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Recent Reviews
Katy Hessel
Mixed The New Republic Hessel’s particular version is tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism, which is perhaps not surprising for a book born out of an Instagram account ... Neatly packaged products like these answer loud, ongoing calls for more cultural representation. Yet they also run the risk of oversimplifying their subjects ... It’s impossible to read these stories without feeling haunted by the accumulated what-ifs, all the art that wasn’t but could have been ... Hessel’s later efforts at inclusion often feel clumsy, like she’s trying to shoehorn outsiders into a master Western narrative ... Attempting to re-create Gombrich’s famously sexist text under the guise of inclusivity is not the best way to address art’s gender problems.
Alexandra Lange
Positive The New Republic A question kept nagging me as I read Meet Me by the Fountain—one that Lange answers but not, I think, completely convincingly: Should malls be saved? She says yes, making the case that \'the mall is neither a joke nor a den of zombies, but a resource. America’s dead malls represent millions of square feet of matériel that are not going to be reabsorbed without investment and effort.\' This is an important point: No one is served by hulking, decaying structures, least of all the people who live nearby, and Lange details some fascinating examples of adaptive reuse, including one former shopping center that’s been transformed into an Austin Community College campus ... But while she’s defensive about those who catalog dead malls with glee, I understand the impulse—although my take has always been more of a lament. Instead of multiple shopping centers with similarly sterile interiors, why couldn’t my suburban hometown have had theaters, a skate park, nature trails, and more sidewalks? We all need places to go to sit among strangers and bump into friends, but I wish I’d been given more opportunities to do so that weren’t linked to commerce or set to the sounds of Muzak or Top 40 pop.
Joe Sacco
Positive The Nation Unlike the structure of Sacco’s previous books, in which the core conflict is woven throughout the story, the narrative of the residential schools is concentrated in one section in Paying the Land, and it doesn’t appear until halfway through the text. That decision reflects a crucial difference in this new work: Although, like other Sacco titles, it involves him visiting and reporting on an oppressed community as an outsider, the subject isn’t war or an uprising. There are fewer specific events to chronicle and more sentiments and arguments to convey, which at times makes for a less cohesive story. But the shift allows him to move away from mostly depicting misery to rendering a more complex, affirmative world. This comes through in the richly detailed art and the formal experiments that open up new depths in his work ... Sacco fills the pages with a proliferation of images. Scenes of bush life flow into one another without panels or borders, creating the feeling of a dreamscape informed by the aesthetic of a scrapbook. The effect is immersive ... Sacco went to the Northwest Territories in search of stories about what’s buried underground. He returned with something deeper.
Nancy Princenthal
Positive The New Republic ... convincingly rewrite[s] the history of performance art by tying it to sexual violence. Reading this book now is simultaneously illuminating and painful, an acute reminder of how far we’ve come in the decades since, yet also of how mired in the same problems we remain.
Mark Dery
Positive The Nation Dery’s ability to break down Gorey’s many influences is one of the most valuable aspects of Born to Be Posthumous, which is as much an analysis of its subject’s work as it is a telling of his life ... Dery devotes ample space to Gorey’s underappreciated commercial work, and rightfully so ... an engrossing read despite its flaws, which include a fondness for cliché and over-the-top language, as well as an overreach on Dery’s part when it comes to Gorey’s sexuality. (This has also been a point of contention for other critics, who have objected to Dery’s treatment of it as an unsolvable, trauma-induced mystery, rather than taking Gorey at his own word that he simply wasn’t that much interested in sex.) The vignettes are valuable not just as entertaining stories, but also because they extend the reach of Gorey’s transfixing spell.
Nell Irvin Painter
Mixed The Nation Painter drew constantly as a teenager and studied art for a time at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s. Decades later, her historical research slowly brought her back to working with images, until she made the decision to attempt a second career. For Painter, that meant getting a second education, a journey that she chronicles in her new book, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over ... Her writing is consistently readable, with the occasional striking line jumping off the page, often when she uses color as a form of description...and her style can be overly colloquial, with phrases rendered in all-caps for emphasis and words like \'Harrumph\' appended to the ends of paragraphs. These Internet-inflected tics are arguably the wrong elements of the 21st century to bring into her memoir.