Aruna D'Souza

4Columns September 7 2018

“Can empathy be an effective tool in political transformation, Love Story asks, if it requires those who are suffering to repeatedly narrate their pain? And to what extent does our empathy require a certain version of that story and a certain kind of storyteller?”

Exhibition catalogue essay for Dialectics of Entaglement: Do We Exist Together? at A.I.R. Gallery, August 2–September 2, 2018

[Dialectics of Isolation] itself was an oppositional gesture, one that grew out of a contemporary and widespread critique of A.I.R. Gallery, the eponymous journal published by the feminist Heresies Collective, and other women-centered cultural organizations whose programming and activism largely re ected the concerns of their mostly white memberships, to the chagrin of many women of color in the
art world. But Dialectics of Isolation was not predicated on the idea of inclusion — that is, its goal seems not to have been to merely make space for artists of color in a hitherto white space, though it certainly achieved that. Rather, it was predicated on a much more radical idea: the productive value of difference, the power of speaking from a position of isolation. “As non-white women our struggles are two-fold,” [Ana] Mendieta wrote. “This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being ‘other.’”

4Columns, June 22, 2018

“From a distance, the garments, feathers, mouth guards, and other materials embedded in the surface of A View of a Reflection create an improvisational, virtuosic play of color and texture, equal to any AbEx masterpiece: various shades of blue, from cobalt to ultramarine to whatever blues generic button-downs come in these days, are joined by bursts of carmine, coppery browns, dun greens. Close up, the surface is filled with visual incident: a fretwork plane punctuated by gaps and air holes where the resin did not seep, offering the delightful opportunity of identifying the unexpected objects that found their way into the frame. This and the other slabs open up the space for a painterly abstraction fully tied to a paradoxically visceral disembodiment, to cultural detritus, and ultimately, to blackness—one that is poetic, funny, elegiac, eerie, and, most of all, profoundly beautiful.”

4Columns, May 25, 2018

“If we need Cézanne right now, we need a different Cézanne than the one in Cézanne Portraits. We need the Cézanne that some of today’s most resonant artists see when they draw upon his work in their own: the conjurer of moody pathos that Lynette Yiadom-Boakye evokes when she paints portraits of fictional subjects that force us to imagine blackness differently; the playful, iconoclastic lover of visual puns that sculptor Rachel Harrison thinks about when she creates her strange, abject altars to celebrity culture. We need the Cézanne that undoes tradition, rather than the one that curators repeatedly present in order to uphold it. Those Cézannes are there, in the oeuvre, as are countless others. The challenge, and the pleasure, and the consequence, will be to find them.

Contemptorary.org & CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, May 31, 2018

“Smithson’s attention to this landscape, like my attention as I surveyed it, revealed the potential danger of thinking in terms of deep time, geological time, evolutionary time—namely, the risk of forgetting the now, the way landscape is always contested, fraught, necessary to sustain the now. There are other times to consider, including the time of human destruction, of environmental devastation, of colonial violence. The desolation of the landscape that I first perceived was merely my inability to understand its language, not being able to see its history and its present fullness inscribed in myriad ways on its surface. It was a desolation produced by looking through only one historical accounting of temporality.”

Longreads, May 2018

“As many of the protesters made clear in their posts and comments about the affair, cultural appropriation was not only about identity, but about how economic and cultural resources are available to some, while others — artists who share a cultural and historical link with Emmett Till, who grew up hearing his story as a warning and a call to action — are left without. From this point of view, the fact that Schutz made explicit that she would never sell the work or allow it to enter any museum collection didn’t mean much. The problem with her work was the way it traded on not only a cultural but also a “capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people with which our present era began,” as Black put it in her letter (emphasis mine). Protesters like Black saw in Schutz’s painting both a question of who may or may not speak to black history and one of how those acts of speech are exploited in capitalism. Black’s repeated declarations that “the painting must go” were a demand that all black bodies be taken out of circulation as commodities. The open letter encourages the idea that Schutz’s work be seen in the context of the real black bodies that were brutalized for profit in the past (under slavery) and in the present (e.g., through the prison industrial complex), and of the myriad ways that images of such violence were circulated to police blackness. By this reasoning, there was no other solution than that the painting be destroyed.”

