An optimistic, wise collection that offers the pleasures of discovery.
In a country inundated with political and social ugliness, a nationally curated poetry anthology forefronts the beautiful.
For poet, critic, and editor Lomax, a poem can be many things. This anthology features entries from poets from every state and, pointedly, the United States’ inhabited territories and commonwealths. Each contributor provides a “found poem” that conveys what they find beautiful. In short, Lomax asked each writer to engage in “witnessing, not creating.” A couple of poets chose work by others, but several chose photographs, news articles, and social media screenshots. Each work includes the rationale for its submission. Many revered poets participate, including Eileen Myles, Jericho Brown, and Dorothea Lasky, but there are several lesser-known writers hailing from as far as Cameroon and South Korea. The location and text appear on the left and the image on the right; this is a welcome layout concept since more abstract images require context for readers to effectively see what the poet is seeing. The anthology’s theme, Lomax writes, is partially in response to the Trump presidency and its lingering assault on our ability to connect with the beauty around us; through beauty we can “heal the wrongdoing at hand.” Some works reflect on a memory that addresses multiple issues, like race, identity, and ingenuity; for example, Brown’s entry for the state of Georgia is short but affecting. He provides the phone number of a figure known as “Hustle Man” whose numerous professions make him “an example of the everything black folk will do to survive.” Tiphanie Yanique of the U.S. Virgin Islands chose a screenshot that celebrates the YA novel Hurricane Child (2018) by fellow Virgin Islands writer Kheryn Callender that explores queerness, climate change, and the legacy of colonization without resting on tropes. This is an untraditional offering, and entries range widely in type and scope; the collective effect is both peripatetic and profound.
An optimistic, wise collection that offers the pleasures of discovery.Pub Date: April 7, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9850219-6-7
Page Count: 145
Publisher: Gualala Arts
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This examination of American realist painter Thomas Eakins's little-known photographs—mostly graphic nudes taken between 1880 and 1900—has a timely provocative edge. In 1985, a trove of Eakins's photographs was acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This Charles Bregler collection comprised some three-quarters of the artist's output in the medium. Cataloging the material are Danly (curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College) and Leibold (archivist, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). The package includes essays by able academics; a central portfolio of meticulously reproduced plates; and extensive annotations. After studying in France, Eakins (18441916) returned to his native Philadelphia with an interest in photography. The authors examine the private nature of his photographs, how they were used mostly for study purposes, not for exhibition. Essayist Elizabeth Johns (Art History/Univ. of Pennsylvania) suggests that Eakins used photography to explore a realm of ``fantasy'' absent from his coldly objective paintings. Much is made of Eakins's dismissal as director of instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886 for using a male nude model with female students. In the ``naked series,'' the artist, his wife, and his students pose nude or draped in classical robes. In one, the bearded and frontally nude Eakins cradles a languid naked woman student in his outstretched arms, the two heroically lit by a central shaft of light cutting through the stark studio setting. Plein air studies of young men swimming au naturel are shown to have served as studies for Eakins's 1883 masterpiece, The Swimming Hole. And extensive motion studies analyze figures in stop-action. Though dryly dissected by a bevy of stiff academics, Eakins's photographs still have the power to shock. With the current debates over the ``pornographic'' works of contemporary photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and David Wojnarowicz, it's revealing to have a strong antecedent reexamined. (173 b&w photos, 52 duotones, 16 tritones)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56098-352-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
Preachy and polemical essays trace 25 years of alternative public art, addressing an exciting topic with airless earnestness. Editor Lacy is a conceptual and performance artist, a founding member in the 1970s of the West Coast's Feminist Studio Workshop, and currently dean of fine arts at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Her introduction defines ``new genre art,'' now an established movement of artists who engage in installations in public spaces, collective group endeavors, and activist actions and stand in opposition to what they see as the elitist traditions of museums, galleries, and grandiose public statuary. Essays by a bevy of contributors follow. Mary Jane Jacob, an independent curator, struggles over the medium's attempts to embrace a nonexclusive public. Critic Patricia C. Phillips tries to tackle public art's ``challenge to modernism,'' as well as its failures as a marginalized genre. More cogent are offerings from well-known art writers Suzi Gablik, on the artist's role in society, and Lucy R. Lippard, on the definition of public art; both manage to reach concrete conclusions. Lighter, and most entertaining, is artist Allan Kaprow's first-person account of recruiting inner-city kids for a collaborative project documenting bathroom graffiti in Berkeley, Calif., in the late 1960s. Most helpful to general readers and students will be the book's second half, an alphabetized compendium of both well- and lesser-known works of some 90 artists and collective groups assembled by Susan Steinman (Art/California State Univ., Hayward). Described here: Joseph Beuys's 1974 three-day cohabitation of a New York gallery space with a live coyote; Jerri Allyn's activist ``40 Woman All-Waitress Marching Band'' from L.A. in the 1970s; and New York City's Guerrilla Girls, who raised the art world's consciousness in the 1980s. Essays laden with the verbal clunkiness of the politically correct art cartel, joined by a more useful index of artists and projects.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-941920-30-5
Page Count: 295
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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