Now for something unlikely: Tomorrow, Thursday, May 14th, 11am-2pm—I’ll be hosting a “live talk show event” called “Free Champagne” at the VIP opening of the Independent Art Fair which you can listen to online via the Montez Press Radio website! We’ll wrangle a number of critics, curators and artists visiting the fair to come give their impressions while somewhat irreverently taking the temperature of the “art world.” Special guests are planned—It will be fun.

Then next Tuesday, May 19th, 6pm I’ll be in conversation with Lisa Yuskavage on the occasion of her new show at David Zwirner. Officially it’s called “Color and Other Topics” but I’ve been referring to it as “Everything You Wanted To Know About Color But Were Afraid to Ask Laura Ashley” (Yes, that Laura Ashley will be discussed as a color theorist, in addition to Albers, Itten, and the Renaissance art historian Marsha Hall.)

The talk will be at 519 West 19th Street, NY, NY // RSVP: events@davidzwirner.com

And last but not least, a new episode of Private Life is out today: “Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael and Designo” —we talk about drawings in the exhibition “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the writing of Giorgio Vasari, and end with a dash of Caravaggio. She’s fab.

If you like it, you know what to do: Tell your friends! Repost it! Rate it! Leave a comment!

There really is nothing like the zeal of the converted: I’ve just sent off copies of Eve Babitz books to my mom and high school best friend. After having read four of her books in the last week, I’m in that swoony state perfect for doing an interview about her tomorrow (for a forthcoming episode of Private Life, to be released in a couple weeks!) Give yourself a treat and get your own copy of either Eve’s Hollywood (it takes about the first quarter to get rolling but its a total dream) or the shorter and almost perfect Slow Days, Fast Company. All I can say for now is that she is an artist with exactly the right values: beauty, fun, and sex above all. What more could you ask for?

Today I’m delighted to share a special cross-over episode of Private Life, a collaboration with Dialogues, the David Zwirner podcast. My friend Helen Molesworth has been having some fantastic conversations over there and this one in particular stands out: an interview with art historian Lisa Saltzman all Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. If you like it, head to the Dialogues feed wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe.

Above all—ENJOY!

My weekend visit to Los Angeles for the Steven Arnold celebration was a delightful whirlwind that included quick drive out to Palm Springs for the “Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, Spirit” exhibition. (Special thanks to artist Patrick Carroll for the fun roadtrip). The show features work by a number of friends, including my dearly departed Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. It was nice to see some of her stuff again—including a couple reliquary-assemblages in wall mounted vitrines, suffused with Gen and Jaye’s hair—but ever since I’ve been wrestling with subtly nagging ambivalence… It’s probably just that I miss he/r as a real person, and by contrast everything else feels like ephemera…

Continuing the L.A. theme, I’m happy to share that following my interview last week with architecture critic Martin Filler, the new episode of Private Life is out today, featuring the artist Maya Lin reading Filler’s essay “Ghosts in the House” (1999) about the architect Frank Gehry.

I hope you enjoy it!

You see, darlings, I had to retreat so that my power was intact and purely queer. Learn from my little life and do your art and scream out for what you believe in. I’m just a small example of what can be achieved in a life lived without compromise, but you could achieve much vaster and more far-reaching results if you’d listen to me between the lines. My angel sisters, insist on yourselves and be who you are to the max. Allow yourselves your androgyny for it will be the salvation of the earth. — From Steven Arnold’s unpublished memoir “Cocktails in Heaven”

If you are in Los Angeles this Saturday I’ll be kicking off Steven Arnold’s Sex & Spirit Symposium with the keynote “Angels of History” at Del Vaz Projects in Santa Monica at noon. (259 19th Street, Santa Monica, CA). This afternoon long event is presented in partnership with the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, GLBT Historical Society Museum, San Francisco, & Visual AIDS, New York). Tickets are only $15 dollars and there will be panels with a ton of wonderful artists, writers and scholars exploring this amazing artist’s life and legacy.

I’m also happy to share that the new episode of Private Life is out today: “Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture.” We talk about his intimate, fractious relationship with the late Frank Gehry and at the end veer into some of my favorites things, including Carlo Scarpa and the Portinari Altarpiece. It’ll be followed next week with a reading of Filler’s great essay “Ghosts in the House” by the illustrious artist Maya Lin.

