Saks 5th Avenue was getting a facelift, and would be covered in scaffolding for about 6 months. Through Jean-Yves Noblet of Pace Editions they offered a few artists the opportunity to create pieces on the scaffolding, covering the whole 5th Ave side above the sidewalk. 215 feet by 15 feet. That’s a big thing.

I realized after visiting the site that it would only be seen from either across the street or from cabs moving haltingly down 5th Ave. So, it had to be something you got quickly, like a billboard. I decided to make a kind of flow chart that connected the designers whose products are sold inside and various cultural effluvia in the world outside — the designers' influences, maybe, maybe not. I did it in the graphic style similar to contemporary ads, which made some pedestrians think it was an ad...but there was no tag line.

I have been working for some time on pieces that take off on the graphic family tree form of showing antecedents, ancestors and offspring… and in these pieces I often expand on this form to include all sorts of things — philosophical, cultural and personal — that might, in my world, be connected. They might be connected in your world, too.

It was natural to take this means of presenting information and stretch it horizontally — in order to elucidate the roots, the offspring, the infuences and the illegitimate children of some well-known fashion designers — for a public art piece that has to be apprehended quickly this form seems perfect. Everything really is connected — and while some of these connections may be obvious (you be the judge) others, though less known and possible suspect, are equally true. In fact all things are equally true, but that is another piece.

It was done fast, and whatever permissions were needed were speeded through — in a slower world I’m sure someone would have been worried that Donna Karan may not have liked being connected to Karl Marx, or Calvin Klein to Minimalism, but up it went and there were no lawsuits.