named Ramolla Rider, an artist, and he was doing a series of projects with his students having them design their own logo, having kids come up with a picture that represented what they felt. And then he would have those pictures turned into rubber stamps. And so I was doing a lot of printing making for him; he'd come in and I'd print up a bunch of stuff. Or when I was pulling a print for another client and I had a lot of this white - paper and clear the screen and I had this stuff I was throwing out, he'd take it and make collages out of it. So he was always coming by my print shop, and he came by with these rubber stamps. And I said, that's pretty interesting. Well, yeah, cause he had like an 8 and a half by 11 inch sheet with these things all over them. And one day he had only a few stamps. And I said, "well I'll take the other half of the rubberof the plate." And I came up with my own images. Where we split the cost, I took my half. I started getting interested in some designing rubber stamps. so then I started a rubber stamp company.
KI: Wow.
KS: And it was called Bizzarro Rubber Stamps. And the screening was just getting to be too much; the fumes were killing me. I didn't have adequate ventilation, and the fumes were really nasty, they were getting in to my body. I was either sniffing them, inhaling them, or if I ate lunch in place I was ingesting them, they were getting in to my body through the pores of my hands-it was just making me really physically ill after years and years and years of doing this. Rubberstamps became an idea. To do a mail order catalogue. People would come in and see the stamps in my office, and say, "What are these? Oh, can I buy them?" So came up withdesigned a catalogue, and started selling them. And I realized there was a potential here. So I sold the business to one of the people I was working fore?) they came up, got together some money, and I sold the silk screening business and went into rubber stamps. And that was rather successful. I was able to build it up and build it up and build it up, and then eventually sell that business. I bought a building to do rubber stamps, and I got to a point where I could-and then I decided again-I had been doing rubber stamps for a long time and I had made a lot of money on it, and I wanted to be a full time artist. Cause in between each one of these business I was making art. But not when I had the business. Because I had to build up the business. So the only time I made art was when I was unemployed. So I figured, hey now you can just sell the business, get some money, sell the building, get some money, and just invest in myself. And I built up two silkscreen companies and a rubberstamp company, from scratch, and I had employees, I paid FICA and FICER and taxes and this and that. I was going to put all the information and all that energy and all that experience into developing myself as an artist. Which is what I was trained to do. To that was when I decided to do that. Do nothing by work-live off that money and make nothing but art.
KI: Sorry to stop here-is it okay if I take a quick bathroom break?
KS: Absolutely.
KI: Okay (pauses tape)
KS: So what other direction do you want to take this?
KI: Well, I guess-for me it's interesting because it seems that you really have had-you've had your time running businesses and then being an artist in between, and I guess your website that I saw was a lot of information about - and here I can see all these other products that you're doing. How do you see those two sides? Does one enable the other? Or are they, do they going in different ways? Or...
KS: One-commissions are great because it's like having ajob. Somebody want to pay you to make a sculpture, and--or some other work of art and you can get involved in a project-like I'm involved in a-right now with a school Blackstone Academy, which I've worked with them before, and that's nice, because that's money. Where as when I'm making this stuff, that's just for myself. Unless I sell it, you can never make a piece of art and depend on a sale. At least, not at the level that I'm working at. you make it, and then you hope to sell it. It's like-as somebody once-I called somebody once who said, I did not become an artist because it was a job opening. That's just the way it is. (KI laughs) so I have to make the stuff, otherwise I'll go crazy. I have to get these ideas out of my head. And hopefully I'll sell then, and I have and I do. And then I also apply for commissions. I apply for percent-for-art projects that are around the country. And I get slide sheets together and I do the artists statements, and the business of art, and send those out, and hope that one of those will hit now and then, and they have, and that's just-you play everything you can. Again another famous quote that has helped me throughout all of this is Woody Allen once said that 90% of his success is just showing up. (KI laughs) So whenever I have an opportunity to show people my work, I show up. And just by the sheer percentages. If it's one in a thousand, I'll show up a thousand times and get one.
KI: So when you do-when you were doing you're your rubber stamp business and your silk screening business. Did you feel like-I mean, you said that you didn't feel that you were doing art? I mean, at all? Or just...it wasn't...I mean to me that seems definitely related.
