The New York School

Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

This book discusses the role of gesture painting and the sculpture related to the painting in the development of distinctive artistic tendencies by the members of the second generation of the New York School during the second part of the fifties.

New York School Painters & Poets charts the collaborative milieu of New York City poets and artists in the mid-twentieth century. This unprecedented volume comprehensively reproduces rare ephemera, collecting and reprinting collaborations, paintings, drawings, poetry, letters, art reviews, photographs, dialogues, manifestos, and memories. Jenni Quilter offers a chronological survey of this milieu, which includes artists such as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and Rudy Burckhardt, plus writers John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Edwin Denby, Larry Fagin, Frank O’Hara, Charles North, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Anne Waldman, and more. “Giving us for the first time a full picture of the scene these artists and writers shared,” writes Carter Ratcliff in his foreword, “this book illuminates the unities and tensions, the playfulness and glamour and startling authenticity of their collaborations. Here we not only see evidence of a modus operandi. We also feel the exuberance of a certain modus vivendi, a way of life.” By Jenni Quilter, Edited by Allison Power, with Advisory Editors: Bill Berkson and Larry Fagin, and Foreword by Carter Ratcliff.

New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five major poets of the New York School-John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler-Mark Silverberg examines this rich period of cross-fertilization between the arts. Silverberg uses the term 'neo-avant-garde' to describe New York School Poetry, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other movements intended to revive and revise the achievements of the historical avant-garde, while remaining keenly aware of the new problems facing avant-gardists in the age of late capitalism. Silverberg highlights the family resemblances among the New York School poets, identifying the aesthetic concerns and ideological assumptions they shared with one another and with artists from the visual and performing arts. A unique feature of the book is Silverberg's annotated catalogue of collaborative works by the five poets and other artists. To comprehend the coherence of the New York School, Silverberg demonstrates, one must understand their shared commitment to a reconceptualized idea of the avant-garde specific to the United States in the 1950s and '60s, when the adversary culture of the Beats was being appropriated and repackaged as popular culture. Silverberg's detailed analysis of the strategies the New York School poets used to confront the problem of appropriation tells us much about the politics of taste and gender during the period, and suggests new ways of understanding succeeding generations of artists and poets.

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is “a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age” (Essence). Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school––in her sixties––to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this "glorious achievement––bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives" (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).

Examines art from the Hudson River School, nineteenth-century artists whose work captured the American landscape, including selections from Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, and others; and featuring one hundred reproductions and fold-out pages.

A semiautobiographical coming-of-age story, framed by the harrowing 1975 Circeo massacre Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, the winner of Italy’s most prestigious award, The Strega Prize, is a powerful investigation of the heart and soul of contemporary Italy. Three well-off young men—former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno—brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat. It is this environment, the halls of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, that Edoardo Albinati takes as his subject. His experience at the school, reflections on his adolescence, and thoughts on the forces that produced contemporary Italy are painstakingly and thoughtfully rendered, producing a remarkable blend of memoir, coming-of-age novel, and true-crime story. Along with indelible portraits of his teachers and fellow classmates—the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max—Albinati also gives us his nuanced reflections on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.