MACYS WINDOWS

It was 1985.

New York City.

I was thinking about how I could promote my upcoming show in the East Village?

I was walking by Macys, and I thought, why not hang my paintings in the windows with the mannequins?

So I found out who it was that did the window displays, and I brought her a binder with slides of my art work.

She responded more so to my charcoal drawings, than she did to my paintings. She asked if I could do them large scale: four and six feet in length?

It was something like two or three months later that I had drawings hanging all along 34th Street.

I got a ton of publicity out of it.

It was a year or so later that I had a drawing show at Helio, and a woman approached me at the opening and asked if I was the guy who did the show in Macy’s windows?

She said that she was a switchboard operator there at the time, and that they had been inundated by calls asking who did the drawings?

People in cars! Taxis!

They couldn’t read the little signs with my name and gallery affiliation in the windows.

Live and learn.

I take such things philosophically.

If I had gotten that kind of BIG TIME attention early on when I was just starting out - I can’t say it would have destroyed me - just it didn’t happen.

It wasn’t meant to happen at that time.

I was always meant for now: this time and place.

Everything prior to was just practice and preparation.

But I’ll tell you about back then.

I had just come off seven years of proverbial time spent in the desert, in which I had cut off from everything.

I was making my very first moves, and it was like I was utterly charmed.

Everything I touched, turned to gold.

Some guy at an advertising agency close to Macys bought a few of those drawings. He invited me to their holiday party. It had a Las Vegas theme. You were handed a stack of chips as you walked in the door.

I won a little, lost a little, but I’m not a real party type guy, so I left early, and on the way out I put my entire stack on one number on the roulette wheel.

It hit.

It was just play money, but people seemed genuinely freaked out.

I just laughed.

That’s the way it was back then.

I knew that I was an artist with all the talent I needed, living in NYC, and that what I was about, would change the world, and that nothing in the here and now could stop that from happening.

I’ve always felt that.

I’ve always known that.

December 17, 2024

I just recently came across these photos. I had sent them to my Mom and Dad, and she put them in a photo album. As far as I know, they are the only record that I have of that show.