Canadian Art, May 3, 2018

Profile by Merray Gerges, and excerpt from Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts

“Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal essay “The Case for Reparations” informed the ethos of her foray back into art writing. “I started to think about what a reparative model of art criticism would be for me, and I decided that my reparative gesture would be [through] attention,” she told me, and for D’Souza, that involves asking herself: “Who does my writing serve? Is it useful to the people I feel have been left out of many conversations? For me, a lot of what the book is about is the question of how to be an ally and how that has broken down in these various situations. It’s an exercise for me as a non-Black writer of colour: How can I write about Black protest? And what’s my role to centre the arguments of Black artists?”

The Paris Review, May 22 2018

“The question of what effect the 2017 Biennial protests will have on the Whitney Museum and the art world at large is yet to be seen. What became clear to many, however, especially in the aftermath, are the ways in which free-speech arguments are often deployed to cut off debate and to silence protest, especially when that protest is coming from people who are asking to be allowed into museums in real and meaningful ways—as exhibiting artists, as curators, and as part of a generously conceived public. What many hear when they listen to protesters is that someone wants to take something away from them—whether it’s our unfettered artistic freedom or our curatorial authority. We’d do better if we could bring ourselves to hear that those protesters are largely asking to come inside.”

ARTnews, Spring 2018

“I’m a fan of agonism—the idea of conflict as a productive kind of energy. There’s a strong case to be made that how we conceive of art institutions now is in large part thanks to people like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and groups that were promoting a radical idea of what institutions should be and how they could be relevant to the communities they serve. But as much as that has happened and affected how museums understand their role, what hasn’t happened is museums understanding their communities in a sufficiently broad sense to include and deal with the kinds of larger cultural issues that people expect museums to engage in.”

Art in America, 2 May 2018

“Can you imagine if the Whitney genuinely thought about the history of race protest against itself? I want to know what that would look like. And I don’t mean mounting an exhibition on the history of art-world protests, or even holding a panel about the Schutz controversy—both of which the museum did in the past year. I mean addressing the question of race and institutions in a way that lays bare the practices of decision-making, resource allocation, and hiring—something that looks less like museum programming and more like a truth and reconciliation commission. Even if the Whitney protests were triggered by a single painting, the stakes of the protest were much greater, and spoke to a whole set of institutional and societal issues that are urgent and complex. Until museums figure out how to process their mistakes as part on an ongoing practice, I think these protests will continue to erupt. And thank goodness for that—it’s how real change will happen.”

4Columns, 27 April 2018

“The label of “outsider” has generally been attached to artists on the basis of their distance, whether self-imposed or the product of structural exclusions, from the institutional frameworks that art history uses to confer “insider” status (such as schooling or participation in the right kind of art exhibitions); these frameworks are, in turn, often determined by the artist’s race, gender, class, geographical location, and so on. As such, directing one’s attention to moments when an outlier category emerged opens a space for recognizing so many makers, ideas, and practices that modernism has long resisted, or only accepted begrudgingly: craft processes, regional idioms, traditional “women’s work” such as textile arts and beading, the work of black and Chicano artists long ignored by mainstream art history, the role of religion and spirituality in American visual culture, the artistic value of utilitarian objects, the unironic, artists making installations in their backyards, and so on. But Cooke’s goal is not, it seems to me, simply to get us to recognize these “outsider” works as proper art—but to signal another way through the American visual landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It allows for a retelling of the story of American art…”

Momus, April 21, 2018

"We’re in the midst of what I see as a 'sex-panic panic': a general terror that women’s refusal to tolerate inequality in the workplace will usher in a draconian prohibition of pleasure.... But this panic sidesteps the real issue at stake in #MeToo: not simply sex, but women’s ability to participate fully in the artworld and other professional spaces. Our exclusion, despite being overrepresented among cultural workers, is becoming increasingly clear. And of course, the flipside of #MeToo is the alarming rash of firings of powerful women recently: Olga Viso at the Walker Art Center, Laura Raicovich at the Queens Museum, and, most recently, Helen Molesworth at LA MOCA. Paranoia about the potential excesses of #MeToo must be held in tension with the actual punishments being doled out in the artworld."

In We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85. New Perspectives, ed. Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art and Duke University Press, 2018).

