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I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, 'New Museum,' to be an act of civil disobedience. It's not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It's painting as insurgency.

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

My father loved to take us on historical vacations, and you should have seen the stares we received in East Berlin.

I think it's absolutely fascinating that in Berlin the parliament can discuss actively the role of their soldiers in Afghanistan because is it still possible, literally, for a German soldier to take up arms.

Russia is now very far from being a communist country, but when I walked around Moscow, I kept glimpsing these haunting images. There were statues of Lenin and some neon signs of the hammer and sickle. I remembered myself then as a little girl, living under that oppression.

My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young.

I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.