Listening In: Olivier Conan, The Soul of Barbès

By Scott Gutterman

OCT 2020 | Music

I’ve sometimes puzzled over what people mean when they say, “be fully present.” But my nights at Barbès often provided a natural version of that phrase. It was like a literal expression of that beautiful Rumi line, “I have fallen into the place where everything is music.”

Spencer Sweeney with Andrew Woolbright

JUL-AUG 2022 | Art

In early May, Spencer Sweeney’s exhibition Perfect opened at the Brant Foundation. The drawings and paintings that spanned across the two floors of the foundation represented fifteen years of work and achieved the depth and dimension of both a retrospective and a concert . When the energy finally settled from the opening, we talked in his studio, where I found myself surrounded by the same palpable excitement and energy captured at the Brant. Next to his drums and guitars, and flanked by a ring of booming paintings still in progress, we discussed the shared spaces of music and painting, how painting can be used to anticipate and store the energy of an announcement, and how self-portraits can hold the tension of contradictions to emanate and reflect the soul.

Charles Baxter’s Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

By Joseph Peschel

SEPT 2022 | Books

“The hardest part of being a writer is learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul,” Charles Baxter writes about halfway through his new book, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature. This isn’t Baxter’s first book about writing and the life of the writer as an artist.

Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili

By Dina A. Ramadan

JUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen

Much of Lydia Ourahmane’s work has been an exploration of the multiple connotations of barzakh, the barrier or threshold that separates two things that must be kept distinct. In Islamic philosophy, this is the liminal place which the soul inhabits after death, while awaiting the Day of Judgment. For the multi-disciplinary artist based between Algiers and Barcelona, this space of limbo between life and death has generative potential.