In the course of a 2007 Brooklyn Rail interview with Bill Jensen, his friend and fellow painter Chris Martin remarked that he had seen figures and faces in Jensen’s recent, ostensibly abstract, paintings, and asked the artist if he consciously painted these figurative images. Jensen replied that any such imagery wasn’t intentional, it was just that if things like faces appeared, he didn’t erase them. In any case, Jensen added, the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing he looked for, was “emotional content.” As a longtime viewer of Jensen’s work, I am familiar with how his paintings can, and often do, subtly evoke figures and landscapes. Indeed, this ability to conjure the feel and memory of places and the pose and weight of bodies without getting bogged down in resemblance is one of Jensen’s many strengths as a painter.

Interviewed by a journalist from the Yiddish daily Morgen Journal-Tageblatt, a world-famous African-American singer shares the news that he is looking around for a Yiddish opera to perform in. When asked why he is seeking an opera written in Yiddish rather than a work from the European operatic cannon, the singer replies that he feels little or no affinity with operas from Italy, France or Germany.

A 43-year-old music critic whose beat is hard rock and heavy metal attends a concert by one of his favorite bands whose latest album he has just reviewed for France’s most influential culture magazine. Raising two daughters with his partner, who is also a journalist and began her career covering the 9/11 attacks, he often has to do his writing late at night after the kids have gone to bed (“just like doing homework in high school,” he remarks).

Despite being blinded as a young boy, this inhabitant of the Syrian city of Aleppo gains fame for composing some 400 pizmonim, songs sung on special occasions by Sephardic Jews. While able to effortlessly improvise verses to any melody even, it is said, to the sound of water dripping from buckets on a waterwheel, this sightless composer feels his greatest musical affinity for Arab music.

A Jewish orchestra conductor and a Palestinian-Christian literary scholar, both preeminent in their fields, organize a workshop in the German city of Weimar for young classical musicians, both Jewish and Muslim, from across the Middle East. Meant to be a one-time event, the project evolves into a musical academy and a professional touring orchestra.

Featured in 27 movies and 1,200 musical recordings, this Egyptian singer-actress becomes one of her country’s greatest and highest-paid stars. In her late 20s, shortly after marrying an Egyptian Muslim, she converts to Islam from the Judaism of her birth. A few years later she is named the official singer of the Egyptian Revolution, but infighting among Revolutionary leaders leads to her marginalization.

It’s the late 1950s at an art school in the north of England and a teacher in the metalwork department has just dragged one of his first-year students out of the classroom to berate him for his shameless lack of effort. One of the student’s friends who happens to witness this encounter notices how his pal, who is only 17, has plunged his hands into his pants pockets, very likely in order to prevent himself from punching the fulminating teacher in the nose.

On weekends, a law student in Panama has fun and makes extra money by singing at private parties with a band called Los Salvajes del Ritmo. This arrangement comes to a stop when one of his professors witnesses one of his performances and reports him to the school’s dean, who insists that he must choose between music and law school.

Born during the Great Depression in a small North Carolina town in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she shares a three-room clapboard house with her parents and seven siblings, a six-year-old girl impresses everyone when she accompanies a church choir (her mother is a Methodist preacher) on the piano. Friends convince her mother to have her daughter take piano lessons.

“When I was a boy at school,” recalls an elderly musician who has written nearly a thousand songs and performed them on stages throughout the world, “on the first days of winter we went out to the playground, in the sunlight, and sang Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.”

“Everything can be put into a film. Everything should be put into a film,” Jean-Luc Godard announced in 1967, following the release of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, his sprawling collage-film masterpiece that encompasses documentary footage of urban redevelopment around Paris, satirical Brechtian skits about everyday French life, pointed criticism of the US presence in Vietnam, scenarios linking capitalism and prostitution, countless pop-art images from the world of advertising and, among much else, that famous five-minute close-up of a cup of coffee accompanied by Godard’s whispered philosophical commentary.

Two students at a Catholic university in Houston, Texas, start a band that eventually records one of the most experimental albums of the psychedelic era. After the band breaks up, one of the founders moves first to New York to work as the assistant of a famous artist, then to London, where he teams up with a highly politicized art collective with whom he makes audio and video recordings featuring the artists awkwardly chanting political tracts to a basic rock backing.

