Miranda Melcher with the New Books Network podcast had me on for an interview related to my book Grave. Listen here for our conversation about how we care for the dead, how we could do better, and why cemeteries are fascinating places to investigate.
I contributed a feature story on the self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield to the spring 2023 issue of Raw Vision magazine. Born in 1872, Hirshfield did not start painting until the age of 65 after a career in the New York City garment industry:
At first, Hirshfield stuck with carving and made a large prayer-stand for the local synagogue, adorned with lions, birds and decorative designs accented in gold. However, after turning his bedroom into a studio, he took an existing painting off the wall to use as a canvas. His first finished work –Beach Girl – obscured the original painting except for the woman’s face; the rest was consumed by dense patterns of blue feathery clouds and an ocean that coiled like steel wool.
Read the full story in print, with the issue also including my reviews of the film For Your Peace of Mind, Make Your Own Museum and a new book on the Painters of the Sacred Heart.
I discussed tombstone recipes and the Cooking with the Dead zine with the Spanish-language publication Reforma. It’s always fun to share more of why recipes carved on headstones are so special and our adventures in trying to make them.
I made a new short publication called Some New York City Epitaphs of final messages from the famous, ordinary, and unknown found in cemeteries across the five boroughs. It is illustrated throughout with flowers sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s incredible digitized resources. My favorite epitaph in it comes from comic book editor Julius Schwartz in Mount Hebron Cemetery, Queens: “He met his last deadline.” Pick up a copy here!
My first book—Grave—is officially out from Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series! It’s a concise exploration of the past, present, and future of how Americans care for the dead and is told from my perspective as a cemetery tour guide. It was a journey to write and I’m proud to have it out in the world. Pick up a copy and take it on a stroll to a cemetery near you.
If you’re in the NYC area, I’ll be having a book launch party with Morbid Anatomy on February 23!
My first cover story for Raw Vision magazine is on Grant Wallace who based his mysterious illustrations on messages from spirits and extraterrestrials. The full story is available in print and an excerpt is online:
When he died in 1954 at the age of 87, The New York Times wrote in Grant Wallace’s obituary that he was a “newspaper man, war correspondent, magazine writer, essayist, and artist” whose litany of accomplishments included eyewitness editorials from the Russo-Japanese War, humour writing, archaeological coverage, horticultural experiments, the founding of a writers’ colony, the production of animated cartoons, and the editing of a cinema arts magazine. There was no mention of his explorations of the occult, nor of the detailed documentation of his telepathic investigations but, although it was the least known part of his expansive career, this fascination with the universe and its mysteries as portrayed in his art has become his most enduring legacy.
Read the full story in Raw Vision.
The NYC Microseasons project I’ve been doing with my friend Erin Chapman reached a full year of seasons on Winter Solstice 2022. Visit our site for all of our weekly missives and sign up for the newsletter:
Each week was an opportunity to pay close attention to the small changes in both the natural and unnatural world, where coyotes roam the urban edges and marsh birds wade on a fragmented shore. Appreciating the droning song of window AC units along with the morning croon of the mourning doves, the chaotic appearance of potholes as well as the beautiful silhouettes of great trees, revealed that while the months seem to fly by, there are signals of time all around us. Forecasting these Microseasons encouraged us to slow down and notice even the more unpleasant parts of city life, such as the aerial flotsam that catches in the trees and wasps invading summer picnics, and consider what part they play in making this a place like no other.
For the winter 2023 issue of Fine Books Magazine, I wrote about the ‘Called to the Camera’ exhibition on Black studio photographers that was on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art:
These photographers were often working across commercial assignments, advertising, photojournalism, and the fine arts; still their studio practice was pivotal in giving a space for their communities to be seen by the camera and in turn create a legacy of African American life.
I contributed two stories timed with discoveries to JSTOR Daily, one on the discovery of King Tut’s tomb and another on the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone:
With all this attention paid to the Rosetta Stone, its meaning beyond an object used by European scholars to unlock an ancient script is frequently overlooked. The moment in which it was created to spread the reputation of a ruler—literally as the stelae were erected around the kingdom—and the use of language to assert that ruler’s power is also a part of its history. As museums are now reckoning with the looted provenance of many objects in their collection, the stone is also an object inextricably linked with the conquests of colonial powers in the eighteenth century. The Rosetta Stone is a key to the past, but it also carries forward these colonial legacies and reckonings toward the future.
My latest spooky zine is The Cemetery Language of Flowers, a compact guide to the symbolism of flora found in graveyards. It includes 28 pages of original text and photographs, ranging from the meaning behind broken roses to the complex symbolism of the passionflower. Pick up at copy here.
I wrote a book! Grave for the Object Lessons series of compact publications is now available to pre-order from Bloomsbury. I’m excited to share my short exploration of the American grave as a design object: “The grave may be a final destination, but it is not the great leveler, and permanency is always a privilege.” Read more here.