"The term [identity politics] had been used in activist circles since the 1960s and was refined and further theorized by the Combahee River Collective in their 1977 statement as a form not simply of self-naming, but of a necessarily intersectional, tactical, and coalitional politics of identification across boundaries of race, class, as well as gender. In the pages of Heresies, and in the galleries of Dialectics of Isolation, it was this form of identity politics that emerged as a force in feminist art, and would continue to develop in the work of black radical women in the 1980s and beyond."

4Columns, March 2, 2018

"The goal seems less about teaching us how to draw and more about showing us that we can draw—that it is an innate skill that we all possess. This is what makes Dyson’s project so interesting, to my mind: by offering ideas on how to use that skill to address otherwise insurmountable problems, even in a small way, she allows us to enter the fray as active participants rather than remaining powerless bystanders. If Wynter-Wells functions to reorient the museum in a more activist direction, it does so by turning us, its audience, not simply into draftspeople but into political actors."

Garage, February 13, 2018

"Padmavati" offers up an anti-Islamic parable that is undone by its subversively sexy bad guy.

4Columns, February 2, 2018

"In her large-format, black-and-white photos of Flint paired with journalistic text, she notes those moments and events—or lost opportunities—that sociological or economic studies would fail to register: the fact that Shea will not be able to teach her daughter Zion to bake, because she can’t stretch her supply of bottled water far enough to be able to prepare food or wash dishes; the fact that Zion will not experience the childhood joys of playing in the spray of a popped fire hydrant or having a water balloon fight; the fact that Shea’s family had to abandon their ancestral home because it was located in an area of town hit hardest by lead contamination. While the last seems most consequential, the effect of Flint Is Family is to show that seemingly minor inconveniences faced by Flint residents have an outsized, cumulative effect, interrupting generational transmission of culture and experience. If Flint is family, what happens when the little, unthinking rituals that tie families together are no longer possible?

4Columns, January 26, 2018

"But this movement, this exilic condition, involves a constant refashioning, a prospect either exhilarating or exhausting. Starting Over (2016) depicts this complexity in the most extraordinarily succinct way: it consists only of a sheet of handmade paper that is crumpled up tightly and then smoothed flat again. You can see the wrinkles; you can practically feel the gestures of the hands that pressed it gently and repetitively to erase the signs of what it’s been through. How to read this gesture? As an act of near-destruction, in which the pristine paper is forever marked by the pressures to which it has been subjected, or a record of resilience, whereby the sheet is made infinitely more fascinating by the tracery of wrinkles on its surface? The answer surely depends, in part, on where you’ve come from, and how you got there.

Garage Magazine, December 22, 2017

"Shortly before the show was set to open on December 15, Candice Breitz discovered that the National Gallery of Victoria had contracted its security services to a company named Wilson Security—an outfit that oversaw the notoriously inhumane refugee camps at Manus Island and Nauru. The artist was left to decide between pulling her work and finding another way to make her objections known.

She came up with a novel solution, renaming her work Wilson Must Go and appending the condition that whenever the work is shown on Australian soil it must appear only with that title."

In Karen Greenwalt and Katja Rivera, Traduttore, Traditore, exh. cat. (Gallery 400, University of Illinois Chicago, 2017). [Download PDF here.]

"Translation is a practice that strives for an impossibility, a chimera of perfect understanding across the chasm of language, ideology, and culture. One undertakes it knowing that it will always be a failed project, that some notions are simply untranslatable, that even if one finds the perfect words to express a foreign notion, that notion will not lose its foreignness entirely. But still we persist, in our belief that translation is necessary for understanding, understanding is a prerequisite for empathy, and empathy is an antidote to cruelty. To make our world more fair and just, we must be able to fathom each other fully—our ability to be kind is predicated on our ability to relate to those on whom we bestow that kindness. We imagine that a productive collectivity only emerges from a shared language, or at least from an inability to translate near-seamlessly between languages.

The problem, of course, is that I don’t want to have to wait until people understand me for them to me as fully human, and vice versa. And I don’t want to believe that a sort of coming together—a consensus—has to emerge before we carry on with the task of dismantling the aspects of our lived experiences that are untenable, violent, and inhumane. But even more than that, I don’t want to lose the beauty inherent in misunderstanding—in the incompatibility of two systems of sign making, in the glitches that occur when words and thoughts and ideas don’t match up, when new ideas are formed out of the ashes of mistaken readings and stubborn, even perverse, resistance to comprehension."