Not long after the “events of May,” two old friends, who first met while studying avant-garde music in Darmstadt, rendezvous in Paris. One of them has been teaching in New York, the other, who is accompanied by his wife, plays keyboards in an experimental group currently setting up a studio in a large villa outside of Cologne.

Born in France to a classical pianist from China and a Russian composer (the family later immigrates to the United States), a musician who has studied with some of Europe’s most experimental composers is hired to teach at a Southern California art school.

A rockabilly singer and his backing band are hired to perform for a week at a club in Ft. Worth. When they arrive at the venue, which is called the Skyline Lounge, they are shocked to discover that the building has no roof.

At a restaurant in a small town on the west bank of the Mississippi River about 70 miles south of Memphis on Highway 61, five men are enjoying a late lunch after having spent several hours playing the blues. One of them is an older Black man whose lives in the town, the other four are young white musicians temporarily in Helena between gigs.

In April, the same month as the fall of Saigon, the Phyllis Cormack, a 66-foot-long fishing trawler, sets sail from Vancouver in search of the Russian whaling fleet. Its mission is twofold: prevent the Russian vessels from killing any more whales, and alert the public about the continuing slaughter of this endangered species.

A youth aged 17 (or, in some accounts, 15) is sent to jail for stealing $30,000 worth of automobile tires. Prior to this, he and his younger brother comprised a two-person gang that ruled their neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles.

The title of Richard Hell’s new book of poems, What Just Happened, can be taken in several ways. It could be referring to some very recent occurrence (as in “Did you see what just happened?”) or it could be pointing to an event that appears to lack all cause or reason (as in “I didn’t mean to break the cookie jar, it just happened”).

A 20-year-old Ohio native whose accomplishments include dropping out of several universities, consuming as many drugs and as much alcohol as she can afford, and alarming her parents, is perusing a magazine stand at a shopping mall when, to her astonishment, she comes across a recent issue of the British music weekly New Musical Express.

Two British music journalists meet for lunch in a Holland Park bistro ...

Drafted into the US Army and sent to Germany, a 23-year-old is struck by a recent recording of the classic Neapolitan ballad “O Sole Mio.”

A Neapolitan singer-songwriter (whom we will call Composer #1) buys a collection of 23 melodies from another musician (Composer #2), who is also Neapolitan.

On the first Thursday of every month for nearly 40 years, a singer’s live performances, often lasting five hours or more, are broadcast throughout the Middle East. These programs become so popular that during them streets empty, stores and restaurants close, and politicians avoid scheduling any speeches or press conferences.

Thanks to her own talent, fearlessness and good looks, a 17-year-old working-class British girl secures a recording contract. Between takes at her first studio session she looks up at the control booth and sees her manager jumping up and down with excitement and the technicians around her laughing. “Your feet, your feet,” the manager explains over the microphone.

It’s the mid-1960s in Bedford-Stuyvesant where some 15 or 20 young men get into the habit of harmonizing together after pick-up basketball games. One of them, an aspiring musician who is supporting himself as an elevator operator, notices some talented voices in the crowd, so one night he invites everyone back to his apartment to rehearse, hoping for something interesting to emerge.

A teenager in Oklahoma City who is destined to become one of the most respected guitarists in the world but also fated to die at 43 from a heroin overdose in a Los Angeles laundromat covets more than anything else in the world a 1954 Fender Telecaster sitting in the window of a local music store.

Hoping to discover new acts and garner some publicity, two independent record labels organize a “battle of the bands” tour around England. At each venue, local groups are chosen to perform with the vague promise that the winners of the contest will be given a recording contract. One stop on the tour is a small basement club in a once vibrant industrial city that has fallen on hard times.

It’s the nation’s coldest winter in more than 200 years. Much of the country is covered in snow from December until March. Everything freezes, from water pipes to monumental fountains to streams and rivers. Travel is disrupted, food stocks begin to run low, a regional newspaper reports with dismay that two swans have been found frozen to death on a nearby river.

Upon being told by his manager that under no circumstances can he continue to go onstage wearing spandex pants without underwear, a young musician begins performing in nothing more than a trench coat, black high-heeled boots and black bikini underwear.

What happened in Łódź two months before her birth: the Germans forced 160,000 Jewish and Roma inhabitants into an area of the city—a new ghetto—far too small for that many people.

While waiting for his first book to appear, an impoverished 34-year-old poet succumbs to tuberculosis. When, a year and a half later, the volume is finally published it sells only 20 copies. To make matters worse the text is bristling with errors, most of which will not be corrected for nearly a century.

