The artist Fred Tomaselli turned off a radio blasting NPR in his East Village studio the other day, settled into a creaky swivel chair, and described where he’d spent his early-pandemic, after his studio assistant “fled to Vermont.” “My work’s usually really heavy—I can’t lift it myself,” he said. “So I was, like, fuck it, I’m going to take my studio and put it in my guest bedroom in Williamsburg and just make little drawings that are sort of a deep dive into the emergency of COVID, because every day was a banner headline. In March it was, like, BOOM BOOM BOOM—every day was just an earthquake.”
In that bedroom, he scanned front pages of the Times, printed them on watercolor paper, and painted and collaged over them, creating bright-colored patterns often reminiscent of groovy stained-glass windows. Eventually, he began to move components around, mismatching headlines and photographs. A number of these works are being shown by the London-based gallery White Cube, in a digital exhibition that runs through December 26th.
Holed up in Williamsburg, Tomaselli, who is sixty-five, tinkered, gardened, biked, boogie-boarded, fly-fished, and birded. “It was like being back in high school,” he said. (He grew up in California, “in the shadow of Disneyland—I had Tinker Bell flying in the night sky outside my house, amid the fireworks.”) He went on, “I’m a big birder, and I never really had a chance to focus on my back yard before. But I think I got seven new back-yard birds during the pandemic. I had a Nashville warbler and a Wilson’s warbler in my plum tree—like, on the same tree, at the same time!”
Prints of the newspaper works hung behind Tomaselli, who wore a checked flannel over a gray T-shirt, black jeans, and sneakers. One, from September 29, 2021, featured a photo of a yellow bird, onto which he had affixed yellow flowers, and around which he’d added a leafy pattern, all under the headline “COVID MISINFORMATION CREATES RUN ON ANIMAL MEDICINE.”
He asked his new assistant, Ryan, to dig up the actual paper from that day—“He knows where shit is.” The top headline read “MILITARY ADVISED BIDEN TO EXTEND AFGHAN PRESENCE” and was paired with a photo of a scowling General Mark A. Milley. Beneath the fold was the bird, captioned “The Maui nukupu‘u, last seen in 1996, is one of 22 animals joining the list of lost species. Page A17.”
Tomaselli’s birding-life list, which he’s kept since the nineties, has about four hundred species. He wandered over to stacks of boxes and flat-file drawers, and began pulling out other collections.
“I have every New York Times since 2005,” he said. “This file is ‘collage material, humans,’ so this is like plastic detritus and eyeballs and noses and lips and hands and feet and mouths.” All of these had been scanned, reprinted, cut out, and arranged by color and size, for ease of collaging. Other drawers and boxes were labelled “Map Prints,” “pads o’ paper,” and “POT” (as in the leaves, which he presses and uses in his work).
“Hey, Ryan,” he called. “Do you know where my insects are?”
“Like, real insects?” Ryan asked, while continuing to excise scanned images of bird feet with an X-Acto knife.
“Wait, look, here’s some monarch-butterfly wings,” Tomaselli said. “There was a big praying mantis in my butterfly bush, and it would kill butterflies and you would find the wings. And I thought, Well, the mantis is giving me a present.” He paused. “On the other hand, monarch-butterfly populations are crashing, so that bums me out.”
Near the flat files hung a centuries-old Tibetan thangka (depicting, per Tomaselli, “the union of compassion and wisdom on this sundial dancing on ignorance”), slightly damaged by yak-oil smoke. Allen Ginsberg—another thangka collector—died upstairs. “Two floors, but, like, directly,” Tomaselli noted.
He pointed to a foam-board maquette of a building, the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, for which he’s designing an elliptical mosaic. Beside it was a reject, featuring a mosaic owl. “I was gonna do this, but I just found out that owls are considered bad luck there,” he said.
He’d made a Times-manipulation work about the late Barry the Owl, of Central Park fame. In Tomaselli’s piece, Barry is paired with the headline “FACING AFGHAN CHAOS, BIDEN DEFENDS EXIT.” “They don’t really make any sense together, but it just felt right,” he said. “I saw Barry; I see all the celebrity birds.” The mandarin duck? “I saw that duck before it was famous! And I was, like, it’s an escaped pet, big fucking deal. And then the mandarin duck became a thing, in the news, and I was, like, that duck is fake! You know you can buy them on the Internet for a hundred and fifty bucks. They’re, like, ornamental ducks you can have in your ornamental pond in your back yard in Connecticut.” ♦
