Recently, we along with so many others have been turning to deep conversations with friends and family for comfort and stimulation, even as we remain miles apart. This week’s episode features a conversation we recorded in less distanced times with two friends of the gallery, the photographer and filmmaker Tyler Mitchell and the critic and curator Antwaun Sargent.

In their spirited dialogue, these two leading voices of their generation grapple with what success means today for young black artists and address the radical power shift from gatekeepers to artists, the breakdown of barriers between fashion and art photography, cautionary tales of social media groupthink and overexposure, and historical artists who made the new black vanguard possible.

A detail from a photo by Tyler Mitchell, titled Ugbad Abdi, dated 2019.

Tyler Mitchell and Antwaun Sargent

Featuring Tyer Mitchell and Antwaun Sargent

A New Black Vanguard

Media

Browse available works from twelve galleries

Platform: New York

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Opening Soon

New Viewing Rooms: Studio and Exceptional Works

April 3–May 1, 2020

A Viewing Room Featuring New York Galleries

, a viewing room featuring London-based galleries, hosted on David Zwirner Online. 

 is an initiative that invites friends, peers, and colleagues from galleries around the world to present a focused presentation of works by a single artist.

“Helping out some of the industry’s smaller players is David Zwirner gallery, which began its support of 12 other New York dealers by hosting them on its website this week…,” announced the Financial Times on April 9. “Next up are another dozen galleries from London—revealed as Arcadia Missa, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, Herald St, Hollybush Gardens, Kate MacGarry, mother’s tankstation, Sid Motion Gallery, Soft Opening, Southard Reid, The Approach and The Sunday Painter. Like their transatlantic counterparts, each will show one artist on Platform: London (April 17-May 15).’’

Read the full article in the 

, and find further details, below:

The participants in 

 represent a cross section of colleagues, friends, and peers in the city’s gallery community: The Approach, Arcadia Missa, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, Herald St, Hollybush Gardens, Kate MacGarry, mother’s tankstation, Sid Motion Gallery, Soft Opening, Southard Reid, and The Sunday Painter. Each gallery will feature a focused presentation of works by a single artist. In some cases, galleries are presenting artists who were intended to be featured in spring exhibitions or whose shows were cut short by last month’s closures. 

 will be on view on davidzwirner.com from April 17 through May 15, 2020.



 emerged from conversations between gallery directors about the challenges facing all galleries in this current moment. With physical galleries temporarily closed due to the global health crisis, the art community has increasingly turned to digital spaces to share the work of artists and to engage audiences all over the world.

The inaugural edition, 

, showcasing 12 galleries from the New York art community, launched in early April and is currently on view on 

A detail from a work by Andrea Büttner, titled Beggar, dated 2016.

Launching April 17

Platform: London Announced

Image With Caption

Read Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating correspondence with Balthus

An Excerpt from Rilke's Letters to a Young Painter

“The interview is a very particular form as a text, in that it promises many things’’

Making What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with art critics

Equal parts oral history and analysis of craft, 

 offers an unprecedented overview of American art writing. These thirty in-depth conversations chart the role of the critic as it has evolved from the 1960s to today, providing an invaluable resource for aspiring artists and writers alike. John Ashbery recalls finding Rimbaud’s poetry through his first gay crush at sixteen; Rosalind Krauss remembers stealing the design of October from Massimo Vignelli; Paul Chaat Smith details his early days with Jimmy Durham in the American Indian Movement; Dave Hickey talks about writing country songs with Waylon Jennings; Michele Wallace relives her late-night and early-morning interviews with James Baldwin; Lucy Lippard describes confronting Clement Greenberg at a lecture; Eileen Myles asserts her belief that her negative review incited the Women’s Action Coalition; and Fred Moten recounts falling in love with Renoir while at Harvard.

Jarrett Earnest’s wide-ranging conversations with critics, historians, journalists, novelists, poets, and theorists—each of whom approach the subject from unique positions—illustrate different ways of writing, thinking, and looking at art.

, 1664. Gemäldegalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin

I want to start by talking about your early life and your relationship with poetry. How did that connection with language begin?

It started at home. I grew up near Concord, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. My parents were a very young postwar couple. My dad had just started medical school when I was born, so there was no money to speak of, but they were resourceful. They were book readers, museum goers, and they loved music, especially jazz. While my dad was in school at night, my mother would read my younger sister and me poetry at the dinner table—just a routine thing that she did. Her taste in poetry included Emily Dickinson, which she thought would appeal to us because her poems were short and had references to nature, but also the language is so startling—it wakes you up and makes you listen. I got a lot of Dickinson early on.

What would you point to as an early important aesthetic experience?



When I was a child, we went to The Cleveland Museum of Art. My favorite experiences were of strolling through those galleries with parents who enjoyed this very much. They weren’t necessarily always equipped to provide detailed information about the art we were looking at, but they were only too happy to indulge their only child in this way. At a certain point, it must have been clear that I was the person who needed this experience the most, but I was never made to feel as though my interest was a burden to them. I don’t recall having a lot to say about it—ever since I could talk I have had speech impediments, and this predisposed me to keep words to myself—but I loved looking, in a deep and abiding way. I guess I looked really hard; I certainly wanted to look often. My first real loves were Dutch landscape paintings by Ruisdael and Van Goyen, which I revisited almost on a pilgrimage basis. I was mainly looking at paintings; it took me the longest time to learn how to see sculpture of any kind. The Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman [1634], by Frans Hals—I saw it again recently, and it’s still to me as completely fixating as ever. Looking back, I feel that a painting like that appeared to me as something like 

where you offhandedly say that your mother used to call you “too sensi-tive for this world”—I’m wondering about that and how it relates to your early aesthetic experiences.



That particular essay, “Becoming Others,” is about my mirror-touch synesthesia, a form of synesthesia that wasn’t named until 2005, although obviously people have been walking around with it forever. It’s a physiological phenomenon: if I see another person slapped on the cheek, I have a sensation in my own cheek. I also have strong physical responses to colors—once while looking at a shade of turquoise in Iceland, I had a revolting crawling sensation all over my body. Everyone responds to color, but my mirror-touch sensations probably exaggerate the response. At the same time, I can’t jump out of myself and check what it is like for you. When I was growing up, it never occurred to me that other people didn’t feel what they saw.

A detail from a painting by Johannes Vermeer, titled Young Woman with a Pearl Necklace, dated 1664.

Read this week's David Zwirner Books excerpt

What It Means to Write About Art, Interviews with Art Critics

What do we talk about when we talk about minimalism today? A timely conversation with the art critic Kyle Chayka, who recently published 

The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism

, on how a radical 1960s art movement became the basis of a hyper-commercialized lifestyle adopted by luxury brands and millennials everywhere—and where Marie Kondo and Agnes Martin overlap, if at all.

In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be evolving to give you even more episodes to listen to, with one-on-one conversations with the people—and on the subjects—we find especially compelling during this unique chapter in time. Stay tuned!

Image: Kyle Chayka, Hanger Studios, New York, March 2020

A photo of Kyle Chayka at Hangar Studios, New York, in 2020.

The Minimalism Episode

Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

How Did Minimalism Go Mass? 

The Minimalism Episode: Kyle Chayka on the David Zwirner Podcast

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.