4Columns, December 8, 2017

"As we exhaust ourselves with phone calls to senators and protests and town hall meetings and Facebook debates, as we cope with the mounting anxiety and depression that comes from seeing the daily outrages committed by our government and those around the world in the name of a false, corporate-driven populism, Brătescu is re-energizing, at times outright inspiring. She shows us how to imagine resistance as a form of joy, of play, of grounding ourselves through art. What a challenge, and a gift, that seems right now."

Real Bodies: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin

Momus, October 30, 2017

"She would force us to see these bodies not as nudes – as generalized images of beauty, as invitations or exhortations for us (whether feminists or not) to focus on how the erotics of that form were produced. Rather, she invited us to pay attention to those moments – would you forgive me if I borrowed the photographic notion of Barthes’s punctum? – where those erotics broke down in the face of the wonderful banality of flesh and virtuosity of paint."

Remembering Linda Nochlin

The Brooklyn Rail, November 2, 2017

"What a solitary pleasure, to read and reread her writing, her sentences that trip along the page with such freewheeling spunk, the way you just knew she chose a word because it rolled around on her tongue just so, her eccentric (but never improper) play with punctuation so that a phrase read exactly the way she would have said it out loud. She loved the word 'trope,' and she loved 'topos' even more. She would never shy away from a bawdy word when necessary, especially when the reader might be in danger of over-intellectualizing what should be the sensual and earthy pleasures of art."

'A True Pioneer': Friends and Colleagues Remember Linda Nochlin

Artnews, November 2, 2017

"I don’t even know how to describe what Linda Nochlin was to me; she was my dissertation advisor, my teacher and mentor, my best friend, and my family—she was my dear Linda. I have known her all my adult life, and anything I am today—as a writer, as an advocate, as a person of conviction and sense of purpose—I owe to her and the example she set."

Remembering Linda Nochlin

Art in America, January 1, 2018

"While Linda Nochlin is rightly credited as a groundbreaking, transformational, and rigorous art historian, we sometimes forget that she was also an art critic, though I’m not sure she herself dwelt particularly on the difference between the two roles. All that she was as a scholar—brilliant, incisive, ornery, contrary, funny, and deeply humane—seemed magnified in the freer-form mode that art magazines allowed her, Art in America above all. In an era when many of her friends and former students in the October circle had an outsize effect on critical taste, she played a crucial role, insisting, in an almost perverse way, on questioning fashionable opinions. If everyone was focused on Minimalism, she would insist on maximalism—unless, of course, that maximalism was getting too de rigueur, in which case she would take a left turn again. It’s not that her arguments and assessments weren’t deeply felt. Rather, she was always looking for what others had overlooked.

Garage Magazine, October 27, 2017

"With To Wander Determined, her current solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Toyin Ojih Odutola asks us to imagine a world just different enough from the one we live in to be a little uncanny and tremendously revealing, in which black people haven't been held back by centuries of slavery, colonialism, and their myriad consequences."

Exh. cat. for When Home Won’t Let You Say, ed. Eva Respini and Ruth Erikson, Yale University Press in association with Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

“It is common to think of borders as geographical boundaries. But borders are much more conceptual than that. Yes, in some cases they consist of a line drawn in the sand, or a checkpoint, or a wall, but they also consist of a waiting room in an airport, or a waiting room in a government building, or a waiting room in a foreign embassy. They consist of children’s detention centers and ICE-issued ankle monitors, of visa requirements and travel bans, of troop buildups. It is common to think of borders as pathways for movement, as liminal sites. But borders are more commonly sites of stoppages and stasis and containment and incarceration. We have gotten well past the 1990s fantasy of a globalized utopia, a borderless world—we know now (perhaps always did) that such a delusion involved capital being able to skate across a flat earth unimpeded while people were to be increasingly constrained in their place. The borders for things are different than the borders for people—the former have been torn down while the latter have, increasingly, been fortified, militarized, thickened, attenuated.

