I realized that once I became a sexagenarian, my body morphed into an unseeable object, a mere biological container nestling vital organs to keep me alive. My art has always dealt with the nude — quite often my own body, naked with blemishes (which were coming on stronger as the years passed) and shifting into newly settled configurations. At the end of my sixth decade, feeling vibrant, alive with intellectual curiosity, making videos, writing, and painting what I consider some of my finest works, I decided to celebrate and literally embrace my chassis, including the scars that defined life’s odyssey.

In 1995 I got my first computer and seized on the diverse possibilities that this new technology offered. Most important, a friend taught me how to manipulate photographs in Photoshop, which turned out to be an invaluable tool for future ways to communicate. I began with a series of photographs titled “I Can Still Dance” — a self-portrait depicting my obsession with the passing of time as I “virtually” wove my body in and out of New York’s and New Jersey’s streets, stores, parks and buildings. In these portraits, the personal and the political are interlaced: they involve risk through a literal baring of self, expose the vulnerabilities of aging, and explore with humor and pathos how I as an older woman exist and navigate as unnoticeable in an urban environment.

To bypass Facebook’s policies on nudity, the artist self-censored her work, for example, seen here, “Grace Joins Abakanowicz’ Alterations” (Archival Pigment Print, 2015).

I joined Facebook in 2005 shortly after it was first launched, and became “Friends” with a widening group of “Like”-minded artists. Dialogues on style, meaning, technique, branding, and commercialization were discussed with people from all over the globe — there being no geographical boundaries as fresh ideas penetrated my hermetic solitary working cosmos. Images were exchanged and suddenly a person who had just existed as a name of a stranger, took on a fresh presence once I beheld their visuals. Into this online neighborhood, I decided to post my self-portraits and quickly got a notification from Facebook’s Standards Policy on Nudity to desist. Intimidated, I devised a strategy of bypassing their provincially narrow definition of nudity and decided to self-censor by covering my breasts (particularly nipples) and genitalia with black rectangles — aesthetically a distraction, but crucial to being permitted to stay in the Facebook community. Since that time, I have feared Facebook’s imposing anonymous “watchers,” and whenever I conceive of a new composite photograph, I sense their hot sighs on my neck, ever vigilant.

I have been fortunate to have two comprehensive articles written by Suzanne Russell in Women’s Voices For Change, a magazine whose mission focuses on women over 40 celebrating “. . . the power and wisdom of women in the second half of life.” The comments that Women’s Voices readers wrote, like the one below, gave me added impetus to freely make art without the restrictions and hypocrisy that are often evident on social media sites: