In 2011, I stumbled upon an abandoned door during a time of personal and professional inflection. In that moment, the door felt like more than a discarded scrap of wood. It was a threshold—a manifestation of my being between places, between versions of myself, between past and future. I brought it back to my studio. Soon after, I began noticing forgotten doors all around me, discarded and strewn about my urban landscape.

​

As with most objects in my studio, I began painting and gilding the doors, and at some point I began scrawling on them with pens, crayons, markers—an almost graffiti-like act that felt both creative and subversive. Gold, so often treated as sacred or precious, took on new meaning when applied roughshod over battered old doors. As I worked, a line from an old song kept echoing in my head: On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain.

​

The song was Sin City, recorded by by Emmylou Harris in 1975—a defining track of my early years. Emmylou and I go back a long way. We met in Washington, DC at the start of our careers, when she was a local singer-songwriter and I had just started as a framer at the Smithsonian. The song, written by Gram Parsons (who’s band Emmylou would soon join) and Chris Hillman, is a melancholy lament about artistic exploitation and intellectual property. The “gold-plated door” was a reference to the 31st-floor Los Angeles penthouse of a corrupt music manager. Hillman and Parsons learned the hard way that they didn’t own the rights to the songs they had written with their previous band, The Byrds—a fact that was legally true but philosophically absurd.

​

That strange injustice struck a chord with me. It speaks to the illusion of ownership, the fragility of security, and how we can be undone by the very forces that promise us opportunity. It echoed what I was going through at that time, and what countless others were facing during the post-2008 recession—the potential evisceration of our livelihoods and our spirits by forces outside our control. It went beyond art, to war and history and the broader human experience. I thought about my father, my mother, my uncle, that entire generation of working-class men and women whose lives were forever shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. And I thought about my daughter in Italy—her life there suddenly felt like a roundabout return to the place that, through the war, had laid the groundwork for her own life.

​

In all of it, I felt how helplessly we are all bound to these unseen forces, to the world we inherit. All we can do is respond to it.

​

So, I “opened” my doors to the world, installing them in public spaces and inviting anyone to mark and transform them. Each door is a living, communal canvas that exists as a response to its time and place, belonging to everyone and no one, without a gatekeeper.

​

I begin each piece by searching specific sites—urban backstreets, historic districts, derelict buildings, dumpsters—for doors that have been left behind. I’ve been a picture frame conservator for over 40 years, which has trained me to look for beauty and value in discarded bits of wood. Doors, like frames, are often overlooked. If they look right, they go unnoticed. Frames bridge art and architecture—they surround, protect, and often elevate what they hold. Doors perform a similar, albeit more functional, role in our lives: they divide and connect, conceal and reveal.

​

I don’t typically restore the doors that I find—only minimally, and only when necessary. Rather, I preserve their imperfections, paint them, and apply gold leaf, a material that carries both symbolic and literal value.

​

Passersby are encouraged to inscribe the surface with thoughts, memories, prayers, or drawings. The result is a collaborative surface that evolves over time, becoming both a visual record and a cultural mirror.

​

This series brings together all aspects of my practice: craftsmanship, conceptual inquiry, historical reverence, and public engagement. Each door is a one-of-a-kind object, but also part of a larger, ongoing narrative—one that spans from the shores of Sicily to an old motel in the Mojave Desert. What connects them all is the impulse to reflect, to gather, to remember, to hope. Through these doors, I aim to create spaces of reflection and connection—markers of shared values and evolving memory.