Kara Walker: Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies & The Book of Hours

By Susan Harris

DEC 21-JAN 22 | ArtSeen

Installed in the first of the two back galleries of Sikkema Jenkins are several suites of modestly scaled drawings from the series “Book of Hours.” Referencing medieval Christian books of hours, the drawings on view reinforce the primacy of privacy. Viewers bear witness to the outpouring of stream-of-conscious thoughts, feelings, and reactions that Walker channels through line and liquid media onto paper.

ADAM RENSCH with John Collins

MAR 2020 | Field Notes

The third book in the Field Notes series published by Reaktion Books in association with the Brooklyn Rail has just been published: No Home for You Here: A Memoir of Class and Culture, by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch. John Collins sat down with Rensch at his home in Chicago to discuss the book and its preoccupations.

John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance

By Jean Dykstra

DEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen

Photographer John Edmonds was a standout in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, where his understated portraits and still lifes quietly deconstructed ideas about race, gender, and masculinity. His reserved and lovely show at the Brooklyn Museum—his first solo museum exhibition—includes a few of the photographs on view at the Whitney and in his well-received book Higher (2018), as well as new portraits and still lifes.

The Once and Future Queen: Amber Sparks's Weird Realism

By Kurt Baumeister

FEB 2020 | Books

Amber Sparks’s third story collection And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges is, as the title suggests, teeming with tales of retribution, though reducing the book or even its concept to that of a glorified burn book would be way off the mark. Desire, anger, murder, madness, robots, gods, monsters, apocalypses, love, hate, violence, magic, fairy godmothers, women as heroes, and men behaving badly (badly-behaved men who often pay with their lives, or hearts, or souls for said bad behavior): all these things live within this book’s pages.