KS: I always try to do something that was related to art. And I often times when called in to RISD to act as a guest critique or part e of a mentor program to talk to kids about what they are doing-which I really enjoy doing-once thing I always try to encourage them to do is if they need a part time job or they are graduating and they need work, to get a job that is as closely related to what they want to do and where they want to go. I try to discourage artists from getting jobs working in restaurants as waiters, because I think those jobs are better suited to actors and writers, because its' closer to the skills that they need. Because they can observe people and they can act. Whereas visual people maybe work in an art supply store, or maybe work at home depot if you are a sculptor-you know, work with stuff. Or if you are an architect work in a landscaping company. Work in a golf course. You know, just try to work closer to where you ultimately want to end up. So having a silk screening company worked for me, because I was working with artists and galleries, and could do crazy things and print t shirts for myself. and working with the rubber stamps, I was designing, I was doing catalogues, I was doing graphic design, I was in marketing-and that was related.
KI: Did you feel like you were an artist?
KS: Oh, I was definitely an artist. I was never not an artist, but I was someone who was not making art.
KI: I see. That's an interesting distinction.
KS: Yeah, and the only way I could bridge that gap--because it would have been a very painful place to be-is I became a collector. I because a postcard collector. And through the (?) and that was my way of relaxing. And keeping my visual senses tuned in. Cause I would collect postcards and then I would collect different genres of postcards, and I would upgrade them, and I would collect different series of postcards, and I would just organize them-and I because like a museum, a museum director. I had my own little museum: I was curating it, and I was collecting it, I was organizing it. And it was all visual. It was a gut thing, I didn't even have to intellectualize anything. I could go instinctively through a box of cards and know bing-bangboom this one, this one, that's no good, yes I need this one I don't need that one, ooh. Where did this come from? I never know about this one. It is an idea that's new to me. Let me pull that one out, look at it, put it on the wall, study it. Nah, it's not going anywhere, oh yeah, I'm going to get more.
KI: What kind of postcards? Where did you just go to gas stations and find the huge potato on the back of a truck?
KS: Yeah...
KI: Or old ones, or. ..
KS: I first started when I graduated RISD. And South Main street from-going from market house all the way down to Wickenden street were antique stores. Junk shops. There was a goodwill industry down there, and a salvation army, and all these places. And I went into one of these antique slash junk stores and there was a shopping bag full of postcards. And I was with a friend of mine. And we were looking around--and I was taking these cards out, and the guy said, "25 bucks the whole bag. I'm not selling them one by one. The whole bag or nothing." So I started looking through them, and he started picking cards out, and I said, "Hey give those cards back." So I ended up buying the whole bag. And I got them back to my studio, and I spread them all out on the floor, and they were everything. They were old ones from the turn of the century 1907, 1917, all the way to modern ones. embossed ones, that went into all different categories. So I said to her-uh, a guy at RISD that I had these, and he said, "Oh I know people who collect these. Let me take a look at what you've got. some of these might be worth some real money." So I started looking at what I got. And there was this janitor at RISD who use to be-who was a postcard dealer. So I set up a time where once a week, when he'd pull up car, and I'd sit in his car. And we were like drug dealers. He'd show me the cards he had, I'd by the card, I give him money, I'd put it in a pocket, and I'd walk out. It was very-if anyone had been watching us, it was very suspicious. And it was all about postcards. And then he told me there was a Rhode Island postcard show once a month, and not having a card I would take the bus there. And there were all these dealers. There were tables full of these people with shoeboxes of these postcards. I was just dumbfounded. I just looking around, and I was picking some cards, and I knew from the shopping bag that I had some I was interested. And I was particularly interested in cards that had to do with black Americana. Black people. Because they were-I had never seen anything like that before. So I started collecting all these cards that have to do with black people. And some people would look at me and they would say, "oh you want-I say, "Do you have any cards that on American negros?" In those days, that's the way you would approach it. And they would say, "What are you going to do with them?" and I would say, "Well, I collect them." And they