Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards
Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards

A daringly observant memoir about intergenerational trauma, fine art, and compartmentalization from a returning Soft Skull author and Lambda Literary Award winner

A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do.

Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda's work as "vulgar" and a "waste of talent" once it became unapologetically queer.

As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys's paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys's place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.

Sycamore writes, "Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over and back, over and back, welcome."

Refusing easy answers in search of an embodied truth, Sycamore upends propriety to touch the art and feel everything that comes through.

Matt Bernstein Sycamore, nicknamed Mattilda, is the author of Pulling Taffy, a novel, and the editor of three nonfiction anthologies. Mattilda recently edited That's revolting! Mattilda is a member of Gay Shame: A Virus in the System, a radical queer activist group dedicated to combating the assimilation monster. She's been compared to a combination between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a homosexual agenda, according to the Austin Chronicle.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9781593767358
ISBN 10	1593767358
Titel	Touching the Art
Autor	Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Soft Skull Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2023-11-07
Seitenanzahl	304
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.