The New York Years

I landed in New York City in the spring of 1977 after a nine month, self-designed, post-graduate tour of western European art centers. I carried with me over 3,000 sketches I had made of masterpieces by the great European artists I admired. On previous visits to New York, the city had always seemed way too big and complex for me to handle. But that first morning in the Big Apple, when I went to the street to buy a newspaper, I looked at the woman at the newsstand and burst out laughing. 

While traveling, I had moved so much that I had to think what language to use to ask for the paper. When it dawned on me that first morning on Third Avenue that I could speak English, my fear of the city vanished. 

Because I’d spent almost all my money on the trip, I had to move quickly to find affordable living. It didn’t take me long to discover that my options were centered on the Lower East Side. My girlfriend and I found a place on the second floor of a five story walk-up on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Avenue A. We could crawl out the kitchen window onto the roof of a refrigerator repair shop and look over Tompkins Park. We signed a lease for the five room apartment for $129 a month.

The Club Scene

I struggled to find my place in the core of the Big Apple. When I discovered the underground club world, I found a vibrant vein of society centered on music and performance and in need of visual enhancement. The club scene provided me with a realm where I could explore the limits of my creativity. 

It was on the stairs of my own apartment building that I met Ann Magnuson on the very day she was moving in. While helping Ann carry boxes up to her apartment, she told me she was starting a night club on Saint Marks Place called Club 57. 

Club 57 distinguished itself from other clubs because it was like a petri dish where wild ideas could be cultivated. Nearly everyone who went to the club participated in dramas and silly skits most of which were, as I recall, thought up by Ann. The club attracted a creative crowd. It was there I met fellow artists Keith Haring, Kenny Scharff, Frank Shiffren and Tom Finkelpearl. 

It was about that time that I leased a 2,500 sf loft in Chelsea which I turned into an art installation and work space.  SOHO was still the art center of New York. To call attention to Chelsea, we created an event called Chelsea Artweek 1980. And the jewel of the week of promotion was a philanthropic party I designed we called The Artists’ and Models’ Ball after a party that had been the talk of the town some decades before. 

My girlfriend, Lisa Evers, and I produced The Artists’ and Models’ Ball as a masquerade to benefit Artists’ Space which was about to be headed by a former director from the Guggenheim, Linda Scherer. We got Paloma Picasso to co-chair the party with Lisa. I called on Ann to create a place to hang out in the three story underground initial version of Danceteria. She called it the Dada Lounge.  The party was one of the first to combine the downtown creative arts scene with uptown wealth. 

We got artists to contribute masks which were modeled by Playboy and Penthouse models and auctioned by Sotheby’s. We got the Guardian Angels to patrol the streets of the then sketchy neighborhood around the club. (Later, Lisa married the Angels’ founder, Curtis Sliwa.) One of the guests was Alana Heiss, the founder and director of PS1. 

Meanwhile, I was running my own studio as a performance venue. I painted in performance and presented other talents. One of my most memorable guest performers was Joe Frank. Joe had a radio drama show called In the Dark. I loved the show so much that I ran down to the production studio one night to meet Joe. Shortly thereafter, I produced Joe’s first live performance at my studio which National Public Radio recorded and broadcast.  

https://kingman.smugmug.com/Art/Drawings-Paintings-Great-Reliefs-Pop-Art/Club-57-AVANT-The-New-York/

I’m not sure if it was that night or another that Alana visited me at my studio and invited me to create an installation for PS1 in 1982. One evening when the show’s curator came to my studio, I invited Ann over to meet him. They got along famously and before long, Ann had a lot of say in what the show was about. It was she who called it “Space Invaders” and got Kenny Scharff involved.

Urban Nocturns and Writing on the Wall

The city was an enchanted place at night, full of magic and mysterious figures disappearing in viridian shadows. I spent years working on a series of paintings of my visions of the city by night seen through the foliage of the parks. I drew pastel sketches crouched in shadows and transformed them into large canvasses in my studio.

About the time Jean-Michel Basquiat first became visible, a graffiti group called Avant invited me to join them. The five of us painted on the open pages of the New York Times by day and posted our paintings with wheat paste at night around lower Manhattan. We all signed our work AVANT. With Avant I began to develop a graphic style that communicated well from across a street and often included words or poetry. These are a few examples of Avant posters saved the wheat paste fate by the chunk of lead that sailed through my chest.

 https://kingman.smugmug.com/Art/Drawings-Paintings-Great-Reliefs-Pop-Art/Club-57-AVANT-The-New-York/

Love, sex, and death had always been the subjects that interested me. Some friends speculated that it was my obsession with death that called three men to attack me while I slept in my bed one night. A fight ensued with a .357 revolver, a Nazi bayonet, and a lead pipe. My loft was left in shambles, I was clubbed on the head, my blood was spattered everywhere. I ended up bound and gagged, left unconscious in a pool of blood in the middle of my studio floor. After that, but long before PTSD was known to exist, I was overtaken by internal images of violence and death. I was plagued by recurring memories of the assault. By some strange coincidence, Lisa Sliwa took this photo of me some months before the incident, passed-out after a night of painting on almost the exact same spot where I had been left bound and gagged. Less than a year after the beating, I was shot while standing at the table in the background of the photo.

I continued to paint with Avant, but I needed a deeper form of expression to exorcise the violence that had infected my body like a pestilence. This was a period of deep introspection for me. I made a lot of self-portraits during this period. In private paintings I've never shown, I invented three metaphors for death.

The first metaphor was of death as an invisible escort. "Unseen Escort" shows an old man oblivious to his companion, Death, who holds him by the arm and watches with an enormous eye. A second metaphor for death was clenched teeth. I've always found it curious the way this painting rises over my head like a tombstone in the photo above--where I'm passed out on the floor.

In this strange self-portrait called "X-Ray," I painted clenched teeth exactly in the spot on my chest where, shortly thereafter, I was shot. The shooting, like my clubbing, appeared out of the darkness. I was standing at my kitchen table talking on the phone when I heard an explosion that sounded like a gunshot. I looked up and saw smoke at a partially opened window. I looked down and saw blood on my shirt.

That's a bad place to be bleeding, I told myself when I saw the blood stain expanding in the center of my chest. "I gotta go, I've just been shot," I told the woman I was talking with. I wanted to get out of the line of fire as fast as possible so I didn't even bother to hang up. I ran downstairs and across the street to the same fire station to which I had hopped when I had been bound and gagged.

The third metaphor for death was a paintbrush loaded with paint. While I was recuperating in Bellevue hospital, a detective came in my room, dramatically unfurled this painting at the foot of my bed, and announced I was under arrest for falsifying homicide, in other words, attempting to disguise my suicide as a homicide.

That detective and 40 others were later fired in the largest firing in the history of bungled cases in the New York City Police. Eventually an investigator discovered that seven victims, all shot within a block of Penn Station, were shot by the same gun apparently fired by a still unknown assailant, dubbed the Penn Station Sniper.

I returned to Minneapolis to recuperate and decided to stay. I hired professional movers to pack everything in my loft and send it to me. So it was because of that shooting that my posters were spared solitary disintegration 

on the walls of SOHO and Chelsea. When Sophie Cavoulacos called me from MoMA to ask if I had any works left from that era, I told her I’d have to look. I opened crates that I hadn’t opened for 37 years!

I never forgot the great feeling of being included in a group of creative individuals. My Club 57 days inspired decades of enterprise. I have entertained to raise money and awareness for healthcare, environmental and artistic institutions for decades. I now consider people to be the most important ingredient of successful art and I endeavor to enhance deep, loving connections between people at every opportunity.

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