I’ve been having conversations with artists since Byron Kim suggested that I do so as artists felt comfortable speaking with me when I arrived in New York after college in the early 1990s! Their voices and their wisdom and their passions, all in their own words, have rolled around in my head since then. After mentioning this kindness in an upcoming podcast with Katherine Bradford, I spend some time remembering a monumental work that he began in 1991 around the time that we met and it’s still ongoing. This is how he described it when it was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York:

“Synecdoche is a multi-panel painting. I made the individual panels by going out of my studio, and finding people, and just asking them if I could copy their skin color. And almost always they said yes. There were a variety of people, from picnickers in the park to college students to famous artists. So I'd sit down with the person, and I would mostly look at their arm. I would generally avoid using the face, because a person's face skin color tends to change really drastically as they're talking. It’s a really difficult color-mixing problem. Because the colors are really unnameable colors. And so you really have to get in there and find the color.

Synecdoche means a part standing for the whole. It's a term of grammar, really. In the Navy when they say, "All hands on deck," they don't literally mean just the hands. They mean all the sailors' bodies. So this artwork is meant to represent something. And to me, every part of it represents the whole. In other words any nine or 25 panels represents the whole piece; and the whole piece represents all of us in a way.”

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