I was first diagnosed HIV+ in 1986 just after the test became available. I volunteered for a study at Mt. Sini Hospital under Dr. Sufi. In that year my lover and I decided that we did not want to spend the time we had left selling our art. We only wanted to use that time to make art. Fortunately we were both able to do that. Our families supported us in this decision. Paul finished his novel and I worked very hard to give myself a new vocabulary in art. This I accomplished, but my gallery dropped me because my paintings did not look like what I had been doing for the previous ten years.

In 1993 Paul Nash died. That year I worked harder and accomplished more than any other year of my life. While he was sick I worked to alleviate the strain. After he died I worked just to keep myself busy. It was a very difficult but very productive time in my life. Paul was present in mind and body until the very end. He encouraged me and helped me find a new studio. He even took our friends aside individually, and unknown to me, and told each of them to look after me.

In September of 1994 I found myself in the hospital and assumed that my own time had come. So I called my friends and brought them all down to my new studio. None of them had ever seen the new space or the new work. I showed them what I had made and asked them to help me find a way of distributing the works and preserving my letters, documents, photographs and other related materials. My gallery had dropped me when I changed my style, so I needed to seek another venue or alternative solutions.

The happiest of these new solutions was working relationships with the New York Public Library and Visual AIDS. I donated all of my documents, letters, photographs and two hundred sketchbooks to the Library's Rare Books and Manuscripts collection. They are currently being catalogued. Because my death seemed so imminent, the New York Public Library used some of the grant monies received from the AIDS Estate Project to hire a video crew to interview me in my studio. I showed them my work and talked about why I had made it and what it meant to me. The curator and the crew were most helpful by asking pertinent questions and prodding me to share ideas and thoughts, many of which I had never articulated before.

The curators at the New York Public Library recognized the huge changes that had occurred in my adult life. I was an Annapolis graduate, Class of 74. I was a Naval Officer, and then I became the first Naval Officer to challenge the military's ban on homosexuals in the military. After the trial and my discharge I came to New York to go back to school and start a new life. I got a Masters Degree in Communication Design from the Pratt Institute, collaborated on a book about my military experiences (Get Off My Ship: Ens Berg vs the U.S. Navy, Avon, New York, 1978), and began working as a painting assistant to Charles Bell, a first generation photorealist.

I had been trained by the military in photography, but it was only a hobby for a busy young officer. But because the times were tough and monies short they allowed me to photograph events when other professionals were not available. I photographed public ceremonies involving the Naval Academy, President Nixon, Vice President Ford, many members of Congress and even the reopening of the Suez Canal and President Anwar Sadat.

For all of these reasons the idea of working from photographs to make artworks appealed to me. I threw myself into my new job as a painting assistant while still doing photography and experimental photo collages. It was not enough for me to work for someone else in their style. I wanted my own style. So for ten years from 1976 to 1986 I worked in these areas. It was my diagnosis that changed all that and charted a new course for my career and my life. I decided that those works were not expressive enough to articulate the many conflicted feelings that I had about what had happened to me.

It was chiefly in the sketchbooks that I saw my new style emerge. Paul and I had also begun to travel widely, so I had to change the way that I made my art. It had to be something that I could do quickly in short bursts while moving constantly. We made one long trip around the world staying in four star hotels, a gift from Paul's mother. It was during this trip that I found my way and fully formed my new artistic vocabulary. This is clearly evident in the sketchbooks and photographs that I created in those many months of travel.

I began to exhibit my works only after Visual AIDS came to my rescue. They were able to include my paintings, watercolors and wire sculptures in dozens of exhibitions. The most prescient of these shows being one at the Artist's Space in Soho, and finally a full retrospective of my works from 1976 to present at the Robeson Center for the Arts Gallery on the campus of Rutgers University in Newark.

My online life has been relatively recent and I am no expert. Thankfully I was included in projects by other people and can now send you to sites that contain my work or reflect my history. With the help of collaborators who became friends and friends who became collaborators I have several good sites for you to visit.

http://www.apollomedia.com/copy.html
http://www.hotwired.com/i-agent/95/28/copy.html
http://visualaids.xq.com/thumbnails.asp
http://visualaids.xq.com/copy.html
http://www.artincontext.com/listings/artist/7/au9h4
http://www.nypostonline.com/gossip/729.htm
http://www.thebody.com/poz/profiles/10_98/berg.html

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Day Without Art Web Action Project 212/206-6674 x201 staff@creativetime.org

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