In 1970, American artist John Baldessari burned almost all the paintings he had made in a thirteen-year period—a performance known as the Cremation Project—and baked some of the debris into cookies for display at the MoMA. Art market moguls may shudder at the thought of these lost works, but Baldessari was always invested in concept and process, and recording this purge in photographs was his way of moving forward in his practice. The next year he proclaimed I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art in a hand-written piece where its title became his mantra. In 2014 Baldessari was awarded the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. Baldessari was born on June 17, 1931, in National City, California. He lived and worked on the West Coast, including studies at San Diego State College, the University of California at Berkley, and UCLA. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts, his students including David Salle, Barbara Bloom, Mike Kelley, Liz Larner, and Jim Shaw. Regarded as a founder of conceptual art, Baldessari appropriated images and text to create new works, drawing significant influence from Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist practice. In 2017, Baldessari told the Los Angeles Times, “People look at what I do. I can’t ask for more than that.”