After studies in Paris with the leading French pianist of the time (who, alas, is soon to begin collaborating with the Vichy regime, a decision that will forever shadow him), a young Filipino pianist returns to his home country to begin a successful career as a soloist.

In the spring of 1945, the French government opens up three warehouses filled with pianos that have been stolen by the Germans, the vast majority from Jewish families, and invites the public to reclaim their instruments.

We’re in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s where two film student friends (one in graduate school, the other an undergraduate senior) enroll, in successive years, in the same course on film aesthetics taught by a legendary but now retired émigré Austrian director.

Living only one street apart in a London suburb, two 7-year-olds strike up a friendship that lasts until they are 11 and one of them moves away. In the years that follow, their school careers diverge (one begins attending university, the other enrolls in a local art school) but their musical tastes are oddly similar, as they discover when their paths finally cross again on a train platform in their hometown.

Soon after graduating from art school, a 21-year-old separates from his wife and moves from the city of Winchester near England’s south coast to London where he becomes involved with the avant-garde music scene. One day on the London Tube he runs into a former art-school classmate with whom he has lost touch.

n a working-class suburb of Rio de Janeiro, an Ethiopian-born mother hopes that her son will grow up to become a pediatrician. The boy’s Brazilian father, a dockworker, wants him to be a lawyer. The youth’s own ambition, initially, is to play professional soccer.

Leaves school at 12 to sing in the streets

for coins that buy bread, milk and cigarettes.
At 16, departs his isla for Málaga and the Taberna Gitana.
A few months later he’s in Madrid

This drummer-composer-dancer usually gets new skins for his conga drums at La Moderna, a bakery on 116^th Street near Lennox Avenue. Advertising itself as a “reposteria y pasteleria” that is happy to take special orders for “bodas, bautizos, banquetes y fiestas” and features, among other delicacies, turrones, mazapan de Toledo and membrillo de guayaba.

She is the toast of Havana, a wealthy courtesan who consorts with presidents and generals, who owns numerous houses and nine splendid automobiles, which she drives herself (she is said to be first woman in Cuba to possess a driver’s license).

In the mid-1950s, a youthful singer becomes a sensation in Los Angeles’s Mexican-American community for his energetic R&B performances. Switching effortlessly between English and Spanish, he appeals especially to young girls who flock to his performances at the El Monte Legion Stadium, a venue conveniently located just outside the LA city limits and thus not subject to the city’s restrictive racist regulations.

Born in the summer of 1937 to a family of migrant Mexican laborers
in the Texas town of San Benito (“birthplace of Conjunto”),
at 10 he is earning $3 a day picking cotton in Arkansas
where he discovers rhythm and blues.

Asked by a music writer at what point did he realize his band was going to be a success, a singer songwriter says that he knew instantly. "There were lots and lots of people ready to identify with what I was feeling. Hatred! Hating everything, but not being offensively hateful (chuckle). It was like hate from quite gentle people." After the band breaks up, he titles his first solo album Viva Hate. At first this seems like an extension of his famously combative personality, but in the years that follow, as he makes frequent anti-immigrant remarks, repeatedly criticizes those who speak out against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry and, during a performance on the Tonight Show, sports the logo of a notorious far-right political party, more and more of his fans (or, as they now have to think of themselves, ex-fans) conclude that the kind of hate he espouses has morphed from post-adolescent angst into pure cruelty. In short, it’s no longer charming.

A 19-year-old British musician whose band has just released their first single, explains to a journalist, “All I write about is youth and hate.” When someone else interviews him at the age of 20, he confesses to feeling so much older that he can no longer write “kids’ anthems.” His musical tastes, which are grounded in 1960s pop, haven’t changed but his sense of his own authenticity has: “I really like youth songs, really old classic youth songs, but I mean, it's just a lie to carry on writin' 'em."

This book shows how connected many of her paintings are to specific moments, people, and places in her life. She uses words and images to trace her life from her early years in California to her arrival at artistic maturity in New York in the early 1990s.

A famous singer-songwriter takes her husband, their 11-year-old son and one of his friends to a concert by a legendary German electronic band. She loves the band, and is especially excited to expose her son and his friend to the music. She explains to them as they enter the venue how important the band was to early hip hop.

