There is a sense of mutual trust and affinity when Katy Siegel and Mark Bradford are in conversation, as they have been for more than a dozen years. On the occasion of Bradford’s current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, New York, Siegel joined the artist at the gallery shortly after the installation was complete. In this conversation they discuss the evolution of Bradford’s latest body of work, how he maneuvered through COVID closures, and what it means to imbue works of art with hope and faith.

Upon the release of his latest book, Your Everyday Art World, Lane Relyea met with Katy Siegel to discuss the historical and future implications of DIY, contemporary post-studio practices, and the M.F.A.as the rising art world institution.

It’s over: the contemporary was a brief period, a moment in the short American century when historical amnesia combined with postwar prosperity to flash like a strobe light on the entire world.

Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art History at the University of Texas-Austin, and the author of Doubt (Routledge, 2008). Katy Siegel, who earned her Ph.D. with Shiff, is an associate professor of art history at Hunter College, and a contributing editor at Artforum.

In 1976 I arrived at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, to study “photography as language” with Nathan Lyons. At that time, VSW was arguably the best school of photographic studies in the country—intellectually rigorous, competitive, and austere.

Robert Bergman is a photographer who extends out of the tradition of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, poets who possessed a bottomless empathy for their subjects. And, like a poet, his work can be found in a book, rather than in a gallery.