The inimitable Johanna Fateman asked me and eleven other writers to contribute “one sentence reviews” over at The Critics Table: “Speed Round! 13 Critics Review 25 NYC Shows Before You Finish Your Morning Coffee”

I wrote about Anne Truitt @ Matthew Marks, Robert Mapplethorpe @ Barbara Gladstone, David Levi Strauss’s Robert Bergman show @ the Hill Art Foundation and Yuval Pudik @ Palo.

To give you a taste, here’s my “one sentence” (generously defined) on Truitt:

“Twelve of what at first appear to be identically-scaled, imageless monochromes in slightly off-putting, off-pastel shades, ranging from buttercream to tawny apricot to damp rose to dusty lilac to dingy seafoam, redolent of nursery or hospital waiting room interiors, eventually reveal a similar cross form on square sheets of paper, whose rough edges lend the works an undulant object-quality, and which would be more effectively shown unframed, entering them into a fuller dialogue with the entire space and the artist’s three, characteristically human-scaled, free-standing rectangular columns, each painted a much deeper, more vibrant color: egg yolk cadmium, brilliant ultramarine, and an almost blackish green.”

It was a fun project and I’m so happy to be a part of it—thanks !

ALSO! The new episode of “Private Life” is out!

I’m very proud of this one, a conversation with Namwali Serpell about her new book on Toni Morrison —“Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, Criticism, and Narrative Empathy"

Please give it a listen! Rate/subscribe wherever you get your podcasts (apparently it really does help people find it!) and send to any friend you know that might enjoy a deep dive into Toni Morrison’s novels and the perils of empathy in contemporary criticism.

Night was come. Tree frogs remembering last night’s rain resumed their monotonous molding of liquid beads of sound; grass blades and leaves losing shapes of solidity gained shapes of sound—the still suspire of the earth, of ground preparing for slumber; flowers by day spikes of bloom became the night spikes of scent; the silver tree at the corner of the house hushed its never still, never escaping ecstasy. Already toads hopped along concrete pavement drinking prisoned heat through their dragging bellies.

That's just one of the many stretches of William Faulkner’s first novel Soldier’s Pay (1926) I noted while reading it over the weekend.

I devoured Faulkner in my teens and have been thinking of going back to his books for years. So I finally decided to start from the beginning (a “minor” novel I’d never read before) and there it was, that particularly overheated Southern glossolalia that I love: the multi-vocal steam-of-consciousness, acute visual/sensual description, Classical allusion, formal experimentation, and a precise ambiguity, by turns overwrought and subdued.

How do you say: style?

How do you say: swoon?

It’s not for everyone—but it’s definitely for me. And maybe you too.

This note is just to let you know that following on last week’s conversation with Mark Polizzotti about his translation of Andre Breton’s Nadja (1928) the new episode of “Private Life” is out now: “Gini Alhadeff reads from Andre Breton’s Nadja”

Hope you enjoy it!

André Breton’s Nadja (1928) is one of those books that’s exerted outsized and continual influence on me since my early twenties.

I was in graduate school for art history, miserable, sitting around seminar tables with people whose ideas bored me, precisely, I thought, because their lives bored me.

Finding Nadja was like a big neon sign flashing ESCAPE—an attempt to make life and art switch places. Mad Love! Dream Drawings! Strange Coincidences! Whatever!

So, I broke up with my boyfriend, dropped out of school, and took the book with me to Paris for six weeks (having no money and even less French.)

While there I retraced the events of the Nadja, going to every location, making rubbings of the doorsteps. It was…inexplicable. And yet it felt like the beginning of my real life.

Last year NYRB published a beautiful new translation of Nadja by Mark Polizzotti. In addition to being an esteemed translator of French (of Patrick Modiano in particular) he is also a scholar of Breton. His biography Revolution of the Mind (1995) is excellent in every way, a portrait of the important, complicated, (and lately loathed) ringleader of Surrealism.

Our conversation is out today:

“Private Life”: “Mark Polizzotti on Nadja, Translation, and Surrealism”.

It’s one of my very favorites. I hope you enjoy listening!

Hot-cold-cool-hot-cold-warm—beautiful, beautiful air. I’m loving the weather yo-yo of early spring in New York City, with it’s manic erotic edges, as people on the street start shedding clothes and acting free...and we’re just getting the first taste of the season…

There’s some of that Manhattan wildness in the new episode of Private Life — following our conversation last week, Richard Hell is reading from his quintessentially NYC poet-fantasia Godlike (2005) just re-released by NYRB.

