1948 Ford Idaho 1968 from "Abandoned" portfolio

Michael S. Moore

An image from the Cactus Patch Press portfolio "Abandoned," a series of 8 abandoned cars throughout the western US. The colophon for the portfolio credits packaging and production to The Heavy Unit Cartel, Oakland. It further credits "Cactus Patch Soup National Carlife Refuge / April - May 1972."

Michael Moore comments about this period on his website: "Ted Claire and I formed Cactus Patch Press in 1972 to print my Pyramid Lake drawings actual size [20x26”] in a silkscreen edition of fifty, twenty-five as boxed sets, eight images in each, thus beginning a brief foray into printmaking.

I followed that with a series of drawings of abandoned cars from drawn from photographs, a dozen of which we printed, in 1973, in an edition of thirty-nine, with again about half the edition in boxes, then did a similar edition of Abandoned Buildings drawn using slides. For the next couple of years we collaborated on small to tiny editions using individual images from my desert explorations, some hand-colored, but by the late seventies this manifestation of my work had ended, though the evidence, for the most part, remains."