Thursday, March 10, 2022

Top 10 books about suffering artists

Tom de Freston is a visual artist based in Oxford. Among various fellowships and residencies he has held a Leverhulme residency at Cambridge University, a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University. His work is regularly exhibited, and is represented in numerous public and private collections. With his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, he is the co-author of Orpheus and Eurydice and Julia and the Shark.

Wreck: GĂ©ricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea is his debut non-fiction work.

At the Guardian de Freston tagged ten "works [that] complicate our understanding of the links between pain and art," including:
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Rankine’s book-length lyric poem/essay about race relations in the US moves fluidly between discussion of everyday racism through to the explicit and structural. The entire fabric of society meets her gaze, from the artwork of JMW Turner to the writings of James Baldwin and Robert Lowell, anecdotes of microaggressions, analysis of the media around police shootings, the YouTube performances of Hennessy Youngman and her collaboration with John Lucas.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Citizen is among Diana London's nine books that celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lit Hub's ten books we'll be reading in 2030.

--Marshal Zeringue