I hope you enjoy it. Get some flowers. Read poems. Go dancing.

The poet cries out, once again, for love. And the goddess herself appears, descending from far away on the sharp wings of small birds. Coolly indulgent, even slightly ironic, Aphrodite wants know: Who is it this time, this girl that’s driving you crazy?—“Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?” Clearly we’ve been here before, because the poet sings of love, and of desire and pleasure and suffering, in a mixture she calls “bitter-sweet.”

The goddess promises an intervention, a reversal: “For if she flees, soon she will pursue. If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them. If she does not love, soon she will love even unwilling.” Which is to say, whoever this girl is, she will fall in love with the poet, even against her will, because passion is not subject to rational decision or conscious choice, but is the mysterious province of the gods. For today at least, Love is on the poet’s side.

This poem-prayer was composed 2600 years ago by Sappho. It’s the only complete work we have by her and I recommend Anne Carson’s beautifully stripped version of “Ode to Aphrodite” (quoted from above) opening her book If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho…

Speaking of poetry, the new episode of “Private Life” is out now! It’s a conversation with punk legend “Richard Hell on Godlike and Poetry as a Way of Life”. We talk about the re-release of his 2005 novel, that follows two poets around New York’s downtown poetry scene of the 1970s (and bear a striking resemblance to Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.)

I hope you enjoy! If you do, please ”like it” “rate it” “comment” and send it to your friends!

Last night I watched Videoheaven (2025) (streaming on the Criterion Channel) Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour essay-elegy on the rise and fall of video stores as they appear in film and television. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, but several times I turned to Candystore to say, “this is such a good idea!” and “so fucking smart!”

As signaled by the parenthetical “back to physical media!” in my last transmission, I’m fairly nostalgic for stuff like video stores. In the early 2000s I was spoiled by Lost Weekend (RIP) on Valencia Street, where you could get everything from rare art films to cult-classic TV specials. Along with the excellent programming at The Castro Theatre (RIP, for all intents and purposes) I consider indie video stores to be an important extension of my education in San Francisco. Videoheaven convincingly argues for the video store as a brief, yet historically precise, period—not just in media technology, but in the life of our culture (RIP?)

Following last week's conversation with Joyce Carol Oates, the new episode of “Private Life” is a reading of her 1999 essay “The Mystery of JonBenét Ramsey” — a brilliant analysis of the “unsolved” killing of the child beauty queen that defined the late 1990s.

It is read by the inimitable Alissa Bennett—you’re welcome!

Here’s a taste: “Except that a child is dead and the lives of numerous other people badly shaken, or ruined, the JonBenét Ramsey case is a comedy of errors. David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino could not have devised a scenario so surreal and bleakly comic: the most inept crime of the century investigated by the most inept police department of the century.”

Last Sunday as the snow started falling Candystore and I settled in to watch Kieślowski’s Bleu (1993) on The Criterion Channel. I actually had his Three Colors trilogy on DVD in high school, but I hadn’t seen them since (I wish I still had all those DVDs—back to physical media!)

I guess returning to Wuthering Heights has me thinking about the books and films that impacted me as a teenager (my aesthetic through line has always been zero chill). This particular viewing was also precipitated by our Valentine’s date to see Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) at Metrograph, which was stunning (fireworks and waterskiing! Rembrandt by candlelight!) and returned me to the sphinx-like beauty of Juliette Binoche.

Seeing it again, I still loved everything about Bleu, but with an even deeper appreciation for its abstraction and ambiguity, without expository dialogue, sustained by the strength of images and music to communicate in their own terms.

When it finished around 1am we looked out the windows into a world of fluffy twilight. From our kitchen window I snapped some pictures of snow-covered branches backlit by the bright night, glowing with reflected, suspended, light…

The purpose of this note is to let you know that episode three of “Private Life” is now out— a sprawling interview with the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates. It was actually the first one I recorded, last August, and I think captures the wide-ranging intimate conversations I hoped the show would make possible. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and pretty much everywhere else you find podcasts.

When Emerald Fennell’s new movie was announced months ago, a hyper-stylized version of Wuthering Heights with music by Charli XCX, I proposed writing about the soundtrack for the venerable 4Columns, because I felt like writing about Charli XCX.

