Common Ground
A Critic’s Life: Harold Rosenberg
Featuring Debra Bricker Balken and Eleanor Heartney
to
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
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Author Debra Bricker Balken joins Rail Editor-at-Large Eleanor Heartney for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Zane Koss.
In this talk
Get your copy of Balken’s biography Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life published by UC Press →
Debra Bricker Balken
Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions on subjects relating to the American modernism and contemporary art for major museums internationally. Her recent publications include Arthur Dove, A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021), Harold Rosenberg, A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets (GRAY and Artbook | D.A.P. 2023) She is currently serving as the lead curator on Americans in Paris, Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962 for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University among other projects.
Eleanor Heartney
Eleanor Heartney has been writing about art since 1981. She is a longtime contributor to Art in America, Contributing Editor to Artpress, Editor at Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for Artnews, Artnet, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and was honored in 2008 by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her most recent book is the co-authored Mothers of Invention: the Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art.
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Zane Koss reading.
Zane Koss
Poet, scholar, translator, and resident alien Zane Koss currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of harbour grids (Invisible, 2022) and co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s The Commonplace with Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz and Whitney DeVos. His poetry, translations, and essays can be found in Jacket 2, tripwire, Asymptote, the /temz/ Review, Chicago Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. He has previously published four chapbooks of poetry, including The Odes (incomplete) (above/ground, 2020), shortlisted for the Nelson Ball Award, and a limited-edition artist’s book, site specificity (Simulacrum, 2020). Starting in the fall of 2022, Zane will be a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at New York University.
❤️ 🌈 We'd like to thank the The Terra Foundation for American Art for making these daily conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive.