Description
Book SynopsisWhat happens when beauty intersects with horror? Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes.
Trade ReviewExhibitions is a fantastic book--both smart and inviting, intimate and outward-looking, creative and critical. It's the best of all worlds in an essay collection, and one I will return to again and again."—Randon Billings Noble, author of
Be with Me Always: Essays"These ekphrastic essays do more than extoll beauty or privilege erudition. They insist that art, in all its forms, acts as the ballast against the pain of human cruelty and folly, against the vagaries of time."—Hasanthika Sirisena, author of
Dark Tourist: Essays"
Exhibitions unsettles art and its purchase. In tautly interlinking essays, Dubrow describes what is unseen, overlooked, or dismissed, and she refuses to look away."—Spring Ulmer, author of
Bestiality of the Involved"Told in precise and dreamy detail,
Exhibitions portrays truths--the vivid memory, the unexpected detail, the unforgettable word--with the clarity of glass before it breaks."—Alexander Nemerov, author of
Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New YorkTable of ContentsGallery One
Landscape with Basilica
Gallery Two
The Red Picture and the Blue
Snapshot / Warsaw, 1981
The Dead Class
From the Archives: Lessons in American English
Essay, Made of Antique Glass
Snapshots / Warsaw, 1987
Gallery Three
Mother and Child
Portrait on Metal with Patterned Scarf and Streak of Light
Snapshot / Washington, DC, 1986
Lost Vessels
Snapshot / Lubumbashi, 1978
On the Color Matching System; Or, Marriage
Seventy-Seven Steps
The Lodger
Snapshot / Dallas, 2022
Gallery Four
Ambivalent Things
Gallery Five
Jewel Box
Dear Rose
Snapshots / Denton, 2018
Provenance
The Resonator
You Must Stumble
Still Life with Tattered Passport
Gallery Six
About the Artist
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
