Free to Be… You and Me

This is the third dispatch from Working Title, my mash-up of myth, Masters, and merriment, on view at Philly’s Da Vinci Art Alliance through September 24. Each painting in the show began with a museum blitz across Europe — four cities, four works, four points of departure. Instead of reenacting them, I teleported them straight to 1974: temporal surfing from Antiquity to Renaissance to American suburbia.

ATALANTA, INTERRUPTED. 2025. Egg tempera on panel. 24 × 36 inches.

Guido Reni in the Prado absolutely floored me. Hippomenes and Atalanta hovers mid-stride, apples tumbling like fate itself. To see that incarnato — that porcelain flesh finish — was devastating, something seemingly untouchable. I’d have to find a different way into reanimating a core memory. As a little boy, I first met Atalanta not through Ovid but on the 1972 children’s record Free to Be… You and Me, where Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda gave voice to her story. It left a deep impression — the very best of the ’70s in its tenderness and possibility. Encountering Reni’s version years later felt like meeting an old friend by chance in Madrid. His painting crackles with forward motion. Mine slams on the brakes and turns tunics into tracksuits.

Guido Reni, Hippomenes and Atalanta, 1620s. Oil on canvas. Prado Museum, Madrid.

The race doesn’t open onto a stadium but folds into a living room. Movement is stilted by carpet, the windows gauzed, their light softened and blunting the outside. Even the wall art interferes — its repeating pattern fracturing the figures into 70s geometric abstraction, as if they were caught inside a kaleidoscope or lighting up a vertical disco dancefloor. The chase doesn’t propel forward; it refracts inward, splitting desire into shards of distraction and manipulation, the blindness that keeps them circling.

Reni painted the myth as the beginning of a relationship, swift and fated. Mine lingers on what follows — not the triumph of speed but the inertia of selves, doubled and confined within the same space.

Working Title runs Sept 4–21 at Da Vinci Art Alliance, part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Closing reception September 21, 12-2pm.

Preorder prints are available now — hand-signed, limited edition, numbered. See it in the show, or in your home.