John Stezaker: Love

By Jennie Waldow

JUNE 2019 | Art Books

The collages and silkscreens of John Stezaker contain stutters and elisions, gaps and coverings that pull viewers into “an act of empathetic engagement,” as the artist said in a 2011 interview included in the catalogue for his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Isabelle Graw's The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium

By Lauren Palmer

SEPT 2018 | Art Books

What has a painting historically been, and what is it now? In her new book The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, art historian, critic, and educator Graw ruminates on Harrison’s paintings, and the work of Martin Kippenberger, Avery Singer, and Marcel Broodthaers, among others, tracing the origins of the medium, its evolution, and its enduring significance.

Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality

By NOEL IGNATIEV

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Field Notes

In a lengthy review in the New Yorker of David W. Blight’s recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,¹ Adam Gopnik calls Douglass “the progenitor of the ‘pragmatic-progressive’ strain in American thought that led to Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.”² Douglass is an attractive figure, and it is easy to understand why he fills the need of American mainstream thought for a Black political hero now that George Washington Carver (the one Black figure in the textbooks when I went to grade school) no longer serves. But the notion of “pragmatic progressive” suggests an alternative tradition, which we might call “impractical revolutionary.” Nat Turner, John Brown, and Malcolm X come to mind as exemplars.

Poignant Repairs: JOHN FREEMAN GILL with Hilary Reyl

By Hilary Reyl

MAR 2018 | Books

The Gargoyle Hunters is a father-son story set in the 1970s about New York City’s movement between past and future. Part caper, part tragedy, it’s a coming-of-age book that leaves me wondering if we ever really come of age—our city certainly doesn’t. The novel is richly observed, I think, because there is no fixed judgment or overruling nostalgia. John’s characters, especially his winning young protagonist, Griffin, and his beloved urban landscape are always evolving, but they are not taking for granted the things they leave behind. There is a sense of mourning all bound up with a sense of celebration. Discovery and rediscovery.