Revolutionary composer, poet/writer, and artist, John Cage made a series of watercolors in 1988 at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia; he used stones from New River, which were arranged systematically with art materials (colors, papers, brushes & feathers, etc.) and employed according to I Ching-based chance operations. These visual works represent a high point in Cage’s famous displacement of “choice” from the level of taste, personal emotion, and aesthetic judgment to that of a non-personalist modality of engaging materials and process. “My choices,” he said “consist in choosing what questions to ask.” The work on paper preserves the traces of an event, an energy field of material expression, where things speak for themselves in unforeseen ways and retain their freshness year after year.