Search results for ""Author Hilton Als""

In this brilliant two-part memoir, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hilton Als distills into one cocktail the deep and potent complexities of love and of loss, of Prince and of power, of desire and of race. It’s delicious and it’s got the kick of a mule, especially as Als swirls into his mix the downtown queer nightclub scene, the AIDS crisis, Prince’s ass in his tight little pants, an ill-fated peach pie, Dorothy Parker, and his desire for true love. Always surprising and stealthily—even painfully—moving, Als plumbs longing: “I inched closer to him as he danced to you, Prince. But already he was you, Prince, in my mind. He had the same coloring, and the same loneliness I wanted to fill with my admiration. I couldn’t love him enough. We were colored boys together. There is not enough of that in the world, Prince—but you know that. Still, when other people see that kind of fraternity they want to kill it. But we were so committed to each other, we never could work out what that violence meant. There was so much love between us. Why didn’t anyone want us to share it?”

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'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan'Als has a serious claim to be regarded as the next James Baldwin' Observer'I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love'White Girls is about, among other things, blackness, queerness, movies, Brooklyn, love (and the loss of love), AIDS, fashion, Basquiat, Capote, philosophy, porn, Louise Brooks and Michael Jackson. Freewheeling and dazzling, tender and true, it is one of the most highly acclaimed essay collections in years. 'A voice that's new, that comes as if from a different room. I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead 'Effortless, honest and fearless' Rich Benjamin, The New York Times'Als is one of the most consistently unpredictable and surprising essayists out there, an author who confounds our expectations virtually every time he writes' David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times 'A comprehensive and utterly lovely collection of one of the best writers around' Eugenia Williamson, Boston Globe

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The story of the song that foretold a movement and the Lady who dared sing it.Billie Holiday's signature tune, 'Strange Fruit', with its graphic and heart-wrenching portrayal of a lynching in the South, brought home the evils of racism as well as being an inspiring mark of resistance.The song's powerful, evocative lyrics - written by a Jewish communist schoolteacher - portray the lynching of a black man in the South. In 1939, its performance sparked controversy (and sometimes violence) wherever Billie Holiday went. Not until sixteen years later did Rosa Parks refuse to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Yet 'Strange Fruit' lived on, and Margolick chronicles its effect on those who experienced it first-hand: musicians, artists, journalists, intellectuals, students, budding activists, even the waitresses and bartenders who worked the clubs.

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Introduced by Hilton Als, in 'one of the best novels about adolescence in American literature' (New York Times) two siblings come of age in a mountainous wilderness ...'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing'I love this novel.' Patricia LockwoodShe would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead.Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle's Colorado mountain ranch, where they write, hunt, roam. But this untamed wilderness soon becomes tainted by dark stirrings of sexual desire - and as the pressures of growing up drive an irrevocable rift between them, their innocent childhoods hurtle towards a devastating end . . .'Beautiful, and sensitive, and quickening.' Eileen Myles'A glimmer of genius.' Rumaan Alam'Breathtakingly original.' Tessa Hadley'A brilliant achievement [to] set beside Carson McCullers's masterwork The Member of the Wedding.' Joyce Carol Oates

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Long awaited, the first survey of the work of one of America's foremost contemporary fine art photographersFor almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

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"A generously illustrated, wide-ranging selection of essays on American films helmed by non-American filmmakers.” ­–Film Comment The cities, landscapes and people of America have been the subject of many a film, but when seen through an outsider’s perspective, new and often significant aspects of its culture are revealed. America: Films from Elsewhere examines film and America from the perspective of auteurs from around the world—from anyplace but America—covering the half-century from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 to the election of Donald Trump in 2017. Masters of the medium such as Chantal Akerman, Joyce Wieland, Michelangelo Antonioni, Lars von Trier, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Chris Marker are discussed, alongside lesser-known greats such as Yolande du Luart and Babette Mangolte. The book also features specially commissioned portfolios by artists, including Camille Henrot, Harun Farocki, Lucy Raven, the Otolith Group and Ute Aurand.

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Places for the Spirit is a stunning collection of over 80 documentary photographs of African American folk gardens -- and their creators -- in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina). These landscapes have a unique historical significance due to the design elements and spiritual meanings that have been traced to the yards and gardens of American slaves and further back to their prior African heritage. These deceptively casual or whimsical foliage arrangements are subtle and symbolic reminders of the divine in everyday life, the cycles of nature, and implied right and wrong ways to live. In the spirit of "outsider" art traditions, blues musical roots, and other such folk manifestations, these gardens have a unique aesthetic and cultural significance. Over 20 years in the making, this is the first collection of fine art photography to document this subject and, as such, it adds greatly to our understanding and appreciation of this disappearing element of African American culture.