Last month I went to see Charli XCX’s (brilliant) new movie The Moment (2026) and realized that’s actually what I wanted to write about, and did so for The Critic’s Table, (thanks again Johanna Fateman!) but I was still on the hook for covering “Wuthering Heights”. It was published this morning (Thanks to Margaret Sundell!)

Wuthering Heights is all I’ve thought about for the last month, and I have to say, re-reading it was the best art experience I’ve had so far this year (cannot say the same for watching the movie.) One of the great pleasures of returning to books and movies I loved as a sixteen year old, that formed and affirmed my aesthetic sensibilities, is getting to realize that teenage me was fucking right!

Don’t worry, I’m not becoming a pop culture writer—back to weirdo art and books for me!

The new episode of “Private Life” the podcast I’m hosting for the New York Review is out now, which is an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick “Working Girls: The Brontës” from 1972 read by incredible actor Kathleen Chalfant. It’s a brilliant analysis of the inexplicable lives of Brontë sisters, and gives much needed depth and context to current discussions of “Wuthering Heights”. (It’s a follow-up to last weeks premiere episode, where I interviewed Darryl Pinckney about his relationship with Hardwick.) Give it a listen—send it to you friends.

As a palate cleanser, I’m currently a quarter of the way into Elizabeth Young-Breuhl’s biography of her teacher Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (1982) —which I can’t believe I’ve never read before— and as an inveterate hater of the biography-as-a-form, I’m pleased to say that this one is wonderful.

Wow. Happy New Year?

The last time I sent out a newsletter was almost a year ago, spring 2025. Back then I was doing a bi-weekly art talk show with Leigha Mason on East Village Radio, which prompted me to get this together every other week. For various reasons we paused that show (don’t worry we’re still best friends) not least of which is because I was given the opportunity to develop a new podcast for the New York Review of Books.

I’ve worked on it for most of the last year, everything from researching how to “acoustically treat” a room (complete with installing panels myself—don’t forget I went to art school!) to collaborating with composer Matthew Aucoin on the theme music (THANK YOU!) and with Review art director Leanne Shapton on the handwritten, Cocteau-inspired visuals (DOUBLE THANK YOU!) The result is “Private Life”—named after one of my favorite Grace Jones songs (actually also a cover of a great Pretenders song)—Your private life drama, baby, leave me out…

The show will feature long-from interviews with contributors to the Review (as well as authors from the NYRB books series) about their writing, and I’ll ask them to choose a piece from the archive (by someone else) they want to dive into together. These episodes will alternate with newly recorded audio version of the essays we discuss.

For instance, for the first episode (That you can listen to now! On any podcast platform, such as, Apple Music, Spotify, RSS, etc.) is a conversation with Darryl Pinckney on his friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, which will be followed next week by Kathleen Chalfant reading Hardwick’s 1972 essay “Working Girls: The Brontes” (that’s right, just in time for the deluge of Wuthering Heights discourse—are you ready? I’m ready.)

There are some incredible things coming up—including conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, with her essay on JonBenét Ramsey read by the incomparable Alissa Bennett!—that I’m excited to share.

DO ME A FAVOR: Listen! Subscribe (it’s free!) Spread the word! Rate it five stars and leave a comment! (Apparently that helps people find it!)

If you haven’t seen me in a while “Private Life” is a big reason why (oh yeah, and I’m also in the middle of writing a book and doing endless talks and still publishing miscellaneous essays…so please, bear with me.)

Which is to say: I’ll be sending out these notes again regularly as new episodes drop. I’ll keep it short but I’ll also add a little behind the scenes flavor for each one, as well as round up my recent publications and upcoming events and talks.

For instance, I have an essay in the new Aperture monograph by pioneering gay semiotician Hal Fischer: Seminal Works (2026) and wrote a piece on Charli XCX’s (brilliant) new mockumentary of her brat tour The Moment for The Critic’s Table (thank you as ever to the wonderful Johanna Fateman!)

AND NOW, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce a special Valentine’s “Angel-of-the-Month”:

Angelic Transmissions #025 broadcasts today, Monday June 1st, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! Co-host Leigha Mason and I will be doing a deep dive deconstruction of the new documentary Enigma (on HBO MAX), about our beloved Amanda Lear (contrasted with the iconic April Ashley!) We even make a phone-a-friend to Shane O’Neil of the Washington Post. We also catch up on my recent trip to Italy (especially crying in front of the Portinari Altarpiece in the Uffizi!)

