Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, which catalogues an exhibition that opened last fall at Princeton University Art Museum, proposes a reorientation for American art history around ecology and environmental history.
April 26, 2019
Jasper is the first book from photographer Matthew Genitempo. While the images were made in the Ozarks, they recall an atmosphere of rural America more than they reflect a specific place. The name Jasper, too, has a particular generality...
March 27, 2019
I still feel like a New Mexico writer in part, an important part, and my plans are to secure a little place there to live at least part of the time...New Mexico inspires me as no other place. I consider it the birthplace of my poetry, though of course, my poetry was set in place for generations, through all the speakers, singers, and artists in my ancestral lines.
January 30, 2019
A Swedish girl joins her first séance at seventeen. Her mind swirls with a heady mix of books on Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, and spiritualism. This doesn’t set her apart; the occult is mainstream in 1879. By the time she is thirty-five, she has started a séance circle with four female friends called The Five (De Fem), which will commission her most significant works...
November 28, 2018
February 1983: a man in coat and scarf stands on a sidewalk among various street vendors at Cooper Square in downtown New York City. At his feet, a collection of perfectly spherical white forms...
October 30, 2018
Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the intersection of environmental damage and the human body has long captured my attention as a reader and as an inhabitant of this planet...
October 01, 2018
On April 1, 2014, the editors at ArtSlant reported that MoMA would “give the museum over exclusively to women artists for the entire year of 2015.”...
July 30, 2018
Images in Silver begins with a quote from famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing,” it goes, “and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.” Photography, then...
May 01, 2018
When Jenny George read from her collection The Dream of Reason at Collected Works in early April, her voice was soft, slow, and steady. Like her poems, her reading rendered heartbreaking compressions of language and feeling into something delicate to behold. Her images ...
April 11, 2018
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable...
April 01, 2018
Winter in the northern Midwest is not a place I return to in person, at least not willingly. It is a place I dread for its deadly overcast sadness, a dread that, I learned from Michigan poet Emily Van Kley's collection, constitutes its own heady nostalgia. The Cold and the Rust…
March 15, 2018
Calling herself a "visual artist who writes," author Verónica Gerber Bicecci approaches fiction from the conceptual and the personal simultaneously: What does it mean, logically, for a person to be missing? And how does it feel? Bicecci incorporates line drawings throughout Empty...
February 22, 2018
In the last year, Aleksandar Hemon’s writings in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the perils of Trumpism have served as my touchstones, pieces I bookmark and return to and share when I’m feeling especially low, especially unable to proceed. Hemon is a Chicago-based...
February 01, 2018
Lowrider Summer brought an onslaught of exhibitions, parades, and events to Santa Fe in 2016, but don’t let lowrider burn-out set in just yet...
November 01, 2016
As a difficult year winds to a close, I’ve been thinking about what books made a difference for me in 2017. What changed my mind, or opened it, or gave me language to understand and express the present moment? Here are three 2017 titles that made me see things in a new way...
December 14, 2017
Jenn Shapland reviews three recent book releases: The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (nonfiction), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (fiction), and For Want of Water: And Other Poems by Sasha Pimentel (poetry) ...
November 07, 2017
Sometimes a writer’s subject finds her. Valeria Luiselli, a novelist and essayist from Mexico City, was waiting for her green card when she and her niece started working as interpreters at the New York immigration court. Luiselli had heard from her own immigration lawyer that after...
November 01, 2017
New fall book released in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are reviewed with one sentence and one quotation of each from Jenn Shapland. Titles include The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt, Katalin Street by Magda Szabo, The Mountain by Paul Yoon, Letters to his Neighbor by Marcel Proust ...
October 01, 2017
Louise Lawler has spent her career effacing any presence of her own identity in her artworks. Her works themselves are often either mechanically produced or feature the work of other artists. [...]
September 01, 2017
At the heart of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS lie two apologies. One comes from the poet’s father for his drinking and his absence during her childhood. This apology, [...]
August 01, 2017
While she was planning Views by Women Artists, a massive collaborative exhibition in 1982 during the annual College Art Association conference, Sabra Moore’s own show, Pieced [...]
July 01, 2017
The exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the South in Contemporary Art debuted last year at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is currently on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville [...]
July 01, 2017
The series of obelisks punctuating the US-Mexico border west of the Rio Grande is ostensibly the subject of David Taylor’s 276 photographs in Monuments. These boundary markers resulted from multiple treaties [...]
June 01, 2017
In art history classes, the slide pair is a powerful tool. Project two images side by side, and they are like two flint rocks, one setting a spark off the other. Compare and contrast: it’s always easier to understand something when you can say what it is not [...]
February 01, 2017
