Studio Day 78

Larry Wolf, Photographer at the Lincoln Memorial (1987/2026)
tiled image on newsprint 

Studio Day 77

Larry Wolf, At the Lincoln Memorial (1987/2026)

Longing to Make an Anti-Dystopia

What I am actually longing for

When I listen honestly, I am not longing to do nothing.

I am longing to make.

I want to make handmade paper.

I want to work with wet plate collodion.

I want to experiment without making every experiment prove its future usefulness.

I want to follow the material intelligence of the work.

I want to let my home become a studio again.

I want to cook, sleep, sort, mend, walk, read, and remember what kind of life allows art to arrive.

Hillary - The Slow Alchemist

Anti-Dystopia

Jenka - Heated Rivalry and the Art of Anti-Dystopia

“We just want a future.” He speaks for all of us right now.  

Jenka - Heated Rivalry and the Art of Anti-Dystopia

Studio Day 76

Larry Wolf, March on Washington 1987 - NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (1987/2026)

Brian's Poems

Brian Hitselberger, Day Light / And Then / Night Fall (2026)
Photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Along 65N

Larry Wolf, Along 65N (2026)

Studio Day 75 - Call for Artists

6311arts Call for Artists - screenshot

This work is from my archive, from the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It was the first time the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed in DC. I was there with my then partner, several friends, and thousands and thousands of others. We had traveled from Vermont to Washington for the weekend - community, joy, rage - and tears.. so many tears, and laughter, and the deep awe of our presence taking over the Capital that weekend. 

This is a large print made by tiling sheets of paper. It will be taped directly to a wall along the top edge of each sheet. It's still very much a work in progress, though this current iteration feels good. The attached image is a prototype printed on regular paper. The exhibition print will be on vellum.

I'm also working a single legal-size sheet about the work which folds into a fortune teller, an artist statement and a momento to take away.

The work as displayed for the exhibition is priced at $750. ... I might also sell it as a limited digital edition with the right to print and install, say for $200. I'm open to discussion on pricing and the digital option.

Thanks for your consideration,

Larry

Larry Wolf, Celebration of Life on the National Mall (1987/2026)
printed on a grid of pages
56" x 73.5" (each tile is 8" x 10.5")

Studio Day 74

Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Shuffled (1987/2026)

Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Reverse Tracing (1987/2026)

Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Tracing (1987/2026)

Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Group Photo Drawing (1987/2026)

Larry Wolf, Lincoln Memorial Massed Areas (1987/2026)

Studio Day 73 - Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Larry Wolf, TSA - It's a Muscle - Rex Delafkaran & Colleen Keihm (2026)

Larry Wolf, Rex Delafkaran at TSA (2026)

Larry Wolf, Colleen Keihm at TSA (2026)

Studio Day 72 - Wrightwood

Martin Wong
Photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Martin Wong
Photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Martin Wong: Chinatown USA at Wrightwood 659

Studio Day 71

Larry Wolf, Printing on Vellum (2026)

Studio Day 70

Larry Wolf, Commentary on Learning to See by Keith Sawyer (2026)

This is personal. As someone who had a flash of insight into how software works, and how when I was 16, I shifted my thinking to do it, I deeply believe that a mental reorientation is required to do software, data analytics or any "tech" or "hard science" well. It was my professional life. 

I've watched people work in software development and database groups for years and always be struggling. Their code worked but never very well and they were often stressed out. I've seen others write code as a kind of poetry, a structure that flows from them. The same with people who get databases and how to design them, how to extract information and meaning from all those 0's and 1's. I've seen it with friends who are mathematicians and physicists. 

These technical areas are design spaces, like the art spaces that Keith Sawyer writes about. They are disciplines that train the mind and change how our minds work.

There is something special to art in how the process of making becomes the path to knowing. It's not unique to art, it could apply to communicating with someone, of navigating through moments of confusion, when what one person says lands differently for the other, the "failure" to communicate could become an entry way to a deeper understanding of difference and connection, or it could become part of a larger disconnect. 

I'm reading Sawyer's Learning to See to further make that shift in my art making. 

[see also Keith Sawyer's substack. Lots of good stuff.]

Studio Day 69

Larry Wolf, Two Moments of Community
March on Washington 1987 (2026)

matt__runs

https://www.instagram.com/matt__runs/

I knew watching @heatedrivalrytv was risky. I didn’t expect it to crack me wide open. Some stories don’t feel like fiction. They feel like memories, carried deep in your soul.

