EventsThe New Social Environment#741

Joan Didion: What She Means

Featuring Hilton Als, Maren Hassinger, Elaine Reichek, Liz Larner, and Jonathan T.D. Neil, with Betsy Fagin

Tuesday, February 7, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Writer and curator Hilton Als and artists Maren Hassinger, Liz Larner, and Elaine Reichek join Rail contributor Jonathan T.D. Neil for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Betsy Fagin.

In this Talk

Visit Joan Didion: What She Means, on view at The Hammer Museum through February 19, 2023 →

Hilton Als

Hilton Als (b. 1960) is associate professor of writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts and a staff writer for the New Yorker. He has taught at Princeton University; Smith College; the University of California, Berkeley; Wellesley College; Wesleyan University; and Yale University. Prior to writing for the New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

hilton.als

Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger has built an expansive practice that articulates humanity’s inextricable connection with nature. Through an intentional choice of material, Hassinger explores subjects such as movement, environment, identity, and race. The artist has executed recent commissions for Dia Bridgehampton, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Aspen Art Museum. Hassinger will be honored with a two-person exhibition alongside Senga Nengudi at IVAM, Valencia. She is the recipient of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found at the Art Institute of Chicago; SFMoMA; LACMA; MoMA, NYC; Hirshhorn Museum; Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum, among others.

Elaine Reichek

Elaine Reichek (b. 1943) lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Brooklyn College and a BFA from Yale University, and has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad, including at Secession, Vienna; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Jewish Museum, New York; and elsewhere. Thread has been a core element in Reichek’s work since the early 1970s, and she was a pioneer among her generation in rethinking the role of craft in the fine arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Something Betwixt and Between — Matisse & Bloomsbury at Seven Sisters, Houston (2025); Frock-Conscious at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Archival Correspondents at McClain Gallery, Houston (2022); and MATERIAL GIRL at Marinaro, New York (2022).

http://elainereichek.com/

Liz Larner

Sacramento-born artist Liz Larner experiments with abstract sculptural forms in an array of materials, including polychromatic ceramics that evoke the tectonic geologic shifts of the western landscape. An inventor of new forms, Larner’s sculptures defy easy description by design. Larner’s 30-year retrospective Don’t Put It Back Like It Was was on view at the Sculpture Center in New York and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2022. Her work has been included in group and solo exhibitions internationally, and is in numerous public and private collections. Larner has also been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Nancy Graves Foundation Grant.

Jonathan T.D. Neil

Jonathan T. D. Neil was Editor of the Held Essays on Visual Art for the Brooklyn Rail from 2011-15. Currently he is Co-Founder of Inversion Art, a startup that provides investment, strategy and management services to visual artists.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