The Rose, in 4Columns, September 2023. Exhibition review of a group show of 44 artists, curated by Justine Kurland, at the lumber room gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album, in The Public Domain Review, 2022. A valentine to Victorian seaweed albums and the collection of one particular seaweed enthusiast, Charles F. Durant. A Longread’s Best of 2022.
Gestures of Care: The Domestic Novels of Magda Szabó, in The Point, 2021. An essay about reading the Hungarian novelist during the pandemic. Featured on LitHub.
Against Stillness: The Life of Sara Kathryn Arledge, in Serene for the Moment: Sara Kathryn Arledge (Armory Center for the Arts, 2020). A biographical essay about the near-forgotten experimental filmmaker and painter, based on her papers at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives. The essay was comissioned for a catalogue to accompany an Arledge restrospective at Armory Center for the Arts, with contributions by Terry Cannon, Johanna Hevda, Sarah McColl, and others.
Silvia Kolbowski, That Monster: An Allegory, in The White Review, January 2020. Kolbowski’s video pairs clips from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) with quotes from Shelley’s classic, and manages to say something new about political animosity and shame.
The Exception: Restoring Lois Weber, in The Point, print & online, Winter 2019. About the once-powerful silent film director and the “masculinization” of Hollywood. Featured on Lit Hub and Arts & Letters Daily.
Beige Stage: How Technicolor Invented the Hollywood Palette, in Cabinet, Spring 2019. Natalie Kalmus’s bullish rules about color converted a reluctant Hollywood.
Lost and Found at Sea, in Radical Seafaring (Parrish Art Museum & Prestel, 2016). Reprinted in Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks (Peabody Essex Museum & Guild Hall, 2021). About the relationship between the uncharted sea and creative practice, and about shipwrecks, chronometers, and artists made famous by their ocean disappearance.
Oily Camouflage, in Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016. About the oil fields of urban Los Angeles.
The Bad Archivist: Carrie Hott’s The Key Room, in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Fall 2016. Commissioned by Headlands Center for the Arts on the occasion of a new permanent installation.
Stacy Hardy’s 52 N*ggers and the Undoing of Julius Eastman, in Three Letter Words [R.I.P.], February 2016.
The Babypod: Intravaginal Hardware for the Pregnant Body, in Rhizome, May 2016. Consumer review of an intravaginal speaker.
The Difficult Bequest: A History of the Smithsonian, in Los Angeles Review of Books, Summer 2014. Radio interview followed, on the Irish program Moncrieff.
Giant Rock, in Cabinet, Summer 2014. Translated for the Slovenian political journal Mladina and featured on Longform and Smithsonian.com.
Women Cuddling Animals, in The New Inquiry, January 2014.
Indexes, in Praise of, in Cabinet, Winter 2014. Reprinted in Key Words, the newsletter of the American Society for Indexing, and The Indexer, published by the UK Society of Indexers. A Portuguese translation accompanied an exhibition by artist Helen Mirra at Culturgest, in Lisbon in 2014, and the essay was also adapted for an artist book by Daniel de Paula, produced in collaboration with Ikrek Press.
Making Up Hollywood: Max Factor and the Invention of Modern Cosmetics, in Cabinet, Fall 2013.
Womanhouse Revisited, in The Believer, November 2013. Revists the feminist art installation through the lens of a then little-known documentary film by Lynne Littman, Womanhouse is Not a Home (1972). The essay spurred an event at UnionDocs featuring Littman in conversation with Feminist Art Program alum Mira Schor.
Book Reviews for The Rumpus (2012-2017): fiction & nonfiction by Michael Adams, Fleur Jaeggy, Mark Kingwell, Anne Helen Petersen, Tillie Olsen, Mary MacLane, and George Perec.
Book Review: Considering Forgiveness eds. Aleksandra Wagner & Carin Kuoni (Vera List Center, 2008), in Modern Painters, May 2009.
Double Vision: The Work of Ryan & Trevor Oakes, in Modern Painters, April 2009.
Co-editor of Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles, and Scrawls from the Oval Office (Basic, 2006). Reviewed by NPR, CNN, CBS, and The New York Times, excerpted in The Atlantic, and translated into Chinese.
Robert Blanchon’s Archive of Absence, in Robert Blanchon, eds. Tania Duvergne and Amy Sadao, with contributors Mary Ellen Carroll and Gregg Bordowitz (New York: Visual AIDS, 2006). The monograph was published in conjuction with a retrospective I co-curated at New York University‘s Fales Library and Special Collections.
Care and the Psyche, an essay and interview with artist Mary Kelly, published in At the Mercy of Others: The Politics of Care (Whitney Museum of American Art ISP, 2005), to accompany an exhibition I co-curated at the James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center.
more misc. writings for Cabinet... (2002-2020)