Art and Aging: A Critics Page Discussion

Anna Raverat’s first novel, Signs of Life, was selected for the “Waterstones 11” a list of the eleven top debut authors of the year, as chosen by Waterstones booksellers in the UK. Her second novel, Lover, was published in 2016 by Picador (UK) and 2017 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (US). She works as an organization development practitioner with a wide range of organizations and is currently writing a nonfiction book about the work experience.

Bob Stewart is a pioneering tubist and renowned jazz educator who has toured and recorded nationally and internationally with the First Line Band (his current quintet), as well as with Carla Bley, Arthur Blythe, Gil Evans, Bill Frisell, Taj Mahal, Henry Threadgill, McCoy Tyner, and countless others.

Jeanne Silverthorne is a sculptor who lives and works in New York. Her process is almost invariably one of modeling in clay, making a mold and then casting in platinum silicone rubber. Her practice involves an archaeology of collapse and entropy. Since the early 1990’s, she has been excavating the conceptual and physical ruins of the studio whose outmoded infrastructure and lost artifacts, art forms, actions and people produce a contemporary vanitas. Unearthing what has been buried in the rubble, bringing the concealed to light suggests “deep storage” and many works address what is invisible or packed away. Since 2007 she has been making a functional rubber crate for every sculpture.

Art critic, scholar, and curator Michael Brenson was an art critic for The New York Times and has curated exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the SculptureCenter. He has been a Getty scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, Bogliasco Fellow, and Clark Fellow. For many years he was a member of the sculpture faculty in Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and a Visiting Senior Critic in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design’s Department of Fine Arts. His biography of David Smith, David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2022. He is the artistic director of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation.

A Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN America award for biography, Nancy Princenthal is the former Senior Editor of Art in America and is a contributor to many other publications including The New York Times. She is the author of Hannah Wilke, Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s, and a co-author of two recent books on women artists; a third, Mothers of Invention will be released this spring. She has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; Yale University; and the School of Visual Arts.

Art historian, curator, and critic Douglas Dreishpoon is currently Director of the Catalogue Raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York City and Chief Curator Emeritus at the AKG Art Museum, Buffalo. In 2022, his anthology of sculptors’ writings, Modern Sculpture: Artists in Their Own Words, was published by University of California Press and his contributions to Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 were published by Radius Books. A Consulting Editor at the Rail, Dreishpoon holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.