Timothy Don is Art Editor at Lapham’s Quarterly, a journal in the history of art and ideas based New York City. He founded the Oakland Book Festival, a celebration of books and ideas held annually at Oakland's City Hall, in 2015. He is a curator for Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, a targeted intervention that launches in 2021.
by Timothy Don The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I’m going to use this column to talk about the work of…
by Timothy Don The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I’m going to use this column to talk about the work of…
by Timothy Don The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I’m going to use this column to talk about the work of…
by Timothy Don In my capacity as art editor at Lapham’s Quarterly, I’ve spent the last six weeks researching images for our upcoming issue on TRADE. It was not a thematic that excited me when I started, I have to admit—I’m a curator and a writer, not a businessman or an economist, dammit! But after…
by Timothy Don I met Rene Magritte a few weeks ago at the Starline Social Club in Oakland. A surprisingly jolly fellow, it turns out he’s working these days as a pedicab driver in San Francisco. Surrealism isn’t my jam, but when he offered me a pickup the next morning at the BART and mushrooms…
by Timothy Don One of life’s great and illicit pleasures is spying on others. Put it on the list with smoking, gossiping, flirting with a stranger, ordering a cocktail at noon, calling in sick to lie abed for the day—all those small and tasty morsels we surreptitiously nibble when no one is looking that satisfy…
by Timothy Don Speak the word “discovery” and familiar images of explorers, scientists, ships, and treasure chests come to mind. To look into the visual record of “discovery” over the past 50,000 years, however, is to witness the concept expand, swell, and overwhelm the imagination. There is a wonder that arises in the wake of…
From January 25 until March 3 of this year, Cindy Workman is exhibiting twelve new works—inkjet prints all—at the Lennon, Weinberg gallery in New York City. I have been a fan of hers for several years, and the current series is in my opinion some of her finest work to date. She is an artist…
The palm at the end of the mindBeyond the last thought, risesIn the bronze décor… —Wallace Stevens, Of Mere Being These are the lines that keep repeating themselves in my mind as I sit in the church, the dull buzz of insects outside rearticulated by the dull buzz of the humans within, all of us…
What is the legacy of two thousand years of Christianity? What are the specific qualities that the Christian tradition has instilled and cultivated in the minds of men? They appear to be twofold, and dangerously allied: on the one hand, a more refined sense of truth than any other human civilization has known, an almost…
(Note: Jane Renaud wrote a great piece on this subject last week. I hope the following can add to the conversation she initiated.) When I first heard of Daniel Edwards’ Britney sculpture (Monument to Pro-Life), I was fascinated. What a rich stew: a pop star whose stock-in-trade has been to play the innocent/slut (with rather…
I go home for Christmas, and it is a vast cacophony of family, with grandparents and siblings, aunts, uncles, boyfriends, in-laws and all manner of cousins present: first cousins once removed, double cousins, first double cousins, second and triple cousins. There are fires in three hearths, each trying to outburn the others; the house is…
The last thing my wife said to me in person was, “You are not the person you think you are, and you are not the person that others take you to be.” At the time, I thought the only thing harder than having your partner of ten years call you a liar was suspecting that…
The dirty little suspicion in the heart of every aesthete is that he is no better than a tourist. The appreciation of art and the activity of sightseeing are as old as culture, and their relationship is a lot closer than any of us would like to admit. There have been “art tours” to Florence…
Eastern Kentucky is one of the most accidentally beautiful places I have ever been. Being there, one feels as though God knocked over his cereal box one morning and Kentucky spilled out. The place is a jumble and a tangle, off-kilter and slightly askew: a world whose axis is tilted a few degrees further than…
I arrived at the Basquiat exhibit in a suspicious and haughty frame of mind, like an obstinate mule towing my stupidity along behind me. The first thing I noticed about his paintings is that they were made with the express purpose of being noticed. Basquiat embedded in his canvases little tricks and riddles and hints…
At 9pm on May 7th, 2005, in an art space in Queens, New York City, three novelists were enclosed within three individual habitats designed and constructed by three teams of architects/artists. For the past twenty-one days, this has been their reality. They are not allowed to leave the building and they are granted ninety minutes…