About the blog name

“Fresh widow” is a play on words -- a Marcel Duchamp “readymade” of a miniature, tweaked French window. You can read one analysis of this piece by a scholar (not me) here.

A few months after my husband died, I remembered this pun without cringing -- and saw in my mind’s eye a potential artwork. The work would be in the style of Pierre et Gilles, a super-airbrushed portrait of me, very idealized, bursting or floating through a partially open French window, hair flowing, looking liberated. This image absolutely clicked. I called a friend who did work that could morph into a piece like this, but it was not to be -- she had moved on into pieces using words to delineate complex racial assumptions.

But the title still rocked. And while Duchamp put sexual allusions into the piece (it was signed by his drag alter-ego), he didn’t have 20 years of hip-hop behind him with all the richer meanings of “fresh.”

And there is not a lot out there for young widows so I decided to pile a bunch of my ideas together and self-publish again, this time digitally. So here I am. How did YOU get here?