Karen Chernick
Nell Painter's Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
By Karen ChernickNell Painter made no mention of the fact that she was enrolled as a first-year graduate painting student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) during her guest television appearance on The Colbert Report in March 2010. She wasn’t there to talk about the new career she had started from scratch, at age sixty-four, as an artist.
Peggy Phelan and Richard Meyer’s Contact Warhol: Photography Without End
By Karen ChernickIf Andy Warhol had an Instagram account, its feed would probably look like the 3,600 gridded contact sheets he produced during the last decade of his life.
Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter
By Karen ChernickWhen painter Nell Blaine was just 37 years old, she was almost completely paralyzed from the neck down, after the start of a burgeoning career in the downtown New York City art scene. Yet that’s not the closing chapter of Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter, the recently published first biography of this lesser-known postwar American artist, which chronicles Blaine’s five-decade career.
Alice Trumbull Mason: Pioneer of American Abstraction
By Karen ChernickDaughter Emily Mason decided it was time to sort through her mother’s archive of a life spent championing abstract art in America to compile a monograph that richly illustrates and closely examines her mother’s paintings, prints, and poems.
Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness
By Karen ChernickThis second monograph on Jones fleshes out the details of the artist’s biography using records kept at Howard University and interviews with former students such as artists David Driskell and Akili Ron Anderson. Rebecca VanDiver reinterprets Jones’s work, arguing that she nimbly laced together American, African American, African, and European artistic traditions—in order to fashion a brand new one.