“I became a pop star because I hated football at school,” recalls a British pop star who was bullied in Catholic school for being “soft” (i.e., gay). “Becoming a pop star was my revenge. Revenge for being bad at football. For not being athletic. For being mocked.”

fter achieving best-seller status in his mid 40s, French novelist who comes from a long line of organists and is himself an accomplished cellist, abruptly cancels an international music festival he founded only four years earlier and severs ties with another music festival he co-directs. He also ceases his own public cello performances. The motivation behind these actions becomes clearer two years later when he publishes a book titled La haine de la musique (The Hatred of Music).

At the age of 19, a musician just beginning her career (a multi-instrumentalist, she plays piano, harp, flute and cello) discovers she is pregnant. We are in the era before the pill and she has been dating a jazz guitarist, a relationship that doesn’t have much of a future. She has her pregnancy terminated at a clandestine clinic on Sunset Boulevard.

Speaking to a television interviewer, an expat American pop singer who was raised Catholic expresses a wish to meet with the head of the Catholic Church. She wants to ask the pontiff whether he believes, as she does, that Jesus would agree with the proposition that a woman has the right to choose what to do with her own body.

Looking back from the age of 45, a musician who helped spark a global explosion of feminist punk rock, speculates how her life, and the lives of many others, would have been different if she hadn’t gotten an abortion at the age of 15. She was then living with her sister in Virginia and working at McDonald’s. Receiving no help from the person who had gotten her pregnant, she used what money she had earned at McDonald’s, plus $40 she cajoled from her drug dealer, to pay for the abortion.

It was 1968. And I found myself in a situation where I had to have an abortion. I had a girlfriend who had a friend who was a nurse. And she said that she would give me the abortion. I had to meet her in a hotel room. I remember being very humiliated, to the point that today, I haven't thought about this for years. Thinking about it makes me want to cry.

After being raped, an 11-year-old girl is sent by her family to a Catholic reform school called The House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls where the nuns who run the institution make her sit in a mustard bath to terminate any possible pregnancy.

In early May, French painter Bernard Piffaretti was in New York for the opening of his exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Chelsea. On the morning of the opening, Bernard and I sat down at the gallery to talk about his work. In preparing for our meeting, it struck me that even though I have known Bernard for a long time—we met in Paris around 1990 through Shirley Jaffe—I knew very little about his early years, so that’s where we began. The interview was conducted in French, which I have translated. A few brief written passages, also originally in French, were added later.

A Spanish-language parody of the TV theme “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” becomes an unexpected hit, especially in a subsequent English version that sells some 500,000 copies. This is a departure for the musician who a few years earlier had provided the soundtrack for the Pachuco subculture with recordings like “Marihuana Boogie” and “El Pachuco.”

A quintet (sax, trumpet, piano, bass, drums) led by a legendary saxophonist is booked for two nights at a midtown jazz club. The first evening gets off to a bad start when the piano player, who has a long history of alcoholism and mental health problems, tells the sax player, who himself has struggled with heroin addiction, “You ain’t playing shit no more.”

A museum on the Austrian shore of Lake Constance invites a Scottish sound artist to create a new work. The project she conceives of involves making recordings of five different instruments performing passages from the soundtrack to an early Holocaust documentary. On each of the museum’s four floors, a single instrument can be heard: a bass clarinet on the ground floor, a clarinet on the first floor, a horn on the third and a violin on the fourth.

The first African American to sing a leading role with the Metropolitan Opera is cast as Ulrike in Verdi’s Un ballo in mascara. A century earlier when the opera debuted in Italy, the composer was compelled by censors to repeatedly change the setting, first from Sweden to Poland, then from Poland to the United States, specifically to Boston.

A German composer, who was deported from the United States seven years earlier for being, as one right-wing politician put it, “the Karl Marx of music,” is hired by a French director to score a documentary film about the Holocaust. From Paris, he writes home to his wife in East Berlin: “The film is grandiose, horrible, showing monstrous crimes...regrettably, the film people here are putting me under pressure to finish the whole thing in ten days even though the film is barely finished.

After failing first as a singer and then as a drummer, a 31-year-old DJ starts a band with his closest friends. He exposes himself to ridicule and risks disappointment with their debut single, a confessional monologue about growing older in a younger music scene. The group’s first album is released to critical acclaim.

This 21-year-old Japanese musician has been wandering through Europe supporting himself (barely) as a busker. He has played and sung on the streets of Sweden, Denmark, Germany and France. In winter, when the weather turns too cold for outdoor performances, he finds work in restaurants or on farms. Although his musical skills are limited, he is able attract attention.