Artist Andrew Wyeth’s “Funeral Group” drawings are having their debut presentation at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine. I wrote about the haunting work for Art & Object:
Wyeth remains an artist many consider on the fringes of twentieth-century American art who was a contrarian to the shifts in modern visual expression. The new attention to the “Funeral Group” drawings, with their unfinished lines and unflinching gaze at an inevitable end, offers another view of his process and perspective. Wyeth said in a 1965 interview with Life magazine that he wanted to “paint without me existing,” and here he is, working through themes of grief and absence that have pervaded art for centuries and envisioning a moment of final absence from his work when all that will be left behind are the people he captured on canvas.
For the Autumn 2022 issue of Fine Books Magazine I have two stories in print! One is on the landscape photography of Robert Adams that is currently on view at the National Gallery of Art:
For five decades Robert Adams has captured with a quiet clarity the landscapes of the American West. He has given the same consideration to the stark lines of suburban subdivisions as the majesty of the mountains, always with an eye to how people have altered the earth and what the role is of an artist in a place of both beauty and destruction. As he wrote in his 2017 book Art Can Help, “It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.”
I also wrote a piece on the “Unburnable” edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and how it was made to resist the flames as a statement on censorship:
Created in a time when book censorship in schools and libraries has escalated around the United States, the “Unburnable” edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 novel that confronts oppressive totalitarianism, is a statement of free expression. … Challenged since its publication, Atwood’s searing story of a dystopian America where women’s rights are suppressed by religious fundamentalism was made into a unique volume that can withstand 451 degrees of heat.
I have been doing fairly regular reviews for Raw Vision Magazine of “self-taught” and folk art in their print issues. The Summer 2022 issue includes three reviews I wrote: Dan Miller and Domenico Zindato at Andrew Edlin Gallery, Black Dolls at the New-York Historical Society, and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré at the Museum of Modern Art. Pick up a copy (it’s beautiful!) and check them out.
I’m always interested in lesser known aspects of famous artist’s work, and I had the opportunity to write about the World War II-era photographs Gordon Parks took in Pittsburgh at the Penola, Inc. grease plant. Read all about it at Art & Object:
In American industrial hubs during World War II, what’s known as the “arsenal of democracy” rapidly manufactured the materials to support the Allied military efforts overseas. This largely invisible labor included a diverse workforce producing everything from steel and ammunition to the grease that lubricated tanks, airplanes, and weapons. A young Gordon Parks photographed this work at the Penola, Inc. grease plant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1944 and 1946, visualizing the people operating the world’s largest facility of this kind in the world. The clarity and humanity in these images—where the heat and the grime of the plant are vividly present—show one of the twentieth century’s preeminent photographers of life in the United States using the camera to honor the individuals undertaking these jobs without overlooking the intensity of their toil.
As much as I enjoy writing, it’s also fun to be an interviewee for topics I’m passionate about! The New York Times asked me about tombstone recipes and gave a very kind shout out to the Cooking With the Dead zine that I co-wrote all about the people who choose recipes as their epitaphs:
Allison C. Meier discovered Ms. Dawson’s spritz recipe a few years ago while walking around Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, looking for unusual headstones for a tour she leads. … “Recipes are such a beautiful way of remembering people,” said Ms. Meier, 37, who lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn. “You’re still following in their footsteps and putting ingredients together the way they did.”
In the final years of Ray Johnson’s life, the artist famed for his collages and mail art made a shift to photography. It remained an obscure part of his practice until this year, and I wrote about it for the Summer 2022 issue of Fine Books Magazine:
Nearly three decades since his death, these photographs deepen the understanding of an often elusive creator who was anointed “New York’s most famous unknown artist” for how he deliberately stepped out of the mainstream. But he never stopped producing the extraordinary out of the most humble materials, leaving behind a whole project as a last act of correspondence for people to see through his eyes.
I joined the May 9 “Underworld Tales: A Transit Museum and Morbid Anatomy Variety Show” presented by the New York Transit Museum and Morbid Anatomy for their virtual evening of history. I discussed the “transit of the dead” and how NYC cemeteries impacted the transportation in the city. You can watch it all online!
In my first story for the Art Newspaper, I interviewed artist Coco Fusco about her work in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Her video piece meditates on the dead from the COVID-19 pandemic who were interred on Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field:
It gives the viewer the sensation of floating above the earth, where hundreds of victims of Covid-19 are indistinguishable from those of yellow fever, tuberculosis, Aids and other diseases that have previously swept through the city. If their names were known, they may have been scrawled on their coffins in marker pen, but they are all now hidden and unmarked.
“One of the things that’s in the narration is, ‘The bodies lie together alone,’” Fusco says. “What every individual buried there shares is aloneness.”
Read the full story at the Art Newspaper.
For my photography column in the spring 2022 issue of Fine Books Magazine, I wrote about the early work of Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. Before becoming an influential photojournalist, he used postcard prints to capture the bohemian life of Paris. Selections of these works are on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through May 29:
From 1925 to 1928, before the magazine commissions and exhibitions, his main photographic medium was something much humbler: the carte postale, the popular postcard format used for sending messages and selling souvenirs. Without depleting his meager savings, the small-scale format enabled him to experiment, leading to a lyrical yet formal style that would be foundational for his practice.