The Brooklyn Rail

I’ll never forget him. I had some good times with him, and I also got to witness some of the more crazy aspects of his personality, like when he dumped all the rotting blood from The Blood Show out the door of the Reese Palley Gallery on Prince Street, stinking up the block for days. I got to see him in rage and in unstoppable laughter. He let me do this crazy project of mine of pasting dotted lines all around the Everson. He let me do a lot of things. He even  encouraged me. When we were in Dallas together celebrating the life of Andy Mann, he knew every good Mexican restaurant in the city. We ate good that weekend. 

There are all kinds of museum directors; it’s horses for courses. You have a building project, there are directors for that; fund-raising, there’s one for that, too. Whatever you can think of, there is a director for that.  But Jim was an artist’s director. The artists came first with him. He was not, probably, a Board of Directors centered director. Years later I was invited to direct a small museum, a job for which I was totally unqualified. I tried to channel that aspect of Jim, working for the artists. 

Artists tend to forget the people who made video art possible; Jim Harithas, Russell Connor, Howard Wise, to name a few that come readily to mind. Great people, all of them. Lest we forget.