Xaviera Simmons: Crisis Makes a Book Club

By William Corwin

NOV 2022 | ArtSeen

In the comprehensive survey exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club, Xaviera Simmons explains with brutal clarity the need for real gestures; land acknowledgments without Land Back will not do, and there can be no equality without reparations. As the title calls out, starting book clubs to read the literature of the oppressed without yielding the social and economic capital demanded in those very texts means nothing.

A Joe Brainard Show in a Book

By Megan N. Liberty

SEPT 2021 | Art Books

This collection of zines and book jacket designs celebrates Brainard’s generosity, but also his skill as a designer, highlighting the material aspects of the artist’s hand, his graphic design sensibility, and use of the space of the page.

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.

Interspecies Futures, Veiled Taxonomies, and Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows
at Center for Book Arts

By Amber Jamilla Musser

JUNE 2021 | Art Books

All three exhibitions manifest theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and use the forms of the book to enlarge what constitutes knowledge and being together. In these profound (and profoundly different) engagements with sensing, we realize that the book not only contains knowledge, but also invites ethics—how can and should humans engage?