And so, in front of these barriers, visible and barely so, migrants wait. “

4Columns, October 20, 2017

"There is an irony—a supremely affecting one—in the fact that we discover this feeling of connection with others not by throwing ourselves into the throngs that gather nightly here, but by looking up, to the space of advertising and spectacle, of constructed desires and manufactured emotions. Or perhaps not. The fact is, I cry during Super Bowl ads, too. And even if the fiction they’re feeding me isn’t real, the tears are. "

4Columns, October 6, 2017

"New stories of the past necessarily result in new mappings of the present and new visions of the future: this is the stuff of political transformation. While Trigger errs on the side of offering too many prospective paths on this front, it is at the same time a vital reminder that identity politics, far from being a failure, as the right and left alike are quick to tell us, is alive, well, and getting on with changing the world."

Vice.com, September 27, 2017

"Jordan Casteel paints the street life of Harlem and its black residents, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer the quirky, and often decrepit, trappings of whiteness. But don't let their subject matter fool you. At heart, these two young artists—both of whom are having buzz-worthy solo shows in New York galleries right now—share a common idea: that to deal with our racist past and present, we need to see the world with empathy and care. The results are compelling, and transformative, and, in very different ways, beautiful."

4Columns, September 15, 2017

"This is a dystopic Eden worthy of Goya, who is indeed signaled by a bat flying overhead. Recall the famous image from the Spaniard’s series Los Caprichos of a man asleep at his desk while bats swarm above, 'The sleep of reason produces monsters,' and you get a sense of what this show is to be about: the contradictions of using the masturbatory activity of artmaking to deal with the very real monsters that are rearing their heads at the moment, and a self-deprecating laugh at herself for even trying to do so while the whole world is watching."

Exhibition Catalogue, Cheim and Reid, September 2017

"Fishman's grid functions not so much as a predetermined scaffold but as an always-emerging specter: she does not start with the grid; it develops through an intuitive process of mark-making. Every time she makes a move, applies a block of color, or scrapes it down again, a matrix surfaces on her canvas; yet when we try to pin it down, to trace its horizontals and verticals, to see it as a form in and of itself, it disappears and all we can see are those marks, the blocks of color, the scrapings."

4Columns, August 18, 2017

"At first glance, then, the Rose+Croix Salons—the six annual exhibitions held between 1892 and 1897 that were the primary manifestations of this short-lived group—would seem easy to write off as unrelentingly rearguard. But as Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897 at the Guggenheim makes clear, these artists’ turn to the world of the mind’s eye could accommodate a vast range of political positions: for some, it permitted a reactionary retreat from ugly political realities (or, worse, a doubling down on those realities), while for others it was a way of imagining new utopias."

Momus, July 20, 2017

"This is a question about whether our attachments to certain works or artists warrant setting aside the efforts of a community that has barely survived U.S. genocide to claim its sovereignty, and to survive under the conditions of a centuries-long occupation. If addressing ourselves to these problems makes us question our sacred cows in the process, so much the better. It won’t be easy, but it’s our obligation to do the crucial work of mourning, so that we can finally turn our attention to the long-standing, still-unresolved question of the place of Native American art in our vision of American art writ large."

4Columns, July 14, 2017

"Fernández is best known for her large public installations that play with viewers’ optical perceptions and sense of their bodies in space. In Overlook, she offers a more pointed phenomenological dilemma, one that brings questions of colonialism (and its corollary, “exploration”) into sharp relief."

Momus, June 29, 2017

"Paradoxically, it seems that the very strategies the museum is pursuing to open up its space to multiple voices are themselves responsible for ensuring that the only voices heard are the usual suspects. As is often the case with American racism, this exclusion was slow, systemic, and paved with good intentions."

Art News (print edition), Summer 2017

"A few minutes into my visit, Stanley Whitney gave me a look that can only be described as side-eye. 'You’re trying to get me to reveal all my trade secrets,' he said.

Whitney went on to talk animatedly and at length about his approach to painting, his technique, his art-historical loves, his opinions about today’s painting scene—but at the end of the conversation, I realized he’d never answered my first question, about his special alchemy of pigment and base, even though he’d asked and answered many others.

