The Corporate Caring series currently consists of forty-two woebegone drawings. The series seeks to acknowledge those beings and objects that are overlooked, discarded, or considered expendable. Its subjects include a self-portrait, animals, trash, flotsam and jetsam, and images associated with mortality. Together, they ask viewers to reconsider what is easily ignored and what remains worthy of our attention and care.

The series began when I noticed two small birds lying in a parking lot. They had apparently collided in flight, fallen together, and were subsequently run over by hundreds of passing cars. From January through September, they remained where they had fallen, unnoticed and uncollected by the maintenance staff. Over time, they came to symbolize people whose labor is considered unimportant – individuals whom institutions allow to remain only so long as they are useful, yet whose humanity is rarely acknowledged. I found myself feeling great sympathy for the birds. I eventually drew them as a record of their significance and then gave them a proper burial.

During the past forty years, other unexpected subjects have appeared that seemed destined to become part of the Corporate Caring drawings. They have never been sought out; rather, they have presented themselves through chance encounters. The work included in this exhibition depicts what may have been a cormorant, vulture, or buzzard lying across most of the roadway as I was driving my children to summer camp in Columbia. Another unforgettable image appeared years later of two flamingos or perhaps another long-necked species whose intertwined necks formed an extraordinary composition at a traffic light. My children, however, protested so loudly against stopping in traffic that I was unable to record the moment. It remains one of the few images in the series that exists only in memory.

The Corporate Caring works are acts of witness. They ask whether attention itself can become a form of care and whether drawing can restore a measure of dignity to those lives and objects that have been overlooked, abandoned, or forgotten.