Eyal was life itself. We are left here shifting around in a depleted realm (I owe this word to Cora Cohen, who upon hearing Eyal had died, said “the world is depleted”), we flattened, having lost dimensions, dimensions of dynamism, as Eyal drew us out of our flatness, drew us out into fuller being.

Gillian Jagger (1930–2019) and Vita Petersen (1915–2011) were dear friends. Gerda Blumenthal (1923–2004) was my aunt, my mother’s baby sister. All three were European. Vita emigrated to the United States in 1938, Gillian and Gerda in 1939. Gillian became a sculptor and teacher, Vita a painter, Gerda a teacher and writer. They knew rupture. I saw them all grow frail. Each provides a different way of thinking about creativity and aging. In her eighties, Gillian constructed fanciful, even wild sculptures of animals. At ninety-five, her eyesight fading, Vita painted small monochromatic abstractions of an almost unfathomable yet somehow communal privacy. My enduring image of Gerda’s last years is of her in her living room, almost immobile, her curiosity and faith intact.

Place: Charleston. In 1958 Gian Carlo Menotti founded the Spoleto Festival in the medieval Italian hill town of Spoleto. In 1977 he moved the festival to the no less picturesque and pedestrian-friendly but even more hospitable South Carolina port city. Charleston is inviting. It breathes history.

During the last 25 years Carmen Giménez has built a reputation as the most important curator of modernist sculpture in the world. During her most recent Guggenheim exhibition, “Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History,” Carmen spoke about her remarkable life and career.

On November 12, 2006, I was one of the speakers at the book launch of Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne.