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all struggling. Everyone sat around talking a lot, at the Cedar Bar, and it was nice, the camaraderie. Many of us are still friends.

The art establishment paid me no attention, though. They assumed the whole Abstract Expressionist movement and anything related to it was inhabited only by white males. They thought black painters should paint their own people, like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence did. I mean, the two of them are geniuses and were recognized, but at the same time, an abstract artist like Norman Lewis was ignored, even though he hung out with Rothko, de Kooning, and lots of the others. I took strength from my experiences in Paris, where it wasn't racial, but I realized that in America, you do get into that. I remember that Algernon Miller said that in the arena of "high art," painting is the last area of racial superiority. During my Tenth Street days, it was tough to be taken seriously, or even noticed, if you were an abstract painter who's black.

It was that same year that you made your first shaped canvas, right?

Yes. At the time, I was working mostly on paper, because I didn't have the money for canvas. I was painting a rectangular picture that looked pretty good, and I decided to coat the paper with oil paint strokes. I was going to glue it like a collage, and I looked at it and looked at it and looked at it, and I thought it had a punch. All of a sudden, I put the paper over the edge; it stuck out and it worked! Only without a stretcher, the piece was limp, so I built it up. I built up a stretcher, and I mounted that area so that it was no longer limp. There was no precedent for it, but immediately, I thought it looked fantastic.

Then, it was shown in a group show at Brata for Christmas 1956. Now this was a coop gallery, and I had nothing to do with where it hung. They put it right up front, and people talked about it. Thousands saw it. People said they had never seen anything like it. I didn't know how they were taking it; no one called it a shaped painting. The critic Anita Feldman interviewed some of those people in the gallery, and they said that they were all doing it. Yes, immediately after me, and she knew it. She was around then, with her husband, Joe Feldman, who is dead now. She saw it, and there is all sorts of documentation of where it was reproduced with the names of the artists in the gallery. The sculptor Sal Romano, who is the husband of art critic Corrine Robins, was there too, and he also saw it. It wasn't called shaped painting then, just something strange and different that began with that painting. Then, other people began to do things like it.

The first time I noticed someone taking credit for the first shaped painting was in the 1960s when I was in Paris. Then, on the West Coast, Frank Okada said, "Everybody knows the first time we saw a shaped painting; it was Ed