When I was an art student I had a great teacher named Nancy Chunn. Her first assignment was to bring in a bunch of stuff we really “responded to.” The stuff could be pictures from magazines, photos, fabric, basically anything. Then together we would look at the objects and “read them like a shaman would read the entrails of a sacrificial animal,” to interpret my artistic muse.

Anyone who would use the words, shaman, entrails and sacrificial animal in an art assignment (or even the same sentence) was already rating high in my book. Since I was a collector, it wasn’t difficult to fulfill the request. My apartment, a boarded-up storefront between Avenue A & B in Alphabet City, was crammed with the stuff I collected. I brought in a number of items, including some old Valentine’s Day greeting cards (my birthday) and an illustrated western story about Billy the Kid.

Her interpretation? “There are a lot of female artists who deal with women’s issues, but I think you may be one of the few men who really wants to communicate male issues.”