January 21: Amy Sillman and Eileen Myles in Conversation
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery at 6pm EST on Thursday, January 21st, Amy Sillman and Eileen Myles will discuss Sillman’s new book Faux Pas: Selected Writing and Drawings.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Thurdsay, January 21st at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings By Amy Sillman, edited by Charlotte Houette, François Lancien-Guilberteau, and Benjamin Thorel. With a foreword by Lynne Tillman. (After Eight Books, Paris, 2020, distributed by D.A.P.)
Since the 1970s, Amy Sillman—a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene—has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing the role and meanings of color and shape in depth. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews, and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of which were made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection as she addresses the possibilities of art today—favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols—with as much critical sense as humor. As Jason Farago notes in the New York Times, “Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas … her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings.”
For Now By Eileen Myles (Published by Yale University Press, 2020)
In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer: existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.
For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.
Photo-credit: Calla Kessler
Amy Sillman is an artist based mostly in NYC since 1975. She got a BFA in 1979 from SVA, and an MFA at Bard College in 1995. Her work includes painting, drawing, writing, zines, and animations. She works with gestural and material techniques in painting, but also engages in ideas drawn from art history, language studies, improvisation, and other discursive histories adjacent to contemporary painting. Her most recent exhibition, “Twice Removed” at Gladstone Gallery, New York, was held in the fall of 2020 and included large abstract paintings interspersed by dozens of flower paintings and a cycle of large drawings presented as a kind of “film strip.” Last year, Sillman curated the widely-acclaimed exhibition “The Shape of Shape” for MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series, and created a special zine for the exhibition online presented by MoMA Magazine. Sillman has exhibited regularly in galleries and museums in the USA and Europe since the 90’s, and her work is held in many private and public collections including MoMA, The Whitney Museum, LA MoCA, The Tate Modern in London, the Brandhorst Museum in Munich, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Her mid-career traveling survey show “one lump or two” was curated by Helen Molesworth, originating at The ICA Boston in 2013 and traveling to two other venues, and was accompanied by a monograph published by Prestel. Sillman has also worked extensively as an educator, most recently as a faculty member at Cooper Union. Before that, she was a Professor at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt, and was previously the longtime co-chair of painting at Bard College’s MFA Program. She is currently on the faculty at Cooper Union as a painting teacher. A long bibliography would include writing on her work as artist, writer, and curator in recent texts in Artforum, Art News, Texte zur Kunst, and Frieze, among other publications. [Photo-credit:Calla Kessler]
Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently novelist, public talker and art journalist. A Sagittarius, their 22 books include For Now, evolution, Afterglow, I Must Be Living Twice/new & selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. In 2019 they wrote and directed an 18-minute super 8 film, The Trip, a puppet road film. Eileen is the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, 4 Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2016, they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. In 2019 Myles received a poetry award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2020 they got the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.