Edition of 300
Coated card stock
6” x 7.5”
Postcard print of “Artist Thomas Ray Willis reads a letter from NYU regarding his $120,000 student loan debt while making a watercolor painting with his tears. March 19, 2019. NYU MFA Program. By Marilyn Church.”

From the catalog description:

Marilyn Church is one of the U.S. Federal Court's longest working sketch artists. The Smithsonian has a vast collection of her work, and the Library of Congress has obtained more than 4,500 sketches in their archives. Church has drawn the high profile trials of OJ Simpson, Donald Trump, John Gotti, Bernie Madoff, Woody Allen, Martha Stewart, Tupac Shakur, Puff Daddy, the Central Park jogger case, the World Trade Center Trials of 1995, and most recently, Thomas Ray Willis.

In his book “NYU MFA Art Critique,” Willis hires professional courtroom stenographer Samuel Hittin to record his graduate school classmates’ skepticism of his tear paintings being “real.” Furthering the courtroom allusion, Willis commissions Church to draw a portrait of him making a watercolor painting with actual tears to authenticate the crying process as a rebuttal to his peers’ remarks. Copies of the book were entered into the Museum of Modern Art Archives, Whitney Museum Library, and New York Public Library, and were performed live at Printed Matter Inc, Distillery Gallery Boston, and Montez Press Radio.