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Painter, novelist and wrestler, Drexler is the great polymath of Pop Rosalyn Drexler has always moved between worlds. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, she showed sculpture at New York’s Reuben Gallery, a gathering place for artists like Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg who combined installation and performance with traditional media. Drexler took part in Happenings at Reuben Gallery and at Judson Church (years after her own quasi-performance as a female wrestler, memorialized by Andy Warhol in the 1962 series Album of a Mat Queen). Drexler’s collages and large-format paintings of the 1960s open the category of Pop art to technology and politics in a way that feels contemporary today, crossing hard-edge painting with depictions of sex, violence, race and gender role-playing in film and media. Her writing also crosses high and low genres, comprising novels both experimental and popular, avant-garde theater and writing for television (including an Emmy-winning Lily Tomlin special). In addition to a comprehensive selection of Drexler’s major paintings, Who Does She Think She Is? also recovers the artist’s early sculptures, recently rediscovered and not exhibited since 1960. Documentation of Drexler’s performances and theatrical work, photographs evoking her role in the downtown New York scene and a selection of her books and other archival materials present her work across multiple mediums, offering a comprehensive look at Drexler’s varied career. Rosalyn Drexler was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. In 1951 Drexler pursued a brief career as a professional wrestler under the name "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire." In January 1964 her work was included in the First International Girlie Exhibit at Pace Gallery, New York. In 1968, Drexler signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

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Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as she finds it.Simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique - Speedboat is funny, disturbing, cutting, brilliant unlike anything that had come before. Since it burst onto the scene in the 1970s, it has enthralled generations of readers and been a touchstone for writers including David Foster Wallace, Claudia Rankine and Jenny Offill.With an introduction by Hilton Als

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Explore Frank Walter’s relationship to Antigua through a range of works and writings that express his intimate connection to Caribbean nature, landscape, and place. “Nothing seems to be reworked—it is as if each piece drew or painted itself without being adjusted, revised, or fussed over.” — Hyperallergic Influenced by his studies of agriculture and the sugar industry in the former British colony of Antigua as well as his extensive travels in England, Scotland, and West Germany, Walter created work inspired by his thoughts, knowledge, journeys, and surroundings—work that encompassed painting, drawing, writing, sculpture, photography, and sound. This focused selection focuses on paintings—tender, quiet, and lush—that transcend the traditional tourist’s view of island life in favor of perspectives that explore how and why we look at where we are.Published on the occasion of the 2022 exhibition at David Zwirner, this catalogue includes an introduction by the show’s curator Hilton Als. Barbara Paca, the leading expert on Walter, writes a text detailing her personal experience meeting Walter and being in his presence. An essay by Charlie Porter takes readers on a walk as he muses about Walter’s life and the nature depicted in his paintings. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro travels to Antigua to explore the history of the island and Walter’s lasting impact there.

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The debut monograph on the haunting, tenebrous figuration of the acclaimed Maine painter Maine-based painter Reggie Burrows Hodges (born 1965) explores storytelling and visual metaphor, often drawing inspiration from his childhood in Compton, California. Starting from a black ground, Hodges develops the scene around his figures, who materialize in the recessive space with foggy, ethereal brushwork. Hodges' figures are "forms that are made sharper, and more haunting, not because we see those things in their eyes, but because we see it in their bodies, their postures, the endless desire for humans not to be alone, and to connect," Hilton Als writes. "To that Hodges adds all that wonderful blackness." This fully illustrated catalog features a selection of works made between 2019 and 2020; a newly commissioned essay by Hilton Als; and an interview between the artist and Suzette McAvoy, Executive Director at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

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Art writing, theory, poetry and more from a leading champion of “painting as a poetic act” This unprecedented collection compiles the writings of artist and poet Jesse Murry (1948–93), an extraordinary thinker who believed in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction brings together Murry’s published art criticism with previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his tragic death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. The result is a portrait of an original mind who sought to unite the histories of Romantic landscape painting with the realities of Black experience through “a belief in the restorative and creative powers of the imagination.” No artist before occupied the exact intersections Murry created through his work, which aimed to reclaim “painting as a poetic act” amid the “death of painting” discourse of the 1980s. In addition to Murry’s writings, this volume also includes reproductions of selected paintings; excerpts from a a pair of panel discussions on art criticism and expressionism that took place in 1980; as well as transcriptions of two of the artist's notebooks, in which the spatialization of the words across the page approaches the condition of thought. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction presents Jesse Murry in his own words, offering intimate access to this remarkable figure.

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A revelatory trove of innovative photo collages, photograms, photographs and photocopies—many never before published—most reproduced at the size DeFeo printed them This monograph on the legendary and influential artist Jay DeFeo features over 150 photographic works—many never before published—most reproduced at the size the artist printed them. After the completion of her monumental masterpiece The Rose in 1966, DeFeo moved from the heart of artistic activity in San Francisco to a small house in Marin County, California. There she embarked on a focused and rigorous exploration with the camera. For much of the 1970s, she used the camera as a tool to look and think with, creating a wide range of black-and-white photographs she processed in her darkroom. The artist used experimental photographic techniques to produce extraordinary artworks, alongside documentary images of her studio and paintings in process. Her contact sheets, some of which are reproduced here, are often filled with multiple views of one object, revealing the way DeFeo looked and sketched with the lens. In 1972 she wrote: "My interest in photography has always paralleled my expression as a painter." Essays by Hilton Als, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller and Catherine Wagner survey the rich materiality, sculptural layering and illusionistic devices of DeFeo’s playful and enigmatic photographic works, illuminating her astonishing range and daring experimentation with the medium. Jay DeFeo (1929–89) was a Bay Area artist who created an original and provocative body of work, including the iconic painting The Rose (1958–66). In the 1970s and 1980s, DeFeo continued her visionary work in a range of mediums, including works on paper, photography, collage and photocopies. Among many other exhibitions, a retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012.

