Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity
Dubrow writes of how the world intrudes on our innocence, how it leaves us dire notes and grim surprises that ultimately become the stories we tell to live. Told in precise and dreamy detail, Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity portrays truths—the vivid memory, the unexpected detail, the unforgettable word—with the clarity of glass before it breaks.
—Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York
Jehanne Dubrow’s searching, deeply intelligent collection harkens back to Adorno’s call for the essay not simply to serve as thought on the page but to actively question, pare off the lies propagated by our culture and society. These ekphrastic essays do more than extoll beauty or privilege erudition. They insist that art, in all its forms, acts as the ballast against the pain of human cruelty and folly, against the vagaries of time.
—Hasanthika Sirisena, author of Dark Tourist: Essays
Exhibitions unsettles art and its purchase. In tautly interlinking essays, Dubrow describes what is unseen, overlooked, or dismissed, and refuses to look away—not unlike her mother, the quiet heroine of this book, who breaks silences by translating and predicting atrocities (often to those who refuse to listen).
—Spring Ulmer, author of Bestiality of the Involved
Exhibitions is a fantastic book—both smart and inviting, intimate and outward-looking, creative and critical. It’s the best of all worlds in an essay collection, and one I will return to again and again.”
—Randon Billings Noble, author of Be with Me Always: Essays