Matt Kenny @matt__runns 28 December 2025

Studio Day 68

Larry Wolf, My Driver to the Airport (1998)

Studio Day 67

with my photo (1987/2026)
photo: Karen Dana Cohen (2026)

AIDS Memorial Quilt

Colossus

Martin Wong
Wrightwood 659 - Martin Wong: Chinatown USA
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Larry Wolf, Torch and Crown (1998/2026)

Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (1903)

Studio Day 66

Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026)

Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026)

Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026)

Larry Wolf, April Fidget (2026)

Reference Images

Larry Wolf, AIDS Memorial Quilt - March on Washington 1987 (1987/2026)

Marsden Hartley, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1933)
Milwaukee Art Museum

Max Beckmann, Wally Barker (1948)
Milwaukee Museum of Art

Studio Day 65

Larry Wolf, March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights (1987)

Lost ... or ...

I Know Billy Patreon Post

Studio Day 64

Gertrude Abercrombie, brooch 
Milwaukee Art Museum
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Marsden Hartley, Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1933)
Milwaukee Art Museum
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Marsden Hartley: The First Great American Modernist

 – The Earth is All I Know of Wonder

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

“I think painting for him was a struggle. I think he was always struggling with those basic problems of being alive. ... 

"Everything is a potential existential crisis.  For an artist, you want potential. You want there to be conflict. Conflict creates friction. Friction create heat. When there's heat, there's potential for combustion, explosion, new knowledge. ...

"He was never satisfied with his work. At the same time, he was completely convinced of his own genius. That's enough to keep a person going. Why should you quit, if you're a genius? ...

"Hartley's most homoerotic work.. a totemic object.. it's all about the torso.. brute force.. like a tree trunk of a human being right in front of him. These men are elemental forms. It's not about the sweetness and tenderness of familial bonds between two men, it's barely homosexual. ...

"'I want this mountain. I need it. I have to touch it. I have to have it.' And the mountain rejects the artist. 'I have been here before you. You cannot possibly possess me.' Nevertheless, he's there trying. Grappling with it. Struggling with the thing he would like to possess. He gets the next best thing which is to possess an elemental symbol or idea of it. He does that with paint. ...

"I'm always excited to see a Marsden Hartley painting in the flesh, in person, in close contact with it. I'm excited. What I've learned to look for is there are big clumsy brush marks, clunky composition, it's thick. He's not trying to finesse reality, he's trying to beat reality out of the thing he's looking at."

Sam McKinniss, painter (b. 1985) 

Studio Day 63

Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum

Research visit scheduled for 25 & 26 June 2026.

Studio Day 62

Advance Reader Copy of Douglas Stuart, John of John
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

 "There had been a time in their late twenties when it seemed John could no longer pretend. He would come to Innes, his eyes rubbed pink with guilt and exhaustion. ... In those days, John snuck away more frequently and it was a feast for Innes. They led the dogs on long unnecessary meanders, until they found a hollow in the hillside somewhere dry, somewhere away from the eyes of their neighbours. The land was so bare it was a hard thing to find, but over the years they had come to map all the places they could be together and they came to know them by the flowers that grew nearby, or by the shape of the rocks that hung overhead. 

...

"He would ... ask John to spend a sunny afternoon curled up with him, the curtains drawn tight against the world... He had magazines about the gay community and he would read articles about the need to abolish Section 28, about the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor. He would declare that what they were was 'gay'. And John would bear it silently. And he would hate it."

[Douglas Stuart, John of John, pages 169 & 222] 

Section 28

the director who tended a garden next to a nuclear reactor  / Derek Jarman

Studio Day 61

Larry Wolf, Spring (2026)

Paul Thek, Meat Cable (1969)
Art Institute of Chicago
photo: Larry Wolf (2026)

Studio Day 60

Larry Wolf, Ghosts of Bodhisattvas (2026)
Bodhisattva Reimagined: The Buddha of the Future Made Whole
Art Institute of Chicago

also Studio Day 52

Studio Day 59

Four Generations in Brooklyn - Family Sedar 1957

Studio Day 58

Larry Wolf, Worktable (2026)
transfer drawings from used risograph stencils

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)

Larry Wolf, untitled (2026)