Art
With an Eye to Our Common Future
Some painters — following in the footsteps of Arthur Dove — offer us received images of transcendence. John Dilg isn’t one of them.
John Yau
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
Why Give a Name to It?
I liked Outside In because I found out what five artists whose works I have followed are doing these days.
Books
Muriel Leung Wants to Remember the Color of Her Blood
Muriel Leung's poems grabbed me by the throat.
Art
Guston After Trump and Before Christmas
I don’t know if laughter is the best medicine: sometimes it is the only medicine.
Art
Original Translations
Diane Simpson’s sculptures, which are made from planes she cuts and scores when she wants to curve them, always begin with a drawing.
Art
“Neither Flesh nor Fleshless”
What’s great about Rothko’s paintings is their refutation of language, the way they push back against conclusions.
Art
An Abstract Expressionist Master of Etching
In contrast to other Abstract Expressionists, most notably Robert Motherwell, Richard Pousette-Dart saw prints as a beginning, a surface to work on. He goes over them with acrylic, gouache, graphite, and ink.
Art
The Ecstasy of Drawing
Cecily Brown is genuinely interested in all the ways a body experiencing pleasure can occupy space. In her drawings she records the results of her curiosity, her looking.
Art
The Quick and the Dead
Salvatore Scarpitta’s imagination was wild and full of high jinks. It is one reason why the art world has never known what to do with him.
Art
The Triumph of the Chickens
Like Ralph Ellison, who did not think of the Invisible Man as a protest novel, Kerry James Marshall is interested in the nuances of invisibility, in how much goes unseen, and the many different ways willful blindness manifests itself.
Art
Seeking Community: Memories of 'The Poetry Project'
I think a conversation about community is important for many reasons, not the least being the rather utopian idea that there is someplace you can go where you feel safe.
Art
An Artist Who Is Not a Capitalist Minimalist
Nahum Tevet's premise is straightforward: What do you need to temporarily preserve and mount a drawing on the wall?