Neither grape nor grain — but craft, indeed
"The science behind fermentation allows any fruit wine to be fermented to dryness."
Ian Anderson 7 p.m., June 27
W.S. Di Piero
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
Kerry James Marshall addresses the absence of blackness
We’re the violators of their culture of leisure.
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, ...
Artifacts of the cult
The Reformation was heaven for haters.
Tension between Death and the woman is as wiry and volatile as the religious tension of the times.
Life as meat
Post–World War II London artists dabbled with expiration date
In the years following World War II, the biggest art conversation was about abstraction and what to do with it. The critical center was New York and the artists in question were Pollock, Rothko, de ...
Beautiful disgusts after some masterpieces
By the 18th Century, mighty Venice had become what Goethe called “the drawing room of Europe.”
Many of us seek and cherish essences when traveling to foreign places: a food, a shop, a fall of light, an open-air market, the peculiar curve or steep of street or hillside, the play of ...
Bawdy shots
Mapplethorpe’s work “moves toward a kind of perfection — it’s just a matter of refining.”
I was 11 or 12 when I befriended an older neighborhood boy who was a fanatical bodybuilder. Johnny pumped iron in the basement and would interrupt any conversation to do handstand pushups against a wall. ...
German art right before Hitler
How it was, how it is
In many of these photos, things have an existential aura of their own and seem to be observing us.
Passionate energy just this side of anarchy at San Diego Museum of Art
Coney Island was designed to overcome
Coney Island: Visions of the American Dreamland, 1861–2008 is a game, splashy exhibition.
Sparky, hectic, unmediated inventiveness on display
This way to Radium Girl!
The Self-Taught Genius exhibit at the Mingei, artifacts from their conversation with the world
Stunning but remote physicality in Essaydi’s women
The poses matter.
Essaydi’s women don’t “present” to the viewer: each has an inner life made visible but unavailable to us.
