ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
Thirty years ago, following a published review of my first solo art exhibition, in Santa Monica, a long odyssey of hard lessons was set in motion. The review concluded with this bold statement:
“This installation starts from the premise that all systems in this world are interrelated and interdependent – a fundamental truth which Eastern philosophy is based upon and which scientists have only recently begun to recognize. In bringing these issues to the fore, Abrams’ installation offers an important opportunity to reflect on the current state of world affairs.”
Click here for the full review, “Worlds of Systems,” Artweek, May 17, 1986
The result of this exhibition was that several West Coast critics, curators, art dealers and art collectors inspired me to leave my native home of Los Angeles. They armed me with referrals to art dealers, curators, critics and museum directors in New York, London and Paris. I had no notion at that time that I would end up living in New York, France, Spain and Poland for most of the next quarter of a century.
My world perspective had a great deal to do with the politically tumultuous times of the early 1970s when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Many former alumni entered the world for the sake of social causes. For this reason, I felt a responsibility to live up to that exhibition review without any idea of the very long and steep learning curve awaiting me.
Global affairs fatefully pitted me in the midst of incomprehensible circumstances, precisely during various profound historical moments. Since returning home in 2012, those past lessons give me acute insights into current world events. The stories found on this website concerning Paris and Poland make me look in inescapably and disquieting new ways at the dreadful circumstances that drove me from both countries. The fall Parisian of 2015 followed a Polish election. Just days earlier, Poland experienced a xenophobic retreat from its just over decade-long membership in the European Union. This has happened just when its western city of Wrocław – where I lived for 16 years – was about to become the annually selected 2016 Cultural Capital of Europe.
At the same time, I have been inspired in so many ways from my experiences in foreign cultures, and I am now expressing artistically in ways previously unimagined.
Among what I present in this website are stories of what fatefully brought me into unintended conflicts with both French and Polish societies, merely for having aspired to offer ambitious artistic and cultural contributions. As a result, a dominant theme of my artistic expression has become a personal documentation and interpretation of events as they transpired. In describing these experiences as multimedia presentations, I relate stories behind both my artistic creations and a business venture in a post-communist country as it became engaged in a dramatic socio-economic transformation.
At the same time, as an outcome of spending so many years abroad, I express an entirely new direction in my work in the creation of this website and in Abrams’ Tower West.
December 2015