A band with a one-armed drummer scores a hit record with a song about its one-armed drummer.

Born in New Orleans to a Baptist minister and his wife, this woman has been singing professionally since the age of 14. Now living in L.A. and well into a pregnancy, she gets a call one night from a producer friend who is desperately in need of a backup singer for a recording session with some visiting English musicians. At first, she refuses—it’s almost midnight, she’s pregnant, and already in bed—but at last she agrees and a car is dispatched to pick her up.

On a weekend when his wife is away, a musician invites an artist he has just met to his house. Retiring to the home studio he has built in his attic, the two of them, who as yet barely know each other, spend the night experimenting with tape loops and wordless vocalizations, creating a dense recording of muffled piano and guitar punctuated with warbles, screeches, moans and assorted noises.

Speaking in her studio at the age of 100, a Cuban-born artist who has lived mostly in New York for the past 75 years, nearly all of it in obscurity (she was 89 before she finally sold one of her geometric constructions, and survived until then only thanks to her husband’s salary and pension as a public-school teacher) reflects on the museum attention that has come her way over the last two years: “They say, ‘If you wait for the bus, the bus will come.’ I waited 98 years for the bus to come.”

An artist who grew up not far from Disneyland moves from Southern California to New York where he finds a cheap apartment in Greenpoint and a job at a framing shop. It’s the mid-1980s and the city seems like a rough place filled with a lot of obnoxious people. He wonders whether the problem is that New Yorkers never get to see the night sky.

At the age of 31, an artist walks into a SoHo gallery containing only a single work—a 35-foot-long abstract painting—and begins to feel almost physically sick. He has been deeply affected by the political movements of the previous decade (feminism, civil rights, war protests) and realizes that he doesn’t want to go on making big paintings. He can’t stand the thought of one of his paintings ending up in a bank lobby or even in a museum.

After the suicide of her older sister, a 11-year-old girl decides that she will never let another memory vanish. She begins taking photographs of everyone she knows, firm in the belief that by photographing them she will never lose them.

In the summer of 1975, a 25-year-old Belgian filmmaker and her cinematographer shoot footage of Manhattan’s streets and subways for a 90-minute color film. On an intermittent voiceover, the filmmaker reads (in French) from letters her mother has sent her. They are filled with typical parental concern: How is her job?

In the midst of the AIDS crisis, an artist exhibits a small teddy bear wearing a T-shirt that reads “Someday I will make a Cubist painting but right now it doesn’t seem important.”

A young couple (he is a sculptor, she has given up painting to help her husband by sewing his cloth and vinyl sculptures) find themselves living in a very noisy building. To ensure that they can always get a good night’s sleep they build three bedrooms in their loft.

A 23-year-old Brazilian artist makes his first trip to New York. During a visit to the Museum of Modern Art he falls into a conversation with a woman about the paintings of Jackson Pollock. So inspiring is this conversation, and his discovery of Pollock’s art, that two months later he moves from São Paulo to New York. Within a few years he has launched a successful career by using unusual materials to make drawings based on black-and-white photographs.

A young artist frequents the Cedar Bar where he drinks with older painters he admires. It’s there that he meets and befriends an artist who gives him a piece of advice he never forgets.

Two young artists, one of whom has traveled by subway from his home in Manhattan, are in a small one-room Brooklyn apartment writing a dialogue on a typewriter. While one of them is typing, the other sits on a bed, waiting for his turn.

On November 5, 1969, a Saturday, an artist living at 340 East 13^th Street, gets out of bed at 17 minutes after noon. Using rubber stamps, he notes this fact on a postcard that he mails to an art critic living at 138 Prince Street.

Some six years after the death of his beloved wife from cancer, a photographer asks his assistant to finally take apart his late spouse’s bed. After all, he is nearly 90 and it’s time to put his life in order. In the course of disassembling the bed, the assistant comes upon some boxes of enigmatic black-and-white photographs—many of them depicting old disjointed dolls, possibly happened upon at flea markets or deliberately posed in a studio, it’s impossible to know—credit stamped with a woman’s name.

The mayor of New York City borrows a life-size fiberglass sculpture of a shirtless young man with a boombox and a basketball (he holds the ball under his left arm, while his right foot rests on the boombox) to place on the front lawn of his official residence on the occasion of presenting a filmmaker renowned for his depictions of everyday urban life with the keys to the city.

