Touching the Art
Click to look inside
World of Books
The feel-good place to buy books
Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book AwardsFinalist 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 | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781593767358 |
| ISBN 10 | 1593767358 |
| Title | Touching the Art |
| Author | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Soft Skull Press |
| Year published | 2023-11-07 |
| Number of pages | 304 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |