Eureka and Benecia, California
The Barn Gallery and Arts Benecia
collective grief—in memoriam packs more than 100 boxy forms made of handmade paper onto a low, nine-by-12-foot plinth to create an aggregation of structures that recall the apartment buildings and office towers of every midsize city around the world—all of them similar, no two exactly alike. The family resemblance depends not only on the use of a consistent formal vocabulary, but also on the fact that nearly all of the “buildings” seem to have sustained damage, displaying heavily textured surfaces that appear charred and blackened. A few structures grouped together in a contiguous zone at the margin, glowing brilliant saffron, are the exception.
Overlooking this vista is like gazing down on a world of ruin. Moving around to experience the diorama from different angles, the viewer shares the remote, omniscient viewpoint of a rueful god. The bird’s-eye rendering of an urban cityscape is disconcertingly familiar, its emotional impact potent. It’s a reminder of how certain forms and viewing positions shape our awareness and structure our formative memories. Who hasn’t peered through a regional jet’s cramped ovoid aperture on final descent and thought: home? To see the familiar array gone dark is to be informed with visceral immediacy that something major has gone wrong.
Lori Goodman and Teddy Milder, the artists behind collective grief, are Northern California sculptors with extensive bodies of work in fiber and paper. Collaborating here for the first time, they initiated parallel processes of improvisation in their Eureka and Berkeley studios to generate the installation’s many forms. “We had self-imposed constraints of color, size, and rough shape,” Goodman said. “But we had freedom within those constraints. We’d sit down to work, and we didn’t know what was going to happen.”
The project dates back to 2023, when Milder and Goodman returned from a trip to Europe and decided that they needed to communicate the grief they were experiencing in response to violence and acts of atrocity taking place worldwide. They wanted to reference humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in the present, as well as historic events that had left indelible scars. The intention was to commemorate the miseries wreaked on innocent victims and to salute the perseverance of survivors. Mass suffering caused by war, famine, and genocide in Gaza was never far from the artists’ minds. “We traveled to Germany and Poland, returning just when the Israeli kidnappings and subsequent horrific Gaza war began,” they wrote. “We reflected on the mass killings of the Holocaust; genocide, war, and devastation in Gaza; and atrocities that are now occurring and have been throughout history, including the current threats on democracy. We were simultaneously inspired to make work to mark collective grief.”
While the identity of Milder and Goodman’s blackened city remains unspecified, the parallel with the charred ruins of Gazan neighborhoods on our screens is impossible to ignore. Within the context of this exhibition, a dynamic emerges that photos and videos of devastated urban districts tend to elide. As viewers move around the plinth, the exercise of privilege, power, and dominance that inheres in the creation as well as the reception of such drone’s-eye imagery becomes apparent. Circumnavigation carries the potential for catharsis, but it can also feel like an indictment.
In this dramatically darkened cityscape, the presence of the few saffron-colored forms posits hope. The chromatic intensity of these structures suggests that the general devastation has not been total. Life persists, with candle wattage. It seems important, too, that this bright zone is contiguous. Radiance is being emitted not from discrete points that remain isolated, but through the networks that connect those points with one another. “I became obsessed with finding that saffron color,” Milder said. “Lori had worked with [it] before, but I hadn’t. We mixed a lot of pigment to get what we wanted. We knew that it would be a very stark contrast. We were hoping that the materials would illuminate well and be translucent.”
At the installation’s opening, viewers circled slowly, eyes downcast. It felt as though an ephemeral community was coalescing in real time. “Both of us became aware of how much we were processing our grief through a year and a half of working on this,” Milder observed. “People said, ‘It must have been really great for you to be able to do something, with all this grief and all this bad news.’ This was a reflection that came about once we were well into the process: that we were processing what we were feeling by using our hands.”
collective grief—in memoriam is on view in the exhibition “Where the Spirit Meets the Bone: Grief and Healing” at Arts Benecia through December 21, 2025.
