December 2025

 

Dear Readers,

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The Art Section is now in its eighteenth year; the journal began in May 2007. Each of the texts in this current issue is connected to artists, writers and exhibitions that TAS has published in previous years. These connections and links are significant as they allow the reader to have a deeper survey of the texts available in this publication.

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The Art of the Hang: Photographers Who Shoot Artists by Olivia Louise Marotte began its incarnation over a year ago. As Editor-in-Chief of the journal, I often ask artists for a recent photograph of themselves. Right from the beginning, this has been a difficult ask – so many artists do not have a good photo of themselves. The book 50 New York Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in New York (1986) by Richard Marshall, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989), is my standard for what a great artist photograph should be––admittedly, this is a high bar. Olivia Louise Marotte, an art historian new to Atlanta, accepted the challenge to write about the history of photographers photographing artists, including photographs by New York photographers Denis Piel and Jason Schmidt, and Atlanta photographers Jerry Siegel and David Clifton-Strawn.

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Artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller recently opened The Warehouse, a permanent space to view their works in Enderby, BC, Canada, not far from where they live. Louis Corrigan traveled (from Atlanta) to British Columbia to meet the artists and have a conversation in The Warehouse about their work. Corrigan's text, Sculptural Sound—The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, takes the reader on an intimate journey. I am more than a little grateful to Corrigan for making this trip, meeting the artists, and engaging them in a conversation about their lives and artworks. My interest in Cardiff and Bures Miller goes back to when I first encountered Cardiff’s Münster Walk in 1997 at Skulptur Projekte in Münster; the piece was one of her early audio walks. Although it was on a cassette player, I think the narrative walk would still be worth experiencing now, 28 years later. I can still hear in my head the way the walk began with the bells of a church in Münster. In 2007, Phil Auslander wrote about Documenta XII, on view in Kassel, Germany and about the next Skulptur Projekte in Münster. The issue of the journal focused on curation as well as the art and artists, something The Art Section continues to do.

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Place is significant in Sara Buoso’s text on The Erasure of Painting: Cy Twombly’ s Second Voyage to Italy and the relationship of this artist, who lived and worked in both Lexington, Virginia and Rome, to Italy. This article was inspired by a major donation of twelve works by the Cy Twombly Foundation to GNAMC, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, and two private donations by collector Giorgio Franchetti and former GNAMC director Palma Lucarelli. I was very interested to learn that Twombly was at Black Mountain College as a student at the same time as Robert Rauschenberg, and that they both studied with Robert Motherwell. The two artists’ journey to Morocco and Italy together in 1953 had a significant impact on their art. I am grateful to Buoso for making these connections and writing for TAS. Thinking about Twombly, I remembered that in the early days of TAS, Anna Leung wrote an excellent text about Twombly (September 2008) on the occasion of a Twombly exhibition at TATE Modern. It is interesting to read Leung’s treatise on Twombly as an American artist whose oeuvre shifted to Europe and the ancient world. I also want to thank the Black Mountain College Museum in Asheville, North Carolina for permission to use Jonathan Williams's photo of Twombly painting while a student at the College. 

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Thank you to all the artists, writers, foundations, galleries and individuals who help realize TAS. Your contributions have made my reading of art more layered and richer, and the journal could not exist without you.

 

Wishing all a New Year of Light and Peace,

Deanna

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Deanna Sirlin 

Editor-in-Chief

The Art Section