in the traditional art and crafts of the country. It was in the East that Clemente found creative refuge, and specifically in their philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic ideologies. Clemente traveled to India for the first time in 1971 and later visited Afghanistan in 1974 with his Boetti. The two shared the impulse to turn away from Western ideals of order, ambition and power, and instead towards virtues of the East. Clemente was intriguied in “the esoteric….and the seductive” aspects of Boetti’s work, as Clemente himself describes–––the very “border between order and chance, a space where anything can happen.” Their analogous movements Eastward, Clemente says, were “symmetrical and complementary.” For Boetti, the model was Afghanistan, where much of his work was crafted but for Clemente, he looked towards the traditions, rituals, and image-world of India. Clemente lived on and off for ten years in India, where he studied Sanskirt as well as Hindu and Buddhist literature. In 1976 and 1977 he visited the library of the Theosophical Society of Madras to study the religious texts there. During this time, Clemente thoroughly read a book that would become the touchstone of much of his post-1976 work: Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). In 1980 and 1981 he worked on Francesco Clemente Pinxit, a series of twenty-four gouaches on antique hand-made rag paper, in collaboration with miniature painters from Orissa and Jaipur. In 1982 he moved to New York City.. New York, the 1980’s, and the Downtown Scene In 1980, Clemente participated in the Venice Biennale. Clemente soon gained an international reputation. Clemente had first visited New York in 1981, and, in 1982, Clemente officially moved to New York City, where he began working out of a studio loft in downtown Manhattan with his wife, Alba Primiceriwas. He had met Alba in 1974. Though in New York, Clemente continued to study Sanskrit in the early 1980s. In New York, Clemente continued to collaborate with creatives across disciplines, including with such artists as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and with writers like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, John Wieners, Salman Rushdie, among otherrs. In 1983, Clemente collaborated with Warhol and Basquiat on a group of works, just as he simultaneously developed various book projects, including three with Ginsberg. BEween 1986-1993, Clemente published The Hanuman Books with Raymond Foye out of the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Inspired by Indian prayer books collected