There’s now a colossal head in Miami Beach commemorating the overlooked history of women’s service in the Coast Guard during WWII. It was sculpted by artist Prune Nourry. I spoke to Nourry about the project for the Art Newspaper, read all about it here.
I wanted to make some smaller zines for fun timed with the Halloween season. These try out something I haven’t before which is folding one page into a 14-page little booklet. The selected spooky topics are L’Inconnue, the drowned muse of Paris; the protective lore of witch bottles; and mortsafes, made to safeguard against graverobbing. You can find them all on my Etsy!
I contributed to Tree Speech’s podcast “The Trees Remember: Tales from the Haunted Grove” with a haunting tale of why mulberries are red. Listen to the episode here!
For the Art Newspaper, I reported on a new gallery of ancient art 100 years in the making at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. It was collected by John Ringling of the Ringling Bros circus. Read the story here.
I joined US Modernist Radio for an interview on the Modernist New York Map I worked on with Blue Crow Media. Listen to the discussion on all things modernism in the city and why maps are great!
I spent much of this year on a project for the American Folk Art Museum rethinking biographies for “outsider” artists and I’m proud these are now coming online! It was inspiring in this time of undervaluing human creativity to commune with those who made their own paths. You can explore them here.
For the Art Newspaper, I reported on how the National Trust for Historic Preservation is supported Black churches in the US, from preservation projects to augmented reality experiences. Read online and in print!
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.
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.
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.