This seems entirely appropriate for a painter whose abstract canvases are at once almost unimaginably forthright in their formal qualities and maddeningly complicated in their optical effects. Like the artist, they don’t give up their secrets easily."

4Columns, May 14, 2017

"An encounter with these figures requires work—the viewer must adjust herself, move slightly this way and that, to accommodate them. To grasp them completely, that is to say. Which is what empathy, too, forces us to do: to transform ourselves, in big and small ways, in order to understand other beings in the world—to treat them as fully human, no matter how abstract they might first seem."

4Columns, April 19, 2017

This review appeared in April 2017. However, in the wake of the installation of "Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World” in Minneapolis in June 2017, long-standing doubts about Durham’s claim to Native heritage have resurfaced, with numerous Cherokee leaders, activists, and curators offering geneaological  proof of the falsity of the artist’s past statements. Durham is not in fact recognized as Cherokee by any of the sovereign tribes in the U.S. as a registered or unregistered Cherokee person, a fact that must be taken into account in any assessment of his work, past or future. — Aruna D'Souza

4Columns, March 17, 2017

"Immigrant, exile, refugee, traveler, stranger: these are the figures that define our time. They are alternately the fantasy and the nightmare of globalization—neoliberalism dreams of a “flat earth,” a world system where laboring bodies travel across borders as easily as capital, while populism fears those same bodies as dangerous, even deadly, parasitical drains on local economies and civil society. What these seemingly opposing narratives share is a determination to erase historical and material realities that motivate such mobility: the wars, economic crises, imperialisms and colonialisms, the violences and disparities that make displacement necessary and impossible, full of friction, driven by a basic instinct for survival."

CNN.com, February 24, 2017

"In the end, while I believe that artists should be able to tackle any subject that moves them, no matter their race or identity, they have the responsibility to that subject matter. By rendering Emmett Till's face in the way she did, Schutz did not fully grapple with the the political, historical and emotional implications of her photographic source. Any image of Emmett Till is about more than a single artist's empathy."

4Columns, February 24, 2017

"In this show, instead of negotiating the fantasies of the black female body as revealed through popular culture, Mutu takes on those conjured by European modernism itself. “Takes on” in both senses: she challenges their racist underpinnings and adopts them, devising herself in their image."

4Columns, January 13, 2017

"The effect is one of enchantment and disenchantment at once: the labor that produces the spectacle of the museum is laid bare at the same time that the dust itself inspires wonder, and even a kind of magic under Katchadourian’s nimble aegis. "

4Columns, December 2, 2016

"In the face of this fear, Jafa’s piece asserts Blackness as manifesto, as both an identity and a politics. But there is no transcendence on offer here, no deliverance. Instead, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is a record of the countless forms of survival and resistance that have emerged in Black culture. It is an artwork that loves the Black body by showing, over and over, how it is not loved but still persists. It is, in its most poignant moments—multiple images of the fear, rage, and sorrow of Black children who we witness confronting the realities of living in a racist world—hopeless, and in others full of hope. Anyone who is anticipating what the next years will be like would do well to watch carefully and to listen closely."

Art Practical, November 10, 2016

"To put it another way, there is no inside or outside to the positions that Ukeles maps in works like Touch Sanitation Performance—a distinction that institutional critique largely relies upon—because Ukeles refuses to see maintenance as an Other. For her, making visible the work of maintenance isn’t shining light on something separate—it is, on the contrary, a “flushing up into consciousness” as she puts it, an act of desublimation within the collective psyche. In this light, the forms of visibility that her performances construct are purposely doubled. Social Mirror (1983), consisting of mirror-clad garbage trucks, and made in conjunction with Sanitation Celebrations, may have rendered the vehicles (and consequently, the labor of maintenance) hyper-visible on the street, but it did so by reflecting the city, throwing back an image of us, forcing us, quite literally, to see ourselves in this work."

Prestel/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2016

"But again that waxy surface draws me in, and this time I pore over it the way I might a display of bugs caught in amber -- as an uncanny upwelling of the past in the present, life caught and preserved, not left to decay and dissipate. Time cannot do its work here on the surface, at least, even as the corners of the paper sag and the edges shred every time the work is pinned to the wall in this gallery or that museum or this collector’s house. Entropy is at work, but this random debris of studio life preserved in the wax – it resists entropy. I find that hopeful, maybe, and poignant."

