Ron and Diana

RON AND DIANA, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1977
Black and white photograph created with 120 film, 20” x 20”, Artist’s Collection

Ron and Diana, both artists, are two of my oldest friends. They stand in a street in the old working-class city of Allentown, where Diana was born. They’re young and remind me of the heady days of the 1960s, when we believed peace and love were just around the corner. Ron and I attended the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969. Their gaze is straight ahead, like the arrow on the street pointing directly to them that seems to say: ‘You can change the world.’ The 60s was a time when everyone who was young and hip wore masks. We were interchangeable—artists, students, teachers, activists, intellectuals—on a mission to transform a corrupt, unenlightened society.

RON AND DIANA, New York City, 2024
Digital color print, 20” x 20”,
Artist’s Collection

It’s early 2024, and Diana has a show in a Brooklyn gallery of portraits of politicians who are holding hearings on the January 6, 2021 Capitol Building insurrection in Washington, DC. The masks on Ron and Diana speak to me of our collective journey. We did not change the world. We did retain our creativity, making our own arrow on the floor of the gallery from a stray roll of masking tape. We remained true to our mission of making art, sometimes using it as a means of education and therapy. As I look at the image and compare it to the earlier one, I see the obvious changes of body and clothing. And I see, more deeply, the mask of friendship that continues to defy time.