Case Study Paintings
(2002-2006)

After nearly a decade of living and working in various, unpredictable apartment and studio situations scattered across Brooklyn, my wife, artist Rossana Martinez, and I had the opportunity in 2002 to purchase a modest, decrepit, fourth-floor walkup apartment in the “best” building on a mess of a block at the nexus of the Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill neighborhoods. It was in such terrible condition that the real estate agent repeatedly asked us, “Are you sure you really want to buy this place? Are you sure? Sure sure?” But we did buy it and this apartment gave us our first ever feeling of stability in NYC after moving to the city in the early 1990s for graduate school at Pratt Institute. We both worked full-time jobs in non-profit and education during that day at that time, so we spent every evening for more than three months reconstructing our new home and studio to make it livable again.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I’ve always been aware of and had an interest in Modernist architecture by the likes of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and others. Renovating our apartment unintentionally led me to begin making a new series of paintings about the concept of the ideal house. The title of this series, Case Study Paintings, and many of the visual references included in the works, were inspired and informed by the Case Study Program launched by John Entenza for Arts + Architecture magazine in 1945. The program commissioned emerging architects to design single-family houses that could be mass produced using new industrial methods and materials that were newly available during the post-WWII building boom years.

The first exhibition Rossana and I organized of our new bodies of work produced in this apartment was entitled Home and was presented at David Allen Art and Design Gallery, a Herman Miller furniture and design gallery on Smith Street, in 2004. We felt it was an ideal context for the work.