would go, "Oh, okay" and reach under the table and take them out. And they would say, 'The reason I do that is because a lot of people say do you have any cards? and they take them and rip them up in our face;" Cause that was the whole thing about the movement. people becoming aware of the races, you know. Amos and Andy stuff was becoming not cool anymore. This was the late 60s. 68, 69. The 70s, the race riots. When Providence was torn apart with race riots. It was unbelievable. So I was collecting this stuff. and I was also collecting things that had to do with patriotic. American presidents. Those were old. Those were like 1907. And then I became interested in other categories and I joined this club, and I would go there once a month. And then as I was-as my business were growing and I was making money and I was able to buy cards, I came up with this idea. I came up with a sheet of paper about 8 and a half by 14. Standard copy size. And I got all my card categories, and I reduced them into little tiny rectangles. and I had them pasted--did a paste up. And had them all on this things as an illustration of maybe 12 different kinds of postcards I was interested in. Because they were a brochure. And I would get these postcard collecting magazines and newspapers, which they are still out there, you can subscribe, and in the back would be a list of all these dealers who were selling postcards. And they would say, send me your want list. So I would take this thing and I would mail it to them. These are what I wanted. And I would get ups 50 pound boxes of postcards coming from all over the county. (KI laughs) So they were piling up all over the place. So I'd open them up, I'd go through them. I'd take the ones I want, I repack them, I'd put a check in, and I'd mail it back to the person. and so the collection was really building quickly,. And I still have them all. I have about 30,000 cards. Which for a collector is nothing. But for me, it wasn't-everything is layered. It wasn't just having postcards in a shoebox that was important. Nor was it having a lot of them. I wanted good quality. I had to show-I had to present them in a way that I could see them. So I got these postcards pages, that fit into 3 ring binders, But then I had all these categories. So I designed my own binders and I went to a bookbinding company downtown in providence at the time, and I had all my real photocards but in these dark red ones here (we get up and look at binders on shelf)
KI: Oh wow.
KS: all that-all my postcards that are made from a technique called real photographs are in these dark red ones here. So I had these binders for them. And I took out all the end papers, and had these special rice papers. And these are-and then I vaguely put them in categories. See, this whole thing might be animals. Yeah, this might be animals. Or at least this first have. See how some of them are crazy stuff. And then a whole series with these giant redwoods with cars going through them. Country western singers. Floats.
KS: And some of these, I just got them because I like--there was something about them I just liked artistically. That I don't know why I liked them. And that's what I mean by this saved me between an artist not making art, and a business man making business. But what-- I had to do something else, and this is what it was. Just collecting all these postcard. So I came up with all my categories. And these dark red ones are all these realphotos. And... I stopped collecting. I did keep the collections. The orange ones are all my bathing beauties. And they're new. You know, I'd go to Florida and I'd get these new ones. I also wanted to document the evolution of these cards. And not just have old ones, I wanted to come up with how technology was changing, how styles if photography were changing. These are all the Hawaiian, Polynesian girls. I tried to keep them in sections. Oh, these some of these are old, these are new. There's Jayne Mansfield, Brigitte Bardot. Some bad lipstick. And there became a way of collecting fashion. All the styles, the bathing suits-some of them are. . .
KI: Incredible.
KS: You see how modern these are, the little bikinis, and some of the older ones. Or none at all.
KI: Yeah. So when did you stop collecting?
KS: I stopped collecting when I.. .sold my last business, which was the rubber stamp business and decided I was going to make art. I got automobiles, I got advertisements, all kinds of things. I don't really keep track of them. I don't really remember anymore. These light blue are all one, the orange is one, these are all comics.
KI: Oh, wow.
KS: I love comics. And these were the kind that you could buy in the store. Right off the shelf. These comics cards are old, they're all linen comics, cause they have a linen finish. The new ones are called chromes, because the have shiny...and they're all by different artists. So I kept track on the spine. These are the MWM company, and there are the Artists and Derby. That's what all those down there are.
KI: So you stopped when you didn't need that connection-that bridge between art and business.
