By the summer of 1984, things were already moving faster than I fully understood. I was working constantly, often on several projects at once, fueled by equal parts conviction and improvisation. Money was scarce, but ideas were abundant. That imbalance had become familiar terrain. What changed—quietly at first—was recognition.

On June 5, 1984, I received word that I had been awarded a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. The amount was modest—$5,000—but the impact was anything but. At that point in my life, that sum wasn’t supplemental income; it was oxygen. It meant time. It meant materials. It meant saying yes to ideas that normally stayed hypothetical. I had learned how to do a lot with almost nothing, and that made the grant feel larger than it was. It wasn’t a windfall; it was leverage.

One of the other fellows that year was Doug Argue, whom I already knew from the New French Bar. We’d crossed paths there often enough to recognize something familiar in each other’s thinking. Sharing the fellowship drew us closer. It gave us a common stake in what came next, and it mattered that we were navigating it together.

What made the Jerome fellowship especially powerful wasn’t just the money. It came with permission—explicit permission—to invite critics into our studios. Three of them. From anywhere in the world. That detail mattered. It signaled seriousness. It suggested that what we were doing wasn’t provincial or temporary, but part of a larger conversation. At the time, I absorbed that more instinctively than analytically. I didn’t stop to marvel at it. I folded it into the ongoing momentum of work.

Momentum was the operative word. By 1984, everything I had been building since arriving in Minneapolis four years earlier, felt like it was beginning to cohere. Artpaper was established. My studio practice was expanding in ambition and scale. I was no longer testing whether I could sustain a life as an artist; I was testing how far that life could extend. Confidence crept in—not as arrogance, but as assumption. I assumed the next thing would be possible. I assumed problems could be solved. I assumed that if a door didn’t exist, you could still knock.

That assumption would prove decisive.

I had learned enough about funding structures by then to notice patterns. One of them stood out immediately: the Jerome Foundation also supported the New Museum in New York. Most Fellows’ exhibitions were held locally, often in modest but respected venues. That was the expectation. But expectations, I had learned, were not rules. They were habits.

The idea arrived the way many of my ideas do—not with a thunderclap, but with a quiet sense of inevitability. Why not ask? Why not see if the Fellows’ exhibition could be held at the New Museum? Working with Doug, we encouraged the fellowship manager assigned to the program to make the call. We didn’t disguise the audacity of the request, but we didn’t apologize for it either. We framed it as a possibility worth considering. To everyone’s surprise—including, perhaps, our own—the answer came back yes.

The exhibition would take place in the fall of 1985.

That decision didn’t just elevate the fellowship; it altered my internal sense of scale. Suddenly, the work I was making wasn’t just responding to a studio or a city. It was entering a national public space—one with glass walls, literal and figurative. I hadn’t yet built the piece that would occupy that window, and I didn’t yet have the idea. What I did know was this: the ground beneath me had shifted, and there would be no way to step back onto it unchanged.