4Columns, November 4, 2016

"The trifecta of being a woman, being black, and—thanks to the New York art world’s myopia—of spending most of her career in the South, is, infuriatingly, explanation enough for her relative obscurity. The refusal of her practice to fit into any single category or genre may be another. But that eclecticism is superficial—never has a practice been so consistent in its devotion to questions of history: whose is recorded, and how."

4Columns, September 23, 2017

"Respites are breaks from the action, not flights from them, and in this sense Thomas’s works seem less like apolitical retreats from the harsh realities of her political moment than (echoing the concerns of Simone Leigh) acts of nurturing and care for a community stretched to its limit. To say this another way: What may well have struck the white art world as comfortably void of any reminders of race politics could have operated quite differently for Thomas’s black audiences. While this exhibition doesn’t make the case fully, it does the extraordinary service of putting these ideas—and these paintings—into our range of vision at a historical moment that is witnessing its own (perpetual) struggle for black lives."

In The Carnegie Reporter, Fall 2019

“But in our digital age, that quest for knowledge has become in some ways more complicated, not less. While one of the Internet’s greatest gifts has been the democratization of information, it brings with it new challenges, such as preserving the immense universe of digital data; ensuring access to the Internet regardless of income at a time of sharp inequalities; and creating an online infrastructure that is not only able to support an enormous amount of information but can organize it into navigable and readable formats, such that we can all use it to better understand our world.”

Carnegie Reporter, April 4 2019

“In the wake of decolonization across the African continent in the mid-20th century, political leaders of newly independent nations saw education as one of their most urgent priorities. How do you build the infrastructure and gain the knowledge — whether in medicine, science, engineering, economics, or a host of other scientific and technical fields — to improve the lives of their citizens? And, equally important, how do you write a new, postcolonial story of Africa — of its histories, its arts, its philosophies and literatures, its musical and cultural traditions — told not through the eyes of its colonizers, but by its own makers, scholars, and thinkers?”

Download the epublication here.

"In writing and publishing art criticism, we hold the contemporary moment up to the court of history, and lay claim to a stake for how we, and our time, will be understood.

Momus writers wield this responsibility and challenge with an embodied understanding of the urgency of writing cogently, clearly, and bravely about our contemporary moment and the art – and politics – it’s coming to represent. Their voices have led our publication into a different tonal register, this year – a ratcheting up of meaning, a growing impatience with pat, tacit political understandings, or obscurantism of any kind. In this register, Aruna D’Souza grapples with grief over Jimmie Durham’s legerdemain; Mitch Speed rides the subway with Zoe Leonard’s heralding, heart-rending “I Want a President”; I move through a vulnerable social landscape in Los Angeles, following Trump’s election and its protests; Kimberlee Córdova and Andrew Berardini confront the shaky ethics of contemporary art; Casey Beal struggles with his desire for “the now-ubiquitous high-decibel, all-frequencies static of political outrage”; Tausif Noor demands better transparency between art and capital; and Saelan Twerdy asks, “in this political-economic configuration, can we say that ‘contemporaneity’ is ending, too?”

The Forward, April 1, 2015

"The first things I noticed when standing in front of Nicole Eisenman’s Seder, a painting commissioned by the Jewish Museum in 2010 depicting a family Passover gathering, were the hands. Garishly pink and fleshy, they rise from the lower edge of the canvas. They’re cartoonish, really, like something out of the work of Philip Guston, and painted in a style utterly unlike anything in the rest of the canvas — they busy themselves by breaking a matzo in half as a motley crew of guests around the table looks on, converses or retreats into silence."

Art Practical, May 27, 2015

"Had I become a writer then, instead of going to graduate school and becoming an academic, I would have been one of a dying breed, like one of the last generation of brontosaurus. Instead, now, at age forty-five trying to fashion a second career, I am like a pigeon who aspires to be a pterodactyl."

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute/Yale University Press, 2014

The Forward, December 26, 2014

The Forward, October 25, 2014

The Forward, September 2, 2014

Interpreter of Memories

Edible Hudson Valley, September 1, 2013

In Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art, D.A.P., 2010

Penn State University Press, 2008

In Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne

Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College/ D.A.P., 2006