Why The Orbit Exists
The MF Gallery began as a business plan. Not the kind built on market gaps or growth projections. It was a plan to organize a life around purpose.
The Foundation
Chris Feinstein died on December 15, 2009. He was known widely as a bassist, but he was also a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and my partner. What followed wasn't a single event. It was a decade: survival first, then the slower work of deciding what the rest of my life would be. The gallery is what I built once I had the footing to build it.
In 2015, a rescue dog changed everything. I named him Strummer, a nod to Chris and his life as a musician as much as to Joe Strummer, and he is still the reason the gallery has a curated street dogs collection, and the reason 10% of its proceeds go to the ASPCA. That's in the book too.
The Material
A decade after Chris died, an actor appeared, a public figure with an audience of his own. What followed was a five-year digital entanglement, conducted entirely at a distance. I never once met him in person. It didn't resolve the way those things are supposed to.
What it did instead was hand me the material: a real-time study of presence and power, distance and projection, playing out while I was still learning how to stand on my own. I didn't know it yet, but I was collecting evidence for a book.
The Architecture
That same instinct runs through everything else the gallery does: examine the evidence, document it precisely, let the facts stand on their own. The roster has grown and contracted over the years, down to today's maximum of fourteen active positions. It also holds a permanent fifteenth position in reserve. It belongs to Chris.
So does the 10% of Days of Punk proceeds donated to MusiCares. That was a plan I had from day one, though it took years to find the confidence to say so publicly, and to find the right collection to carry it. The Detroit 15 archive came later, in 2026, once the timing and material were finally right. It lives at @the.detroit15, and it catalogs the fuller story piece by piece, from Chris's belongings to Strummer to the book itself.
The roster, the donations, the archive: all of it is a way of building around the loss without naming it directly.
The Book
The Orbit: A Study of Presence and Power is where I finally named it. It's a 112-page forensic nonfiction novella, forensic in the literal sense. It's an examination of evidence and timeline, of how presence and absence exert power over a life without ever announcing themselves as the cause. It isn't a grief memoir in the conventional shape. It doesn't ask for your sympathy so much as your attention to structure.
It was released May 14, 2026, as a limited first edition of 100 signed, numbered copies. It was never going to be a mass-market object. It was going to be specific and accountable, the way the rest of this gallery's work is specific and accountable. When this edition sells out, a second edition is something I'd consider, but for now, there are only 100.
If you've followed The MF Gallery for any length of time, you already know Chris's name. You just didn't know the shape it would eventually take. The Orbit is that shape: not a footnote to the work, but the foundation underneath it.
Reserve Edition: https://www.themfgallery.com/shop-fine-art-prints/p/the-orbit-a-narrative-print-artifact-112-page-archive
