Common Ground

A Critic’s Life: Harold Rosenberg

Featuring Debra Bricker Balken and Eleanor Heartney

 

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

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

A portrait of 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
Portrait by Phong H. Bui
New York-based art critic Eleanor Heartney is the author of numerous books on contemporary art. Heartney is a contributor to Art in America, Artpress and Artnet and has written extensively for publications including Artnews, The New Art Examiner, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Her books include Art & Today (2008), Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2004) and Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art (2019). She is co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art, The Reckoning: Women Artists in the New Millennium (2013) and the forthcoming Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Rail.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Zane Koss reading.

Zane Koss

A portrait of poet 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.