KS: Exactly. That saved my head as the bridge between art and business. And now I've decided to just make art. And I actually use those as references. I made a number of sculptures that were based on some of the cartoon characters, out of that. And techniques. For me everything is connected. The postcards, the art, the business, the cooking, printmaking, sculptures, it's all this-it's all my world.
KI: So how did your family feel about your artwork? It sounds like they were pretty supportive, but-or at least, understood at least to some degree that this very artistic and innovative.
KS: Yeah, they put me through college. My father paid; I was not on scholarship. He wanted-I think they were happy with it. they probably would have felt better if I was a lawyer or doctor. (Both laugh) But as long as I was working. I don't think they would be happy if I was a bum artist, if I wasn't doing anything. If I called myself an artist but didn't make anything. But the fact that I do make things, and the fact that I do make a living, quote unquote a living, and I do have jobs, and I do get shows and I am in the world of art. That's enough of a success for them.
KI: I'm still struck by the image of all the black roofed houses and then yours is the only one with a silver roof. It just seems that coming out of suburban Long Island, you know maybe that going back to the world would be really awkward, But it sounds like your parents...
KS: Well, actually the silver roofed was in Woodside, before Long Island, That's when we were in the row houses.
KI: Oh right.
KS: Yeah, I had no idea that would be an influence on me until years later I discovered that I really liked silver and I was using it in a lot of in my work and in different the apartments I lived in-one of them was on East Manning, I had a kitchen and I painted all the walls silver, and there was a dish rack in the corner near the sink, and when ever I put in this big orange fiesta wear dish, it would tip back and touch the wall and flow. The reflection would glow right in the silver. And that sparked a whole series of sculptures that I did, that were slightly relief, off the wall. And the background was painted a color. And with the right lighting, even on white, you could have a colored shadow. I was working with red shadows and blue shadows, as part of the piece. And that came from the information of the silver that kept connecting.
KI: Is there anything else you want to talk about in particular?
KS: I think you covered pretty much the stuff that I am doing. I mean, experimental print making is something that I've gone back to. When I had the rubber stamp company, I was also printrnaking then. That's kind of where it came from. There also that I was interested in the rubberstamps when I saw what Moll Rider had been doing is cause I was doing a lot of mail art. I don't know if you are familiar with mail art, but it's was a big movement, still going on now, but a big movement of artist who would use the outside of the envelope or the postcard as a work of art. And penmanship, and collage, and rubberstamping, and all that stuff that was on the out side of the envelope was the piece. and you'd mail that through the mail. And sometimes the post office would shoot it back to you and say, "we're not going to mail this." usually because the subject was too rude, or it was just too confusing, they couldn't find the address. but most of the time it went through. and people collected this. I even see now in some of the art magazines that they had a call for an entries of the mail art projects. so I was doing a lot of rubber stamping, and collecting old postage stamps. I'd go to the-in those days, the post office-you could buy old issues stamps. (gets up and gets binder of stamps) and the post office started buying up old stamps. t hey were trying to get all the old stamps out of circulation so they could sell new stamps. and this was-the stamps I used to use in the mail. But these stamps are no longer being sold. Even (inaudible) this is a three cent New York World's fair. That's a California gold centennial. Three cent. And I use these now, for mailing
KI: Wow..
KS: Because I think there really cool. And I usually go, "Well, all the post office could find is these (inaudible) currency. If someone had a thousand dollars worth of stamps that they couldn't sell it because it was a rare stamp, they could turn it in and get their thousand bucks back. Cause they new at the very least it was always worth the cover value. But if they had special one that a three cent stamp was worth twenty five buck or a hundred dollars, then that's what they were going to do. So I had a friend at the post office who was buying back these stamps, because he wanted to get them out of circulation, and people who had these that weren't worth anymore than face value, actually, and he would say, "Hey Kenn, do you want to look at these old stamps?" And so I would buy them. At face value. And I would be using them in my mail art. And I still have them. These are the--this one isn't that old, it's a 13 cent Indian.
KI: It's teeny.
KS: So I still like using these stamps. Getting at collections within collection.
KI: You can mail a post card that you've collected with your stamp that you've collected.
KS: If you want, I'll show you upstairs.
KI: Yeah that'd be great.