A husband and wife, both artists, both Mexican, are living in an apartment at the Hotel Brevoort in Greenwich Village. Following the politically motivated censorship of a mural commission the husband has been working on at 30 Rockefeller Center, he is frustrated to learn that two other major U.S. commissions have been cancelled.

Before moving into a new apartment building overlooking Washington Square Park, a photographer and his wife, both Hungarian émigrés, go through every apartment in the still-unoccupied building to find the ideal vantage point for the photographs the husband plans to take.

A British sculptor known for her casts of architectural spaces is invited to create a public artwork in New York City. After traversing the city in search of inspiration, she notices the “weird wooden barrel-like objects” that sit atop many Manhattan buildings.

During a residency in Queens in a former public school, a Korean artist trained as a painter finds herself responding in unexpected ways to the space she has been given to work in and the overwhelming sense of cultural and social strangeness she feels in New York.

Having studied at three different art schools, a 24-year-old artist moves to New York where he begins to spend two to three hours a day writing out numbers on graph paper, starting at 1 and aiming for infinity. When ideas for art works come to him he incorporates them into his counting process, either by inserting a drawing into his columns of numbers or by signing his paintings and sculpture not with his name but with whatever number he has reached when he completes them.

In a SoHo gallery an artist props three old doors against one of the walls. Each door is painted a different color and each carries different signage. One announces an “Upper West Side Plant Project,” the second something called the ”N.Y. State Bureau of Tropical Conservation” and the third “The Department of Marine Animal Identification of the City of New York (Chinatown Division).”

On September 1, 1966, a Brazilian-Swedish artist who has been living in New York for five years stages a performance on Fifth Avenue that involves himself, his wife and several friends carrying placards bearing enormous headshots of two famous figures, the American comedian Bob Hope and the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung. In January of that year, Bob Hope’s “Vietnam Christmas Show” had aired on NBC. In May, Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution. As part of the performance, which is also filmed, a radio journalist asks spectators on Fifth Avenue if they are happy

After her father is killed in an anti-Semitic pogrom, an 8-year-old girl emigrates with her mother from the Ukraine to New York City. It’s only long after, at the age of 45, that she begins to paint, using, among other materials and tools, enamel paint and glass pipettes from her husband’s costume jewelry business. Working with these unconventional means she develops a novel method of painting that involves dispersing fluid drips and pours of paint across the entire canvas. Her studio is a few square feet on the parquet floor of the Brighton Beach apartment she shares with her husband and son. Thanks in large part to the actions of her son, her work attracts the attention of several avant-garde refugees from Europe (two of whom pay visits to her in Brooklyn) and other people interested in “primitive” art.

At the age of 38 an Argentinian artist who has abandoned a law career to become a painter moves to New York City where he rents a studio in Little Italy and supports himself by working as a waiter at the Caffe Figaro on Bleecker Street. The same year he has his debut solo show in the city and moves his studio to 248 Lafayette Street. The following year he has his breakthrough idea of leaving the front of his paintings solid white and applying color only to the sides. When he shows one of his first “sides only” paintings at a 57th Street gallery, an art critic who visits the show climbs onto a chair to see if the top edge of work has also been painted. (It has.)

At the sparsely attended opening of his first museum show in the United States, a German artist carries a 16-mm movie camera on his shoulder throughout the event. As people come up to congratulate him, he says almost nothing while pointing the camera at their faces. It’s unclear whether or not he is actually filming, but the camera effectively insulates him from his fans, however few they are.

A painter who was a USAAF bomber pilot during the Second World War recounts to two of his poet friends how on several occasions he flew a famous movie star around North Africa. His friends don’t believe him until one day in the early 1960s when the three of them get invited to a party for the launch of a book the actress has written. The two poets are delighted because they will finally be able to prove that their painter friend simply made up his connection to the glamorous star. As they walk into the private club where the party is taking place, they espy the actress seated at a circular banquet talking with several people. She looks up as they approach and the painter makes a small hand gesture, the slightest of waves. She immediately responds with a smile and calls out to him by name and with a big “How are you?” His friends are so shocked he thinks they are may pass out.

