Other Writing
Book Reviews
The German Modernist Who Painted a Multicultural United States
From the Blackfeet reservation to Harlem, Winold Reiss immersed himself in the world of the people he represented, forming close ties with many individuals.
To illustrate Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues,” a German immigrant artist captured “the lazy sway” of a singer at his piano. Cubist fragments form the background of a cabaret and nighttime New York cityscape. This is the world of Winold Reiss, where European modernism meets African American vernacular culture. Reiss ruptured divisions between cultures and nations as well as applied and fine art. His oeuvre encompassed paintings, book designs, posters, tapestries, and interior and architectural design. His skills and range are so impressive that his relative absence from 20th-century American art history seems unaccountable. The 14 contributors — curators, art historians, artists, and cultural critics from both sides of the Atlantic — to the eclectic anthology The Multicultural Modernism of Winold Reiss (1886-1953): (Trans) National Approaches to His Work offer compelling and provocative reasons to rectify that omission.
- Hyperallergic: August, 2022
Martin Harris
“Fannie Engraves a Copper Plate”
How Women Helped Revolutionize the Art of Printmaking
The artist Boris Margo once confronted Louise Nevelson about the messiness of her printmaking. “You leave so much black on the plate; you can wipe it cleaner.” “I don’t want it clean,” she retorted. At the innovative print collective Atelier 17, women “got dirty” in ways that resisted gender norms. Home and hearth were the midcentury feminine ideal, so being an artist was challenge enough. Add to that assumptions about women as weak — surely they couldn’t operate a heavy printing press or use “manly” tools like the burin in copper plate engraving. But at Atelier 17, women displayed more than mastery. They helped revolutionize printmaking, and along the way redefined beliefs about gender identity and artistic achievement in the 1940s and ’50s.
- Hyperallergic, May 2020
Read more: Hyperallergic
‘Joan of Arc’ review: France’s virgin saint comes alive in Kathryn Harrison’s Biography
If you aren’t already in thrall to the “Maid of Orleans,” you might be by the end of Kathryn Harrison’s You can’t help but cheer on the 19-year-old who armored herself with virginity and men’s clothing as she disrupted 15th-century social norms, led the French army to victory over the English, and ushered the Dauphin to coronation as Charles VII. She paid for her brief glory with “the first great witch trial,” a tortuous imprisonment, and a brutal death before earning the immortal life of sainthood.
Harrison creates the interior life of a singular young woman against a backdrop equal parts myth and history. She mines the extensive records of Joan’s trial and its nullification to create a complex figure unbending to any but divine authority, and possessed of a verbal acumen that “a chorus of scheming pedants couldn’t dismantle.”
- Oregon Live, Jan 2015
Read more: Oregon Live
Nonfiction Review: ‘Cleopatra’ by Stacy Schiff
To appreciate Stacy Schiff’s “Cleopatra: A Life,” begin by banishing the myths, the “kudzu of history” that grows in the absence of facts. Forget the thick bangs and pageboy, the dazzling beauty and sexual predations, the fabled asp that delivered her death, even the perception that she was Egyptian.
Cleopatra was a Greek Macedonian descended from the Ptolemy dynasty — “about as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.” She was not likely beautiful; most sources report on her large nose, confirmed by the only images we have — her face on the coins issued during her rule with Mark Anthony. . . Imagine: a woman rising to the top without trading on beauty.
- Oregon Live, October 2010
Read more: Oregon Live
Nonfiction Review: ‘The Pain Chronicles’ by Melanie Thernstrom
In “The Pain Chronicles,” Melanie Thernstrom tells the story of a former train conductor who lost both legs and an arm in an accident caused by his multiple sclerosis. One day, his doctor finds him propped up in his hospital bed holding “Kitchen Table Wisdom,” a book of medical stories, with his one remaining limb. “Hey Doc,” he says, “Some of these people … the way they cope — it’s incredible.”
Why do some people stay resilient in the face of intractable pain while others despair? What is pain, Thernstrom asks, “sensation, emotion, or idea?” How does the body’s alarm system turn into a “state of being unlike any other, a magic mountain as far removed from the familiar world as a dreamscape”?
“The Pain Chronicles” follows Thernstrom’s personal and intellectual journey through these vexing questions.
- Oregon Live, August 2010
Read more: Oregon Live
Exhibit Reviews
Banquet by Joseph Hirsch
How Printmaking Became Popular After The Great Depression
The Portland Art Museum’s exhibit on the innovative business enterprise Associated American Artists (AAA) displays one of its 1946 catalogues. On the cover, a slim, blonde woman sits reading on her couch — the very embodiment of middle-class leisure. Six signed, original prints by the group’s “Leading American Artists” fill the wall behind her — a visual statement of the AAA’s goal of bringing art to every home. Prior to the Depression, owning fine art was beyond the reach of most Americans. In 1934 Reeves Lewenthal changed that through a unique marriage of art and commerce. According to The Reporter magazine, Lewenthal was “an enthusiastic, restless, practically sleepless businessman” as well as a former art dealer. Chyna Bounds, who curated the exhibit, quotes Lewenthal’s belief that “the gallery system was doomed.”
- Hyperallergic, August 2019
Read more: Hyperallergic
Interviews
Q&A: An Ear for Women
Growing up, professor and biographer Megan Marshall practiced the piano or the harpsichord every day, a discipline that prepared her well for life as a writer. Marshall listens for rhythm and melody in language, her own and that in the letters and diaries of the women whose lives she explores. “A biographer,” she has written, “is like a good accompanist.”
In her most recent book, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, she literally accompanies her subject, integrating her experience as Bishop’s poetry student at Harvard in 1976. Meanwhile, Marshall’s two previous prize-winning biographies innovate in other ways, expanding our framework for reading history and women’s experience.
- WCW Online
Read more: Women’s Review of Books
Diving Deep: An Interview With Ted Conover
Ted Conover has spent his entire career delving into different cultural worlds. “Why not?” he asks. “It’s a big universe to explore.” Conover’s empathy runs as deep as his curiosity. He is a writer, as William T. Vollmann observed in a review of The Routes of Man, who cares about “not merely that convenient abstraction, humanity, but people in particular.” Indeed, people—everyone from hoboes riding freight trains to Mexican immigrants to prison guards—animate the pages of Conover’s books. Living with them, sharing the indignities they suffer and the pleasures they enjoy, is the foundation of his immersion journalism—a beat he shares with Barbara Ehrenreich, Lauren Kessler, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, among others, each of whom opens up the experiences of frequently ignored people and communities.
- Creative Nonfiction, Spring 2017
Read more: Creative Nonfiction