John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism.
Art
Huckaby, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was raised, and teaches at the University of Texas at Arlington, draws people he knows: family, friends, and neighbors in the African American community: he makes the local become something more.
Art
Clements’ dedication to drawing — “the way she sees,” as she once told Susan Swenson — is registered in the shifts and jumps in perspective, and in her use of separate sheets of paper to define the limits of her focus.
Art
For an artist known for her flawless alignments (or deliberate misalignments) of overlapping wave patterns to achieve a memorable optical effect, the inclusion of “bruises” seems a bold and unexpected move.
Art
Gagner’s attention to details is laced with a sharp, self-mocking wit. And yet, there is a gentleness running through the paintings, a sense of humor at once compassionate and tough.
Art
Derived from memory, Bearden’s bayou is at once real and mythic, the Black counterpart to William Faulkner’s apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County.
Art
Donaldson wanted to replace the history of demeaning stereotypes of Black people that had been presented by white, mainstream culture. By connecting his work to Africa and developing a powerful transnational view, he aimed to develop an alternative history rooted in struggle.
Books
In all of his poems, you feel Felsenthal finding his way from word to word and from line to line: he is not trying to tell a story or replay an anecdote so much as go where the words and phrases, sounds and meanings, lead him.
Art
Instead of thinking of Acheson’s works as paintings, I have come to think of them as battered talismans, unfinished letters, and broken odes to his heroes, many of whom are artists.
Art
One thing that has bugged critics of Kitaj is that his work can be simultaneously accessible and full of allusions.
Art
In responding to Judd and Greenberg, it is apparent that Gorchov wanted to find his own way past what he saw as the limits of their theorizing and make something that was recognizably his.
Art
If you want to understand what happened in the 1960s or you want to know about race in America, Smith is one of the essential photographers to look at, as are the other members of the Kamonigen to have shows in recent years.
Art
Do you ever feel like you are getting the hard sell or being bludgeoned into submission?