There’s a brand new map for your summer wanders! I worked on the Modernist New York Map with Blue Crow Media that guides you to over 50 sites across the five boroughs, from sleek skyscrapers to futuristic churches, and has beautiful photographs by Jason Woods. It was fun to do the writing and research for this and consider the city from the point of view of its 1930s-60s era of design with all its glass curtains and sculptural concrete. I made a lot of discoveries I was previously unaware of, like work by New York’s first licensed Black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy, and the Transportation Building in Brooklyn that I always overlooked as kind of drab but turns out was once on the cutting edge of design.

This is my fourth (!) map with Blue Crow Media, following Concrete New York, Art Deco New York, and Great Trees of New York, and you can get them all in an NYC set. May they encourage you to explore the world near you!

I reported for the Art Newspaper on an 18th-century house in Brooklyn that is becoming its neighborhood’s first museum. As a bonus it links salt marshes to the rise of NYC. Read all about it here!

The summer issue of Fine Books & Collections magazine that I edited is now out! There are stories on poisonous books (no surprise I wrote that one), the secret art of letterlocking, literary travels in Portugal, road trip photography, and so much more. I’m extra proud of how this one turned out.

I was an honor to be invited up to Buffalo to be the keynote speaker for Forest Lawn Cemetery’s 175th celebrations. I also helped lead a trolley tour of sites at the cemetery as we explored deeper our evolving relationship with the grave. You can find more photos here!

Artist and typewriter-er extraordinaire Tim Youd invited me to talk on his Up All Night St. Louis radio show. You can find it archived here with plenty of other good conversations for your ears.

I’m excited to be going up to Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery to be the keynote speaker for its 175th anniversary celebration! The May 10 event will have an opportunity to join both a talk about how the grave has changed over time and a cemetery visit where we will see Forest Lawn through that context. Click here for all the details.

I created a new zine—Follow Me: Angel Guides of the Victorian Cemetery—with my photographs of guiding angels from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery and an essay on what this 19th-century iconography means in the history of how we remember our dead. It’s inspired by an article I wrote in 2018 for the Offing and features full-page photographs to show the detail of the weathered marble tombs. Pick up a copy on my Etsy.

For the Art Newspaper, I reported on a cemetery for enslaved people that has been rediscovered at Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee plantation:

The legacy of slavery has always been entwined with the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s 1,000-acre Tennessee plantation. There, about ten miles north-east of downtown Nashville, remnants of the quarters formerly inhabited by people enslaved by the seventh US president have been excavated, and artefacts of their daily lives have been unearthed—from sewing thimbles to toy marbles. Until last year, however, where exactly this community had cared for and interred their dead was unknown.

Read the full story here.

For the Winter 24-25 issue of Raw Vision magazine, I contributed a feature about the late self-taught artist Jesse Aaron who was inspired by the trees around his Florida home. As he often stated, “The wood will tell you what to do.” You can read an excerpt online and find the full story in the beautiful print edition!

For the winter issue of ArtDesk, I wrote the cover story on artist Edgar Heap of Birds and his upcoming exhibition in Oklahoma City. Read it online and in print!

For the Art Newspaper, I reported on the restoration of Gordon Matta-Clark’s caged rosebush that has been hiding in plain sight in the East Village for over 50 years:

In a brief yet prolific career that ended with his death at age 35 in 1978, Gordon Matta-Clark responded to the neglect of New York City’s urban environment with radical interventions, most famously colossal cuts in abandoned buildings. Much of his work was meant to be ephemeral, and little of it survives, especially in the places it was created. An exception is a small, rusted steel cage outside St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village. For years it has stood unmarked and empty of the flowers it was intended to hold.

Read the full story here.

Each December over the past four years, I’ve done a mailing project for my friends involving a choose-your-own adventure story (made via the Kafkaesque infrastructure of a Google Form). I started to do it in 2020 when, for obvious reasons, I found myself feeling isolated from many people I care for and also was trying to think of something, anything, that I could offer as a bit of brightness in a dark time. I used some of the Thanksgiving holiday downtime to finally turn them all into physical zines to preserve them in some way offline where everything is always precarious in its eternity. Here they are: The Solstice Scriptorium, The Office of Lunar Occultation, The Bureau of the Winter Triangle, and The Dead of Winter.

While I was in Australia earlier this year, I got interested in how part of Melbourne General Cemetery was being restored from its colonial Victorian landscape to a native grassland. The story is now in American Cemetery & Cremation magazine in print and online!

Surrealism is turning 100 this year! For JSTOR Daily, I created a reading list about all the many aspects of this artistic and literary movement, from its connections to communism to its legacy in contemporary art like Afrosurrealism. Explore it here.

I had some fun making new zines for the fall, including a short one on the strange presence of the Fiji mermaid in museums around the world as well as mini zines on pet cemetery epitaphs, witch marks, lost museums of NYC, and ancient NYC public art. You can find them all on my Etsy!

For the Art Newspaper, I reported on the how the former home of the late artist L. V. Hull in Kosciusko, Mississippi, is being preserved as the town’s first visual arts center. It’s also the very first art environment by an African American artist to be added to the National Register. Read all about it here!

I explored how augmented reality is being used in cemeteries around the world for American Cemetery & Cremation magazine, from visualizing past borders of segregation to honoring military graves. Find the story online and in print!

For the Art Newspaper, I went to the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin and reported on its new expansion, where community, city, and the arts are all coming together. Read all about it here!

I’m excited to share that I’ll be writing a book for one of my favorite series: 33 1/3! If you’re unfamiliar, the Bloomsbury series features compact books each dedicated to a single album. My contribution will be about Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads. Keep an eye out for updates as I get started.

For the spring issue of ArtDesk, I wrote about Loie Hollowell’s work and how the “curving forms and luminous colors of the native Californian evoke the abstraction of artists who emerged in the twentieth century.” Read the full story both online and in print!