FEATURED ARTIST KERRY RUTZ Over past year and a half Kerry Rutz and I have worked closely together on a number of projects. As the curator and producer of "Life After Death: Embracing the Queer Widow" (The Queer Widow Project), I collaborated with Kerry and six other artists in the multi-disciplinary installation featured at Space 743 as part of the National Queer Arts Festival 2001. In addition to the installation, Kerry and I also designed and produced that exhibition's catalog. We were also both featured in "The World From a Gay Perspective" at Sacramento's Michael Himovitz Gallery and later, a more compact version of the exhibit bearing the same name was featured at the Limn Gallery in San Francisco. We learned that not only do our artistic skills and styles complement one another, but we also have very similar views of the world around us, and we work very well together. As a result of this I have invited Kerry to share his work in the first of an ongoing series of featured artists. Kerry has created a number of works that address the social constructs applied to gays and lesbians in America. Through a wide range of media including painting, assemblage, writings, and installations he has tapped into such basic universal notions as Anguish, Grief, Love and Joy for ideas and themes to create works of art that address the topics of equal rights, AIDS, self affirmation, gay bashing and murders, and queer widowhood. The following are selected examples of that work.