For the Ploughshares blog, I wrote about art, conversation, and social change in a study of Olivia Laing’s 2020 collection of art criticism Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.

“When I read Laing on Georgia O’Keefe’s Black Place paintings, I notice her translation of color: ‘the serried hills smashed into shards of grey and puce, bifurcated by yolk-coloured cracks or spills of oily black.’ Though I’ve never seen these paintings, I can vividly imagine their tones, and the eggs and the oil feel to me earthy, elemental. Then there are Laing’s nouns and verbs—smashed, shards, crack—which evoke an emotional tenor of ruggedness and severity. Suddenly I’m not in an armchair in my living room; I’m with O’Keefe in the desert, and I’m awestruck. Seeing the world as O’Keefe sees it, I wonder what it means to be a woman in a man’s art world—what grit is required to be undaunted by giant desert skies and impossibly arid land.”

Read in full here.