Moondog Music in Coventry Cathedral

By Martin Longley

APRIL 2022 | Music

Coventry Cathedral invited Down Is Up from London, an ensemble dedicated almost solely to the music of Moondog, that old inhabitant of New York City. The cathedral is famed for both being bombed into destruction (1940) and optimistic rebirth (1962), providing a suitably majestic setting for the works of composer, performer, and Viking-robed street musician Louis Hardin.

John Ashbery’s ​​Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists

By Candice Chu

OCT 2022 | Art Books

This book allows one to read with as much freedom as one listens to a playlist, in sequence or on shuffle. Read it as a playlist, or as any artwork that is drawn from the stuff of life, discover the biography revealed at its edges and interpret it as a portrait, a diary, or a letter from John Ashbery.

Xaviera Simmons: Crisis Makes a Book Club

By William Corwin

NOV 2022 | ArtSeen

In the comprehensive survey exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club, Xaviera Simmons explains with brutal clarity the need for real gestures; land acknowledgments without Land Back will not do, and there can be no equality without reparations. As the title calls out, starting book clubs to read the literature of the oppressed without yielding the social and economic capital demanded in those very texts means nothing.

Willie Birch: Chronicling Our Lives: 1987–2021

By Amanda Millet-Sorsa

MAY 2022 | ArtSeen

Willie Birch has exhibited his work in New York for the first time since 2000 at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery located in the Meatpacking District. Originally from New Orleans, Birch is no stranger to New York City. Aside from Broken Dreams (Tattered White Picket Fence) (2020–21), the exhibition centers on Birch’s New York period (1983–1997).