On July 2, 2009, my first day as a full-time artist, I set up an easel across Fifth Avenue from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and began painting.
Seventeen years later, the Guggenheim shared three paintings from the resulting series across its social channels.
The October 30 feature, part of the museum’s #FrankLloydWrightFridays, brings together My Guggenheim, Toward My Egypt (2026), Panton Guggenheim (2022), and Cartoon Cake Guggenheim (2025). Three very different interpretations of a building I’ve been returning to annually since the beginning of my career.
You can view the Guggenheim’s posts on:
X (The Artist Formerly Known as Twitter)
When I made that first painting, I couldn’t have known how much this building would become part of my life. What began with an easel on a Manhattan sidewalk grew into a twenty-year commitment: return to the same subject, year after year, and see where the painting takes me.
This year’s painting, the eighteenth in the series, draws on Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. Painting it brought me back to the building itself, working on location and looking closely at forms that remain familiar while continuing to offer something new.
The dimensions remain consistent at 30″ × 30″. Beyond that, each canvas is an opportunity to explore. Collage, color, abstraction, neon, art history, and the events shaping the world have all found their way into the series.
Together, the paintings have become a record of my life as an artist. Each holds something of the year it was made—what occupied my mind, how I approached the canvas, and what I was ready to try.
There is a particular satisfaction in spending years with a subject and still feeling curious about it. My college track coach, the late, great, Bruce Lehane once ran the same 17 mile loop daily for 365 days. In testing the mental effects of repetition, he concluded that while the roads never changed, he did — making the same 17 miles an ever changing mystery. His hypothesis mirrors this twenty year project perfectly.
For the museum to share this work as the project approaches its final years is a meaningful moment. My thanks to the Guggenheim team for bringing the series to their audience, and to the collectors, friends, and family who have followed its evolution since that first day on Fifth Avenue.
Two paintings remain… I look forward to meeting more wonderful people on Fifth Avenue in May of 2027.