John Ashbery’s ​​Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists

By Candice Chu

OCT 2022 | Art Books

This book allows one to read with as much freedom as one listens to a playlist, in sequence or on shuffle. Read it as a playlist, or as any artwork that is drawn from the stuff of life, discover the biography revealed at its edges and interpret it as a portrait, a diary, or a letter from John Ashbery.

Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s

By Alfred Mac Adam

OCT 2022 | ArtSeen

Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s is a time capsule, and like all time capsules it is an enigma. Time capsules are supposed to provide people of the future a sample of things typical of the moment when they are buried. Which raises the critical issue of perspective: are we to understand these eight glorious pieces according to what we think they meant thirty-five years ago, or should we understand them according to what they say to us today? Even if we lived through them, the 1980s are as irrecoverable as the 1880s: an abyss separates us from that decade even if human time—memory—may trick us into thinking we actually know that remote moment perfectly.

Leiko Ikemura: Anima Alma - Works 1981–2022

By Jonathan Goodman

DEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen

Born in Japan, Leiko Ikemura left for Spain to study language and art before moving to Switzerland and eventually to Germany, where she currently works. An artist of subtle feminist assertion, Ikemura has chosen in most paintings to represent women and in some instances children. Ikemura is well known in Europe and has shown extensively there, but this is her first exhibition in America. Her painting style tends to be diffuse and sensuous, in a manner not so distant from the art of someone like Marlene Dumas. Her training directed her toward a compelling mixture of figuration bordering on abstraction, even when she is rendering people.

Carl Einstein’s A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art

By Joseph Masheck

JUNE 2022 | Books

A toughie, but monumental: this book takes substantial texts, from 1912 to 1935, of an idiosyncratically great early modernist German art historian-critic, Carl Einstein—few of whose writings have been accessible to Anglophone artists or scholars—and translates them in developmental order, rendering them both accessible and comprehensible.