The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO with David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro

Philippe de Montebello was appointed the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New Yorkin 1977 after having served at the same museum as chief curator under Thomas Hoving. When he retired in 2008 he was the longest-serving director in the institution’s history, and also the longest-serving director of any major art museum.

In Conversation

SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD with Alex Bacon

Sylvia Plimack Mangold met up with Alex Bacon in New York City to speak about the threads that link together various periods of her career. A survey of works on paper by both Syliva and her husband, fellow artist Robert Mangold, is being presented at Annemarie Verna Galerie in Zurich, through May 24.

In Conversation

A Sonorous Subtlety: KARA WALKER with Kara Rooney

From her all-enveloping cycloramas and iconic wall-mounted silhouettes to her searing films, drawings, and prints, Kara Walker’s work has remained fearlessly stalwart in its condemnation of social and racial injustice.

In Conversation

JOYCE ROBINS with Phong Bui

On the occasion of the artist’s forthcoming exhibit Paint and Clay (May 16 – June 22, 2014) at THEODORE:Art in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Joyce Robins visited the Rail’s HQ one early sunny evening to talk to Publisher Phong Bui about her life and work.

In Conversation

All Our Perverse Pleasures
TREVOR WINKFIELD with Jarrett Earnest

Trevor Winkfield’s idiosyncratic and widely roaming intelligence is evident throughout his career, including publishing projects like Juillard (1968 – 72) and The Sienese Shredder (2006 – 2010), across his distinctive paintings, and within his many art essays.

In Conversation

What’s more real, 
a dead tree or a drawing of a dead tree?
MICHAEL BERRYHILL with Nathlie Provosty

Michael Berryhill’s paintings are brightly-colored, idiosyncratic, image-ambiguous oddities that have developed out of a consistent studio practice arching over two decades.

Remembering Gandalf Gavan (1975 – 2014)

Gandalf Gavan meant the world to me. He was my brother, my partner, and my inspiration. A bright star that filled our lives with magic, meaning, music, laughter, and love. He was a force. If you were ever lucky enough to meet him, you will never forget him.

Society as Cosmos
ON ARIANE LOPEZ-HUICI AND ALAIN KIRILI

Ariane Lopez-Huici is a photographer. Alain Kirili is a sculptor. Whether he makes them from solid chunks of iron or airy swirls of wire, his works are volumetric. Hers, of course, are flat. His are abstract, hers are figurative. As artists, then, they have nothing in common—nothing but their subject, which is the human body, and that gives them everything in common.

Boring but Totally Fantastic: A Conversation with RAGNAR KJARTANSSON

Born and raised into a family of actors and theater professionals in Reykjavík, Iceland, Ragnar Kjartansson has been tightrope-walking between reality and performance for most of his life. It is therefore not by chance that many of his durational performances and video installations often explore and question the edge between fact and fiction.

THE HELD ESSAYS ON VISUAL ART
The Gold Standard

What do we see when we look at a painting? Is it the eye of the artist, his or her milieu, or the process that we follow like Ariadne’s thread to some promised destination? Or is it, perhaps, some fragment of affection that its creator felt for the object of making?

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? Thoughts about the Donelle Woolford Debate

The recent decision by the Black artists group Yams Collective to withdraw from the Whitney Biennial in protest of the show's inclusion of Joe Scanlan's alter ego Donelle Woolford has forced a long-standing private conversation among artists of color into public view.