KS: And that'd probably be off the tape, unless you bring that portable.
KI: Yeah, I can do that (tape paused. Walk out of the studio, upstairs, and enter into the kitchen)
KS: And I've got art work frorn friends. That's a friend of mine from Florida, Bruce Helander, he's a collage artist. That's a friend Jonathan Vader, he's from Nashville Tennessee. That's David Slater. That's mine, that's mine, that's a Richard Merkin.
KI: I saw his work at RISDworks
KS: And my wife collects these ceramic donkey carts. And she's got a collection of almost a hundred different donkey's puling carts for her plants. Here's a piece that I did years ago.
KI: This chair here?
KS: I designed the chair, but this needlepoint.
KI: Oh, wow.
KS: 1976, and a friend of mine, Ed Zugar, built the chair. It's out of solid cherry.
KI: It's beautiful.
KS: Yeah, he's a very good woodworker.
KI: These are great.
KS: Praying mantises. And things matching up with the back of the chair.
KI: You know, the green print that you did with the wood burner. When I first saw it I almost thought praying mantis, from the line. And then I looked at it again and, and went, oh. But...
KS: And this was a piece that I did, it's called "Inner Parts Outer Space." These are all petty point.
KS: Tiny, little, little, little stitches.
KI: Labor intensive.
KS: And you know those fingerprints-that's what I tend to do. Build big things out of many many little things. Whether it's a stitch that goes into the big thing-it's almost like these little pixels. But I keep it turned around, because the dog jumps up here to bark at the other dogs, and her toenails would just wreck it.
KI: And here's the negative, right?
KS: Yes. That's the negative. That's the negative, and the positive I sold, and then the two together is the one downstairs.
KI: And what's this here?
KS: That's a Saul Steinberg. He's a cartoonist for the New Yorker. The workshop in Boston where I was printrnaking during the silkscreen printing he's was one of their clients, and that's the lithograph that they were doing a - session. So I was able to buy-it's called the bonne d'terre. And it's signed by him. See, bonne d'terre. Good to print. And while they were developing this print, he would make changes. Like there, he wrote in pencil, "darker." He wanted me to make this cat darker. And then, - darker. And then make those changes and then it's good to print. Actually I had about 5 but they disappeared over the years without any good reason. But I ended up with two. That one and this one.
KI: You have a lot of masks.
KS: Yeah, Constance collects masks. I was in an antique store, and I found these boots, so I had them made into lamps. (END OF TAPE ONE) (TAPE TWO, SIDE A)
KI: (Returned from getting another tape from downstairs) Hello? Okay.
KS: This was a sample I had-my friend Bruce Helander over here and I started a company. Designing beaded belts. I designed them, and he was supposed to be selling them. The first one we did was for RISD. I think that's this one here. (Turns around, lifts shirt. Beaded belt says RISD) Does this say RISD?
KI: Yes, it does.
KS: So the RISD belt, then we designed a Brown belt, we did a Rhode Island, we did a New York, we did a Boston, and we started selling these. We did a law firm down town: Adam, Park and Sheen. there's a store in Cape Maine, New Jersey called "It's A Breeze." I designed it-I was working with a broker in Miami who would send it to Hong Kong to have it made. But in order to design these things, I needed to know what the color combinations would be. So I asked him to make up one sample like that of all the different combinations with colors-background colors and front ground colors. as you can see yellow on white is the weakest, but I wanted to see it all. So there are two copies of this thing, that were totally unique. And Bruce has one and I have one.
KI: And were you-were you going say something about this, or just talk about the...
KS: Just this. That's a friend my friend David Slater. He's a collage artist. That's not mine, that was given to me by a friend who knew I was interested in that... This was one of my last pieces. Oh this is one of my first pieces, My reclining nude, where I was trying all different stitches. That's a knotty stitch, there then was this hair stitch, then this background stitch, this outline, then there was this main body. And this was done by a friend of mine. This was one of the last pieces I made.
KI: Wow.
KS: And this was one quarter of what the whole thing was supposed to be. It was supposed to be four times bigger, but I just gave up.
KI: Wow. And turned it into sort of a throw.
