In her new book on the artist Louise Nevelson, Julia Bryan-Wilson reassesses Nevelson鈥檚 iconic sculpture, assembled from found wood into elaborated sculptures, usually painted black. Despite her status as a leading sculptor of post-war abstract art, there has been little scholarly writing on Nevelson. Rather than a traditional monograph, Bryan-Wilson鈥檚 book is modelled after Nevelson鈥檚 art, split into four interchangeable volumes, in an act of gathering, sorting, and putting together sometimes incongruent parts. Across the four volumes鈥攄rag, colour, join, and face鈥擝ryan-Wilson deploys methods that include archival research, historical rigour, and close looking as well as speculative conjectures, tendentious asides, wilful readings, anachronistic interpretations, and hypothetical comparisons. Following Nevelson鈥檚 nailed-together sculptures in which the means of construction are fully on display, with nails still poking out, Bryan-Wilson also implicates herself in this project, and narrates her own frequently disjointed process of researching, writing, and hammering together this book. In conversation with Jo Applin, Bryan-Wilson will discuss the work of Nevelson, the work of working on Nevelson, and our tasks as art historians for thinking about the art, life, and work of an artist.
Julia Bryan-Wilson (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2004) is Professor of LGBTQ+ Art History and core faculty in Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de S茫o Paulo (MASP).听She is the author of four books:听Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era听(University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by 迟丑别听New York Times听and听Artforum);听Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing听(with Glenn Adamson, Thames &听Hudson, 2016);听Fray: Art and Textile Politics听(University of Chicago, 2017, a听New York Times听best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize); and听Louise Nevelson鈥檚 Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face听(Yale, 2023).
Bryan-Wilson鈥檚 show听Louise Nevelson: Persistence,听was an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale in 2022; and with Andrea Andersson, she curated听Cecilia Vicu帽a: About to Happen,听which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and travelled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the ICA Philadelphia, and MOCA North Miami.
Organised by Jo Applin, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the History of Art and Director of the Centre for American Art
