Art Re-Education Revisited

I’ve been thinking about that phrase.

A few years ago, while attending Friends General Conference, I took a Zentangle workshop. Part of my interest was practical. As a teacher, I was always looking for things I could bring back to my students. At the same time, I was doing some spiritual searching of my own.

When I retired, my intention was simple. I thought I would return to the work I had left behind years earlier when I completed my MFA. While teaching, my focus had been on technology, my students, and teaching itself. I assumed I would pick up where my thesis left off and continue from there.

I did return to my thesis and to its central ideas: how perception and physiology affect our vision of reality.

What I discovered, however, was that too much had changed. The media I was working with had changed. My interests had changed. Instead of continuing where I left off, I found myself asking some of the same questions I had wrestled with in graduate school.

What is my art about?

What am I trying to say?

And what medium is best suited to saying it?

At some point, I began to wonder if I was engaged in a kind of re-education.

Looking back at those early pieces now, I can see that many of them focused on value, texture, repetition, and mark-making. At the time, I didn’t really realize what I was exploring, but now they feel a bit like exercises in learning how to see and do again. To me, that’s my art re-education.

What I do know is that one thing kept leading to another.

A drawing would spark an idea for the next drawing, and little by little my curiosity carried me beyond the boundaries of Zentangle itself. Questions about line and pattern turned into questions about color, surface, and different ways to make marks.

Before I knew it, ink led to watercolor, watercolor led to gouache, gouache led to colored pencil, digital work, and eventually oil paint.

The recent exhibition at Collective Z feels like a milestone along that path. With the show entering its final week, I’ve found myself taking a breath and wondering what comes next.

And perhaps that’s the point: I’m still asking questions.

I’m not sure where the path leads from here, but I’m still eager to follow it.

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

— Paul Klee

Reflections on Collective Z

Reflections on Collective Z

Bill Hendricks, Kaitlin Reid, and Michael Reid pose in front of Marsha P. during The Ordinary exhibition at Collective Z Gallery in Manhattan, June 4, 2026.
Bill Hendricks, Kaitlin Reid, and Michael Reid at The Ordinary, standing in front of Marsha P. at Collective Z Gallery in Manhattan, June 4, 2026.

My drawing, Marsha P., was recently included in The Ordinary, a Pride Month group exhibition at Collective Z Gallery in Manhattan.

I went to New York not knowing quite what to expect. It had been a long time since I had shown work in a setting like this, and I arrived with all the usual questions: How would the work look? How would people respond? Would I feel comfortable there?

What surprised me most was how interested I became in the other artists’ work. I arrived focused on my own piece, but quickly found myself drawn into the larger exhibition. The quality of the work impressed me, and I was proud to see Marsha P. holding its own among it.

There was another surprise.
Friends appeared. Some I had not seen in years. Others reached out online. Their support meant more to me than I expected.

Standing in the gallery, surrounded by artists, friends, and people engaging with the work, I felt something I hadn’t anticipated: a sense of belonging.

When I look back on the experience, I will remember the artwork, the conversations, and the people who showed up. But I will also remember realizing that, after many years, I still have something to contribute as an artist.

For that, I am grateful.

The Ordinary remains on view through the end of the month at Collective Z Gallery in Manhattan. Marsha P. is also available for purchase.

I am especially grateful to Alex Wang and Collective Z Gallery for creating the exhibition, bringing together such a diverse group of LGBTQ+ artists, and making space for these conversations.

A Living Room Church

A Living Room Church

A personal memory about beginnings, community, and what history sometimes forgets.

Whimsical ink and watercolor drawing with a cross, house-like forms, curling vines, small figures, and a soft blue-violet wash suggesting shelter, spirit, and community.
**Dr. Seuss’s Heaven** — A tribute to Dr. Seuss, mixed media on paper, 2005 (approx. 6 × 9 in.) — A small drawing about the rhythm of life

 

There are stories that get polished over time, and stories that quietly disappear.

I’ve carried one of those quieter stories for years.