KS: Exactly. I didn't want to use it on the floor because it would get killed. But Ijust use it on the couch. That's a throw, right? I liked the idea that if this was a whole rug, and it was on the floor and were a little kid you'd lie on the floor and look at all the animals.
KI: There a camel, and...
KS: Yeah, there's a camel and...
KI: Swallow...
KS: And one of these guys, this monkey. This monkey was--when did I do this? It's signed somewhere. I did it in the 70s. But I took this monkey, late 8Os early 90s, and used it again in another piece, downstairs. I'll show you. I took the-I counted the stitches, I got a graphing paper, and I just reconstructed him bigger, and I used it in another piece.
KI: Why the monkey?
KS: I don't know-I just kind of liked the monkey. It just kind of hit me, for some reason. It could've been anyone of them.
KI: I like the monkey.
KS: And that's the bookcase that inspired me.
KI: Ahh...I see over the TV
KS: And I was looking at that--just sitting here, watching TV, and looking at that. There's something important about that. There's something important about that information that I'm looking at, but I'm not quite sure what it is. And then I started thinking about the book. Like, if a book has blank pages and no writing, is it not a book? Or, if you have a book, and you don't open it, is it not a book? Or if it's just a block of paper, it's still a book. So why couldn't a block of wood be a book?
KI: Same material.
KS: Same material. And the other thing is, when I look at my blocks of wood downstairs, I can assign a subject to them. One book might be an autobiography of Albert Einstein, because I say it is. Just like if that said: Autobiography, Albert Einstein, but I never took it off the shelf and never opened it, it would still be a book. So I was playing around with that combination. This was when I still had my silk screening company, I was did a lot of work for this cartoonist Abe Corin, he does a lot of work with the new Yorker. _characters.
KI: Yeah, it looks really familiar.
KS: You probably know his cartoons.
KI: Yeah, I'm not very good with names. So I'm always like, yeah, I think I've seen that before. And then...
KS: That was the original drawing he did for this radio station WP AI, which I used to print t shirts for. And that's the colorblind chart.
KI: I've seen one of those.
KS: (to dog), come one. Come on. (going down stairs) Do you want to go out? Sit. Sit. Go. Come on. You want to go out? I guess not.
KI: And now I see the silver doors.
KS: Yeah, the silver thing. (To dog) Do you want to go in? No? Fine. This photograph: this is my friend Vladimir teaches at brown. 191h century Russian literature. And my friend Salazar who is a photographer. And these grew their beards-the hair is the same, but they grew their mustaches and beards to match mine and hey wore my shirts, and Constance took the photograph.
KI: That's amazing
KS: Everyone thinks were all brothers. And this is a-this is something that I had written up. That's one hundred year old wooden type. And I like it because I love to cook, but I'm terrible with measurements: I don't know how many quarts are in a gallon or cups in a pint. I have measuring cups, so I don't know this. But I came up with this idea of that equivalence chart for kitchens. And I found this company that does boxing posters and gospel posters-you see them on poles all over town-and they had the type face. And I told them what I wanted, and had them printed these things up on a rainbow background. And I've been selling them.
KI: Is that a buffalo (skull on wall of kitchen)?
KS: No, that's a steer. A friend of mine, his brother had a slaughter house in Hogothe(?), and I told him I wanted a head, so he came in with the burlap bag with a cow's head. And it was stripped; there was no skin on it. No eyes, but the brain was still in it. Actually there were eyes. There were eyes were in it and the brains; all the meat on it, no skin. So I got this giant tub. And I put it on all four burners on the stove, and I boiled it. And I cleaned it all out, and I had the bottom jaw but it was broken. Someone broke it. It was completely intact.
KI: So, I also, when we were talking about the sort of ribs of beef, did you wait for it to skeletonize before you used in your art? Or...I have all these horrific images of moldy art or something. But how did you use it?
KS: I never got a chance to use it. The landlord complained about it (KI laughs) hanging off the fire escape for too long. It was this big rack of ribs. No meat. You could see through the slats, like this. (holds up fingers to demonstrate) And he said, "People are complaining. You know how it is. You can't have this meat hanging off the fire escape. Get it out of there." And it was really funny. So I had to throw it out. But I had a hard time getting rid of it. The garbage man wouldn't take it. (KI laughs) No one wanted it.