Glenn Ligon’s practice is so multi-faceted that separate interviews could be devoted to his curating and to his art writing, as well as to the most obvious topic of his art-making. Recently, Ligon has also directly addressed online misuse of his work. While we touched on those topics, this conversation, which was conducted on Zoom the month before his November exhibition of new work at Hauser & Wirth in New York (this will be his first New York show with the gallery), focuses on his art, especially his recent mural-scaled paintings using the entire text of James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “A Stranger in the Village.”

An artist organizes a group exhibition in the loft building where he lives. For his own contribution he drills a small hole through the wall into the church next door. His plan is to drop a microphone through the hole and pipe the sounds from the church into the exhibition space, but when he enters the church and sees that his drilling has left a small pile of plaster on the floor, he has second thoughts. He is afraid that his act will be seen as an attack on the Catholic Church. Instead, he drills a hole in the wall on the other side of his building so that his microphone can pick up the everyday sounds of a beauty salon.

An artist gives a museum lecture in the guise of Dr. Zira, the chimpanzee/psychologist character from the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes.

A group of artists, gallery owners, and museum employees issue a call for museums and art galleries in New York City to close for one day as an act of protest against a war the U.S. is conducting in a faraway country. The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum, plus many art galleries, comply with this request. Only two major museums decline, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (which does, however, delay the opening of an exhibition for one day) and the Guggenheim Museum, which is then picketed.

One day in 1986, more than a dozen years after Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Cardiss Collins have been elected to Congress, a group of artists, activists and art historians who keep their identities secret by donning gorilla masks surreptitiously plaster the walls of the city with a poster noting, in thick sans serif type: “Only 4 Commercial Galleries in N.Y. Show Black Women. Only 1 Shows More Than 1.”

An artist and her friend are helping install an exhibition of experimental works on an abandoned Lower West Side pier. The women involved in the show are working hard, but the artists whose projects are being shown are all men. It’s the early 1970s. Walking home at night through the empty streets of Downtown Manhattan the two friends feel safer making loud noises, singing off-key and generally pretending to be crazy. One night they find themselves improvising bird sounds based on the first name of the organizer of the exhibition. This impromptu performance develops into a sound piece titled Birdcalls where the artist utters the surnames of 28 male artists in a variety of bird-like noises.

The New York years of this “sound artist” as he sometimes calls himself (declining the monikers “musician” or “composer”) begin in Brooklyn, the borough of his birth. He remembers how when he went to high school he was advised, “don’t tell them you’re from Brooklyn, they will think you’re an idiot.” Musically gifted and growing up in a Jewish community in the Brownsville neighborhood, he begins to sing in synagogue choirs, often during services that run for hours at a time.

It’s early on a Tuesday autumn morning and a sixty-two-year-old painter is standing in front of his home conversing with a neighbor and some firemen who have arrived to investigate a reported gas leak on the block. About a mile away a thirty eight-year-old sculptor who was working so late the day before he decided to spend the night in his studio on the ninety-second floor of a skyscraper is probably still asleep.

On an overcast day in 1993 an artist arranges some scraps of wood and bits of water-logged litter next to a concrete Jersey barrier being used to block off an empty expanse of asphalt on Manhattan’s West Side. In the photograph he takes of this casual-looking arrangement, which seems to rise from a puddle left by a recent rainstorm, we can see in the distance a swath of the New York City skyline.

On a Saturday afternoon four weeks before her solo exhibition is scheduled to open at one of the most prestigious galleries in New York—it will be her first show with this gallery—an artist decides she would like to start some morning glory flowers in the window boxes outside her third-floor apartment. As she steps onto one of the window boxes it gives way and she falls three stories to a parking lot below. Immobile but still conscious, she wonders whether, as a tough New Yorker, her predicament justifies screaming for help. She decides it does, and calls out. “We’ve already called an ambulance,” someone tells her.

As the third wave of a deadly pandemic crashes through the nation, a painter sets up a storefront studio in a landmarked Lower Manhattan building that has served as a communications hub for nearly a century. Surrounded by stacks of folded cloth, she is visible through the window to passersby as she works with a pair of scissors and a sewing machine, cutting up and stitching together fragments of curtains, bedsheets, dish towels, women’s suits, embroidered tablecloths, brocade upholstery, scarves, men’s long sleeve shirts, knitted blankets and countless other remnants from the realm of everyday textiles.

For too long, perhaps, we art critics have chastised ourselves, honoring the great achievements of the past only to discount the present state of our beleaguered practice. There are many good reasons for this attitude, many high marks of understanding, prescience, influence, and revelation that we can compare to subsequent moments of diminished powers.