Long before MCC became what it is in Minnesota, there was a small gathering of us — a core group of gay men and friends trying to build spiritual community when such spaces were rare.

The original services were held in our living room on the 3400 block of Pillsbury Avenue South in Minneapolis.

Word spread by mouth. People came. We worshiped weekly. There were picnics, gatherings, friendship, and a real sense that something important was being born. The worship had a Catholic tone. It was heartfelt, searching, and deeply communal.

There were many involved — names I remember, and names I’ve lost — but I remember the spirit clearly.

Then life moved on. Michael and I joined the Air Force, and I was stationed in California. MCC continued to grow. It moved beyond our living room, then into other spaces, eventually finding a home at the Minneapolis Friends Meeting House.

That was also how I first encountered Quakerism — another thread that would shape my life.

I’ll admit: over the years I sometimes felt forgotten, as though those early beginnings had faded from memory. But memory is a tricky thing. Institutions grow, stories simplify, and humble beginnings can disappear into history.

What remains for me is gratitude that I got to witness — and in some small way help hold — the beginning of something that mattered.

And I was deeply happy to see it grow.

Finding Benton in Michelangelo

The Council Episode of the Battle of Cascina, painted by Bastiano da Sangallo after Michelangelo Buonarroti. A densely packed group of muscular male figures twist, gesture, and struggle in a dynamic battle scene derived from Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina cartoon.
Bastiano (Aristotle) da Sangallo (1481–1551), The Council Episode of the Battle of Cascina, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1542. This painting preserves part of Michelangelo’s lost composition for the unfinished Battle of Cascina
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Martha's Vineyard. Benton transformed the island landscape into a rhythmic composition of figures, movement, and place, reflecting his distinctive American Regionalist style.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Martha’s Vineyard.

I was at the Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was not expecting much after being at the Vatican and in Rome and seeing so many of Raphael’s works in person. However, the show at the Met was a real eye-opener.

Not only did it present the history and the images, but it also showed Raphael’s education and the many works he studied and used as references for his own work. Specifically, I was enamored by his drawings. The drawings had real life.

What I realized is that as he tightened the renderings, the life gradually faded away. I know I am not in any position to critique Raphael’s work, but that was one of the most amazing things I took from the exhibition.

The other surprise was finding an image created by an artist copying Michelangelo’s work. When I saw it, it reminded me so much of Thomas Hart Benton: the energy, the rhythm, even the lighting and shading.

It revealed to me that Benton, too, must have been deeply drawn to Michelangelo’s frescoes and to the undulating, muscular compositions Michelangelo favored.

One of the things I enjoy most about museums is that you never know what is going to stay with you. I went to see Raphael. I left thinking about Michelangelo, Thomas Hart Benton, and the ways artists borrow from one another across generations. Sometimes the most memorable part of an exhibition is not what you came to see, but the unexpected connection you discover along the way.

“The drawings crackle with nervous energy, which gradually attenuates as Raphael translates spontaneous insights into the cool, lacquered surface of painting.”
— Financial Times

That observation captured exactly what I felt walking through the exhibition.

The Ordinary — Pride Month Exhibition at Collective Z

Promotional collage for The Ordinary, a Pride Month group exhibition, featuring a grid of diverse mixed-media artworks including abstract drawings, figures, symbols, and contemporary visual narratives by participating artists.
The Ordinary — a Pride Month group exhibition at Collective Z Gallery featuring works by participating artists.

“Being queer is ordinary. So is making good work.”
— Collective Z, The Ordinary exhibition statement

When Collective Z announced The Ordinary, I immediately understood why the title mattered.

For many of us, simply living our lives has too often been treated as something unusual, controversial, or in need of explanation. Yet most of life is made up of ordinary things: friendships, work, love, loss, community, and the hope of being seen for who we are.

My piece Marsha P. is included in this exhibition. It began as a reflection on Marsha P. Johnson, but it also became a reminder of the people who came before us and the lives that made our own possible.

Sometimes the most important stories are not extraordinary at all. They are simply human.