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Over a brief, twelve-year career, the Iranian director and playwright Reza Abdoh broke all of the conventions of American theater, pushing actors and audiences past their limits to create hallucinatory, at times nightmarish, dreamscapes shot through with humor, song, and an unlikely spirituality. His productions addressed the bitter political realities of his time— the systemic devaluation of black life, governmental indifference to the AIDS crisis, sexual repression, genocide in Europe, and war in the Middle East—with harrowing eloquence. Just before his death he ordered that his plays should never be performed again. Profusely illustrated, the catalogue contains new essays on the influence and reception of Abdoh’s works in theater, film, and video, published and unpublished interviews with the director, and conversations with his friends and colleagues, as well as scripts of his plays and contemporary reviews.

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An exploration of the visual corollary to Didion’s life and work and the feeling that each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics—including artists from Helen Lundeberg to Diane Arbus, Betye Saar to Maren Hassinger, Vija Celmins and Andy Warhol In Joan Didion: What She Means, the writer and curator Hilton Als creates a mosaic that explores Didion's life and work and the feeling each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics. Arranged chronologically, the book highlights Didion's fascination with the two coasts that made her. As a Westerner transplanted to New York, Didion was able to look at her native land, its mores and fixed rules of behavior, with the loving and critical eyes of a daughter who got out and went back. (Didion and her late husband moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, where they worked as highly successful screenwriters, producing scripts for 1971's The Panic in Needle Park and 1976's A Star Is Born, among other works, before returning to New York 20 years later.) And from her New York perch, Didion was able to observe the political scene more closely, writing trenchant pieces about Clinton, El Salvador and most searingly the Central Park Five. The book includes more than 50 artists ranging from Brice Marden and Ed Ruscha to Betye Saar, Vija Clemins and many others, with works in all mediums including painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video and film. Also included are three previously uncollected texts by Didion: “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love” (1969); a much-excerpted 1975 commencement address at UC Riverside; and “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic” (2007).

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A window into the world of 1970s painting through the work of 30 women artists Published to follow the landmark exhibition at Karma Gallery, New York, this catalog unites the works of 30 women painters who were active in New York City during the 1970s. The collection showcases the diverse practices and backgrounds of these artists, all of whom were deeply influenced by the transformative legacy of second-wave feminism. During this period, a new form of painting emerged, fusing elements of sculpture and textile into the medium while reevaluating its role through innovative art historical methodologies. Amid debates about the relevance of painting, women artists revitalized the practice, coinciding with a shifting political landscape characterized by the global revolt of women against their marginalized status. Artists include: Emma Amos, Ida Applebroog, Jennifer Bartlett, Betty Blayton, Vivian Browne, Cynthia Carlson, Martha Diamond, Louise Fishman, Suzan Frecon, Nancy Graves, Cynthia Hawkins, Mary Heilmann, Virginia Jaramillo, Jane Kaplowitz, Harriet Korman, Lois Lane, Helen Marden, Dindga McCannon, Ree Morton, Elizabeth Murray, Ellen Phelan, Howardena Pindell, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Faith Ringgold, Dorothea Rockburne, Susan Rothenberg, Joan Semmel, Jenny Snider, Joan Snyder, Pat Steir.

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This is the definitive visual account of the gay liberation movement in New York, following the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village in 1969, an event that marked the coming-out of New York's gay community. As a direct outcome of Stonewall, gay pride marches were held in 1970 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Fifty years later Pride will be celebrated in thousands of cities across the world. Including more than 190 photographs by Fred W. McDarrah chronicling the movement in all its glory, the book includes reflective essays by major figures such as Alan Ginsbery, Hilton Als and Sir Ian McKellan.

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Baldwin's life and legacy as remembered by a pantheon of artists and writers: from Jamaica Kincaid and Barry Jenkins to Richard Avedon and Alice NeelWhen author James Baldwin died in 1987, he left behind an extraordinary body of work: novels, poems, film scripts and, perhaps most indelibly, essays. A friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, Baldwin was a critical voice in the civil rights movement. After reaching acclaim in his early career as a writer, he struggled to retain the author's I, while taking on the we of the people.Edited by Pulitzer Prizewinning author Hilton Als and growing out of his landmark exhibition at David Zwirner in 2019, God Made My Face brings together an impressive assembly of contributors, ranging from Baldwin biographer David Leeming to novelist Jamaica Kincaid and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, to create a memorial mosaic: one that not only mirrors Baldwin's various tones but

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