“Last autumn I meandered into the Getty Museum's 19th century French drawings room and noticed these two sublime works-- one by Georges Seurat the other by a lesser-known artist Emile-Jules Pichot.  These petite pencil drawings both featured the same male nude model, noticeable by his aged, emaciated physique, long grey beard and hair tied up into a topknot bun. Turns out both these artists-- as well as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-- were all students at Paris's L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the 1870s when figure drawing was standard education-- alas, it no longer is.  Upon further research, I learned that the identity of this very distinctive looking sitter remains unknown and is referred to as "The Old Indian" among academics.  And collecting drawings that feature "The Old Indian"-- is actually a thing among the museum-set!  The Getty proudly owns these two works and they are always searching the globe to acquire others.

I thought: what if a gallery were to host a live nude model session and invite fourteen artists of varying mediums and disciplines to create, interpreting this one sitter each in their respective inspired way.  Let's do it on a Sunday afternoon for two hours and invite art-appreciators to observe and interact with the creative process, allowing it to be transparent and the onlookers to engage. Then two weeks later, after the artists had time to gussy up their individual works in their own studios-- we hold a proper exhibition for everyone to see the resulting artworks.

Pietro at SPY Projects had said to me earlier that month, “Leslie, if you ever have anything difficult you want to mount, come to SPY!"  Hence, The Universe Stops Existing When I Close My Eyes....”

-Leslie Fram, Curator