Then, tomorrow, Tuesday July 1st 2025, I’ll be doing a talk with Nicole Wittenberg at the Ogunquit Museum in Ogunquit Maine, 5-7pm! If summer finds you up in that neck of the woods you can RSVP here!

As ever you can catch up on older episodes as podcasts on our Spotify and Apple Podcasts pages.

And now, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce your June 2025 *bonus* Angel-of-the-Month:

Angelic Transmissions #023 broadcasts tomorrow, Monday May 19th, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! Co-host Leigha Mason and I will be joined by the historian of bad behavior herself, one of my favorite writers and human beings, Alissa Bennett. We’ll talk about her research on Sylvia Plath (in addition to the freaky sub-genre of Plath biographies in general, with a side dish of Janet Malcolm) as well as, for the first time ever, answering listen questions! There is still time to get your question in—simply go to this website and record your query for Alissa to respond to live!

If you’ve missed any of the recent episodes you can catch up on the East Village Radio archive page, and everywhere you get podcasts, including Apple Music and Spotify:

#022: Lynne Tillman (05.19.2025)

#021: Salman Toor (05.05.2025)

#020: Sam McKinniss / Natasha Stagg (04.21.2025)

#019: fierce pussy aka Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka (04.06.2025)

#017: Cynthia Daignault (03.10.2025)

#016: Charles Atlas (02.24.2025)

#015: Jace Clayton / Ian Minamura (02.10.2025)

​#014: Joey Arias (01.27.2025)

#013: Chris Martin / Johanna Fateman (01.13.2025)

And now, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce, in a new format, June 2025’s Angel-of-the-Month:

Angelic Transmissions #021 broadcasts today, Monday May 19th, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! For the first hour co-host Leigha Mason and I will catch up on everything we’ve been seeing and reading lately, including Nicole Wittenberg’s show “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine, the magisterial Jack Whitten exhibition “The Messenger” at MoMA, and, of course, today’s secret word herself: Cher! And more! At 1pm we’ll be joined by legendary writer Lynne Tillman to discuss her new book of selected short stories Thrilled to Death (out now from Soft Skull Press).

If you’ve missed any of the recent episodes you can catch up on the East Village Radio archive page, and everywhere you get podcasts, including Apple Music and Spotify:

#021: Salman Toor (05.05.2025)

#020: Sam McKinniss / Natasha Stagg (04.21.2025)

#019: fierce pussy aka Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka (04.06.2025)

#017: Cynthia Daignault (03.10.2025)

#016: Charles Atlas (02.24.2025)

#015: Jace Clayton / Ian Minamura (02.10.2025)

​#014: Joey Arias (01.27.2025)

#013: Chris Martin / Johanna Fateman (01.13.2025)

On Tuesday, May 27th 2025, 6-8pm, I’ll be part of an event celebrating the publication of the Cooper Hewitt’s beautiful new book Making Home: Belonging, Memory and Utopia in the 21st Century (the companion volume to their current Smithsonian Design Triennial). I’ll be representing “utopia,” talking about “Affairs of Plain Living” my essay on the Foxfire books (which you can now also read online at Scratch a new platform for design writing.) I’ll be in conversation with fellow writers Curry J. Hackett and Catherine E. McKinley as well as the editors and exhibition co-curators, Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Christina De Leon, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson.

The event will be at the Cooper Hewitt’s beautiful mansion, 2 East 91st Street, New York, NY. Tickets are $8 and can be purchased here.

And now, without further ado, I’m pleased to announced the special *bonus* Angel-of-the-Month for May 2025:

Angelic Transmissions #21 broadcasts tomorrow, Monday May 5th, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! For the first hour co-host Leigha Mason and I will catch up on everything we’ve been seeing and reading lately, from backstage at the Charli XCX concert in Brooklyn to Alice Coletrane’s public access television show from the 1980s to the medieval memoir The Book of Margery Kempe—and more, if you can believe it. At 1pm we’ll be joined by painter Salman Toor to discuss “Wish Maker” his two venue show that just opened at Luhring Augustine (at their Chelsea and TriBeCa locations).

