The Reva K. Series

Three weeks following my mother’s death in July 1986 I began unpacking a bag of paper that I had collected in New York quite by happenstance on the day she died. Astonishingly, the bag contained some paper which in its coloring resembled an exquisite stretch of New Mexican desert that I had seen from the air as I returned East after her funeral. I remember sitting fixed to the window on that flight, scanning the “airscapes” but all the while saying goodbye . . . finally.

And so when I drew those papers out of my collection bag, I had no option but quickly to fashion them into a collage . . . into one that still takes my breath away whenever I see it! Thus arose the first of The Reva K. Series.

In the months that followed, I made collages with abandon from that bag of paper, collected so fortuitously, and from other paper that I gathered in January and April on trips to New York. Many of these collages are in this exhibit at The Temple Gallery. They, as the others in the Series, are connected to my mother, not thematically, but in feel — lyrics against the ground of death’s nothingness. Their making constituted my work of mourning.

Let them sing . . .

Irwin Kremen

Durham, North Carolina
March 1988