KI: What did you do after that?
KS: What did I do? I think went down behind an abandoned building and left it in the alleyway with the cats. Part of the donkey cart collection overflow. Oh here-this is the monkey.
KI: Oh wow.
KS: I made it out of these glass tiles. But it turns out-I can't do anything with it because the epoxy glue is releasing. It didn't stick to the tiles. So I couldn't sell it. But I still like the idea. I was playing with the push and pull of the levels. You can see the rippley picking up the molding on the top. Because I was doing a series of pieces like this, were in the back of my mind I would have liked to have done an entire room. You know how rooms have-like, well, here, they have the wainscot. They have this level here, and then they got this railing. I was toying around with the idea-I'd like to do an entire environment where it's all tile, like that, with these silhouettes with these animals going around, and then the whole rest of the wall, all over, was this rippling molding. that would be the treatment of the room. And it's still in the back of my head. And I think, well, maybe if I get a percent for art commission or an opportunity to do an environment that I could work some of that in; because I like working off of a grid. I like that, and I like the needle point, and I like all the little things. But it could be scaled up. Those tiles could be that big. For the outside of the building. This is a piece that I did for a show. It's called "Video Chignon." You know chignon is that bag that holds the hair. And that's made out of video tape.
KI: That's so amazing.
KS: And that's part of a series I did out of-there's a plant, called the croton plant, and it's highly variegated leaf, it's on to big on flowering. it's-you used to be able to buy it at Hope up here. It grows wild in Florida. I did a whole series of those leaves. There's only a few left. There's that one, and then there's a few in the other room that you might have seen over the doorway. (move to other room) These over here are the best part. I saved of the series.
KI: I like the way they look against the backdrop.
KS: Yeah, but they weren't all that way. A lot of them were just free floating leaves with no background. And they'd float on the wall. In any direction. Fidelity Investments bought a lot of those for their Smithfield facilities, and there in the cafeteria, kind of like tumbling along the wall. And then there's this series of night bloomers.
KI: I wondered why you had a stack of pizza boxes.
KS: This is how I transported. There all attached with Velcro, ready to hang. I did an installation of these, and were doing it again, for Fidelity for their Boston cafeteria. They bought 93 of these and they're all going across the ceiling.
KI: Great to have that big of a space where they all can be displayed together.
KS: Yeah, it was nice. Ah, here it is.
KI: Oh wow.
KS: But theirs were all black. They weren't these colored ones. These colored ones I did while I was geared up and everything was jigged up ready to do those, I did this second series of colored ones to try to sell them in other situations. Here's some prints I had shown at Miss Porter's School for Girls.
KI: And they were from that-that--sandpaper series
KS: Exactly, that's that piece, and that's the same series. Not exactly the same piece. That piece is now hanging in a show at the Atrium Gallery on Smith street, right by the state house.
KI: Okay.
KS: And that's about it, I guess, except for, more books. These are part of the book series. This was a piece I had in this show called, "Artifacts of the Information Age." I was using-that was in the show-those pieces, Those are made out of floppy disks from the computer. So I had this--this examines example of floppy disks parts to show people was. And this piece was all these parts.
KI: My brother used to take them and staple them. The inside. .
KS: Staple them to what? KI: Just put staples through them. KS: Through the black part.
KI: The black part. And he used to microwave CDs, too. That's not good for your microwave or your CD, but it's kind of exciting.
KS: What happened when you microwaved a CD? You had to take the metal out, right?
KI: Well, that was what happened. There's this-it almost looks like a little fire bolt that runs back and forth through. And .there' s this pattern burned.
KS: Oh really.
KI: It's quite interesting.
KS: Like that, that yeah. You have to risk ruining your microwave.
KI: Right, exactly. So my mother got a little upset when she found out, but. Yeah, it is interesting the innards. (pause) Well, that you very much for your time and for your stories.
KS: Well, I hope something came out of it that you can use.
KI: Oh, I think it will be (END OF TAPE)