Maya Schock

Maya Schock was a great painter who lived in Harrisburg and was a lively contributor to, and shaper of, its artistic scene in the seventies. She has friends everywhere who remember her with reverence and great respect. We lost her very early to suicide. I was still a child then, and only knew her through her work and her friends. Her work always spoke instantly to me, and I have never seen a bad or even mediocre painting by her. Unfortunately, there is very little available for public display. My Penn State campus did have works by her on constant display, and I loved communing with these paintings when I attended. They are hung in an extremely well-traveled area, so Maya has tens of thousands of people each year experiencing her visual elegies and strangely stratified catalogues of loss.