If you’ve missed any of the recent episodes you can catch up on the East Village Radio archive page:

#020: Sam McKinniss / Natasha Stagg (04.21.2025)

#019: fierce pussy aka Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka (04.06.2025)

#017: Cynthia Daignault (03.10.2025)

#016: Charles Atlas (02.24.2025)

#015: Jace Clayton / Ian Minamura (02.10.2025)

​#014: Joey Arias (01.27.2025)

#013: Chris Martin / Johanna Fateman (01.13.2025)

My essay “Art to Sit On” about the writer, performance artist, and sculptor Scott Burton is in the current “art issue” of the New York Review of Books. Here’s a little bit of it:

What is striking about Burton is that his fanatically conceptualized and impeccably rendered works were intended not to overawe but to pleasurably dissolve into ordinary life with subtlety and grace. They aimed to make people’s lives, even momentarily, more pleasant and humane. Burton once put it this way:

Any chair is useful but a very striking looking chair—something that isn’t like a usual chair—can make people perhaps more flexible in their attitudes to accept more things—to become more democratic about what a chair is. They may even become more democratic about what a person is.

And now, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce May 2025’s Angel-of-the-Month:

HAPPY EASTER!

Angelic Transmissions #20 broadcasts tomorrow, Easter Monday April 21st, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! We’ll spend the entire time with painter Sam McKinniss and writer Natasha Stagg! (Natasha and I both contributed to McKinniss’s first monograph, out now from Rizzoli Books!) We’ll talk about the state of painting, writing, fashion, and popular culture (among much else I’m sure!) At the halfway point co-host Leigha Mason will lead an “essential cinema” discussion of James Bidgood’s 1971 art-porn classic Pink Narcissus!

If you’ve missed any of the recent episodes you can catch up on the East Village Radio archive page:

#019: fierce pussy aka Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka (04.06.2025)

#017: Cynthia Daignault (03.10.2025)

#016: Charles Atlas (02.24.2025)

#015: Jace Clayton / Ian Minamura (02.10.2025)

​#014: Joey Arias (01.27.2025)

#013: Chris Martin / Johanna Fateman (01.13.2025)

And, now, without further ado, I’m happy to announce April 2025’s special *bonus* Angel-of-the-Month for April 2025:

Angelic Transmissions #019 broadcasts tomorrow, Monday April 6th, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! We’ll be joined by artists Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard and Carrie Yamaoka aka the surviving members of legendary activist collective fierce pussy, to discuss their show “arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified: Chapter Eight” at Participant Inc. (116 Elizabeth Street, first floor, New York, on view until May 11th).

Then, next Monday, April 16th, 6-8pm, at the Rizzolli Bookstore (1133 Broadway, New York) I’ll be in conversation with painter Sam McKinniss to launch his new (and first!) monograph. I’ve known Sam for over a decade and had the privilege of writing about my complex observations of his work over that span. I’m so excited for it to go into the world.

Also, I recently published a little piece on attachment and desire in Harmony Hammond’s “near-monochromes” for the wonderful Johanna Fateman’s “The Critic’s Table” over at Cultured. Please check it out and support the new space they are trying to create for art criticism there.

And now, without further ado, I’m happy to announce your April 2025 Angel-of-the-Month:

Angelic Transmissions #018 broadcasts tomorrow, Monday March 24th, 12-2pm EST, via East Village Radio! We’re live again from the little glass booth on First Ave! To begin we’ll talk with the legendary Avram Finkelstein (best known as one of the visual mega-brains who literally invented “Silence=Death”) to discuss the first solo exhibition of his own art “Something Terrible Has Happened (Corpus Fluxus)” (@ Smack Mellon until April 27th). In the second half we’ll be joined by artist and musician Roxy Farman to talk about her recent exhibition “Sacrificial Scam” (@ Genre en Regalia).

Saturday, 29 March, 4pm, I’ll be having a public conversation with painter Ross Bleckner at Petzel gallery 4pm. RSVP: press@petzel.com — PLEASE COME!

An essay I wrote called “Here’s Looking At You Kid” about contemporary painting and it’s relation to images is in the current issue of Aperture. I talk about Judith Eisler, Sam Mckinniss, Witt Fetter and our guest from the last episode of Angelic Transmissions Cynthia Daignault (you can now listen to that episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other platforms, in addition to the East Village Radio archive!)

And now, I’m happy to introduce your *bonus* Angel-of-the-Month for March 2025: