"Evidence of Being" was initiated after I embarked upon a project to archive the objects accumulated over the course of my 30-year artistic career. The project not only represents the strategy of self-historicization and feminist exploration, but also an investigation of the fraught and difficult politics connected to an artistic practice in New York City. By looking historically at the practical conditions that artists face: high rents, limited space, the art market, gentrification, class warfare, gender bias, ageism, other kinds of discrimination and the market-based metrics of success, I found these objects became a lens through which these issues could be explored in my work.