When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.
I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.
There's part of our culture where uniqueness is celebrated and appreciated and another part of our culture where this one way to be - one color hair, one sized breasts, one kind of nose - that's also front and center.
I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.
