The African-American artist Kerry James Marshall, whose retrospective in Los Angeles I reviewed here in 2017, says that his mission and aspiration is to create “a grand, epic narrative with black figures in it.” The …
April 25, 2019
W.S. Di Piero is a recipient of Guggenheim, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest awards, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He lives in San Francisco and is the author of numerous books of poetry and essays. He wrote an essay on his father in June of 2000.
His recent books include Nitro Nights (2011, Copper Canyon) and TOMBO (2014, McSweeney's). Prior to that was When Can I See You Again: New Art Writings (2010, Pressed Wafer), which contains many of his Reader columns.
Articles by W.S. Di Piero
Grounded in Charles White
Sally Mann wanted imagery that looked bruised by history
The history of photography tracks the cultural history of childhood and the innocence we like to think abides there. When the inventor of photography, Henry Fox Talbot, made images of his family in the 1840s, …
January 16, 2019
Burgled secrecies
The first photograph I saw by Brassaï, many years ago, was a 1948 portrait of Jean Genet. Hands in pockets, slight of form, his face an ambiguous index of skittishness and cunning, Genet offers and …
July 25, 2018
Beauty built on blood
In 2003, an archaeologist digging near the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, one of the grand structures at the ancient city of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico, felt a soft spot in the earth that turned out to …
March 28, 2018
Familiar muralists, but a lot unfamiliar
One pleasure of anthology exhibitions is discovering pictures by unfamiliar artists. The English-born artist Leonora Carrington was new to me when I saw a small picture by her in Modern Masters from Latin America, currently …
January 3, 2018
Deep, unusual Mexico in photos
Modern Masters from Latin America reminds us, if we need to be reminded, that Modernism knew no borders. Point/Counterpoint, a compelling selection of 19 contemporary Mexican photographers currently at the Museum of Photographic Arts, has …
January 3, 2018
Twelve Bellini holy pictures at the Getty
Pictures sometimes become devotional objects or pilgrimage destinations. Their contents have the feeling of secular-sacred spaces. The room called the Living Hall in New York’s Frick Collection houses several robust portraits, Titian’s force-of-nature Pietro Aretino …
November 29, 2017
Kerry James Marshall addresses the absence of blackness
Slinky, unfurling forms run around and through many of Kerry James Marshall’s paintings. They frame individual pictures’ contents and rope together serial canvasses into a narrative of styles and scenes. In his 1993 De Style, …
May 31, 2017