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From Wolfgang Tillmans’s foundation Between Bridges

2020Solidarity Posters

Growing up and as an artist, Baldwin had a great interest in masks—the masks of blackness and maleness, the various roles we appropriate or condemn the better to define ourselves.

So much of this begins with his father, David. David Baldwin is a significant figure in a lot of Baldwin’s most emotional and personal texts. In his book about movies, 

, he said he had written too much and too little about this man who was not his biological father.

For most of his adult life, David Baldwin was a Baptist minister. As a man, James Baldwin said that he didn’t understand what his father must have seen growing up in Louisiana, the horror of lynchings, segregation, and forced labor, until he went South himself. Many years ago, I wrote an essay for a book about lynching photography in America. People actually sent postcards and collected this horror, and the project was so upsetting that I didn’t keep a copy of the book for myself.

I felt it was important, though, for us to see what David Baldwin had seen, and the lynching photographs I included show something devastating that affects the mind in profound ways, a black man about to be lynched. The images are about the preparation of a holocaust, in effect. And when David Baldwin left Louisiana, and Baldwin’s mother, Berdice, left Maryland, they were fleeing the kind of world where this was a given, not an exception.

David Baldwin was a native of Louisiana who marginalized his eldest adopted son by calling him ugly and treating him with scorn. How to make art out of that, because all art grows out of love or need? How to deal with David Baldwin and the legacy of ugliness that he passed on to his son, who, thank God, drew a line between accepting his father’s scorn and trying to remake his body as something free of that? These are the questions James Baldwin, the artist, tried page after page after page to answer.

—Hilton Als, based on his introduction to the exhibition 

God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

I learned about light from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face. Many years ago in poverty and uncertainty, Beauford and I would walk together through the streets of New York City. He was then, and is now, working all the time, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is seeing all the time; and the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.

Read James Baldwin's introduction to the exhibition catalogue for 

James Baldwin, “Introduction to Exhibition of Beauford Delaney Opening December 4, 1964 at the Gallery Lambert,” in 

Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective, (The Studio Museum in Harlem

James Baldwin with bust of himself sculpted by Larry Wolhandler

“The reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.’’

James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney

“Live for a while in these books.’’

Excerpts from David Zwirner Books

To Stay up to Date about New Exhibitions, Available Works, and Artist News

Learn more about this exhibition at our 69th Street gallery

Learn more about William Eggleston and John McCracken: True Stories

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Published on the occasion of the 

 of the artist's work at David Zwirner, New York in 2013, 

 charts the evolution of the artist's diverse oeuvre, encompassing both well-known and lesser-seen examples of his production from the early 1960s up through his death in 2011 with a range of sculptures, paintings, and sketches. Featuring an essay by art historian Robin Clark, excerpted here, it includes reproductions of fascinating archival and documentary material that was discovered during the curatorial process, from the artist’s sketches to gallery invitation cards, early catalogue covers, historic photographs, as well as installation views of the exhibition.

John McCracken was a leading practitioner of minimal art, a mystic, an idealist, and an accomplished craftsman. His instantly recognizable geometric sculptures (blocks, columns, pyramids, and, in particular, planks) are both hermetic and expansive. Self-contained in their angular compression, McCracken’s sculptures are also exquisitely responsive to changes in ambient conditions such as light and movement. Often vibrantly hued or glossy black, these objects appear from some angles to be blunt forms, while from other points of view the polished surfaces mirror their surroundings, causing the sculptures to appear ghostly or transparent (fig. 1 and plate 6). This paradox, and the suggestion of entertaining multiple realities simultaneously, is central to McCracken’s practice. McCracken refined his techniques as a craftsman not for the sake of craft itself, but to create works that in their reflective finish contradict their own materiality. “I like to foster work that actually is in the world,” he explained, “ . . . separate from the world, yet includes the world too.”

William Eggleston and John McCracken True Stories

David Zwirner Books

John McCracken: Thresholds

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, an online exhibition presenting over thirty works dating from the nineteenth century to the present in response to one of art’s oldest subjects, read a text by featured artist Cy Gavin on on the colors of J.M.W. Turner, and learning a new way of seeing.

1826 was an eventful year. As Charles Darwin sailed on HMS Beagle’s maiden voyage to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, French inventor, Nicephore Niépce, invented the first true photograph. A colorless and oily coal-tar derivative called aniline was isolated from the destructive distillation of indigo. Aniline could then be used to make the first synthetically produced blue, yellow and brown dyes for fabrics, inks and watercolors. Then French chemist Pierre-Jean Robiquet isolated alizarin, a red plant-derived pigment: the basis for a translucent crimson ubiquitous today. It is also the year J.M.W. Turner is thought to have completed his masterful watercolor flourish, Sea View.

Turner’s social world included foremost scientists, naturalists, and inventors from London's Somerset House and the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science. At the Royal Society it would be common to attend lectures by towering figures like William Herschel, a builder of telescopes and an astronomer famous for his work on the Sun and for his discovery of Uranus.

Apparently, the painting is dated to the 1820s in part by Turner’s choice to work on blue-toned paper. The paper automatically imparts midtones to sky and sea and Turner picks out the highlights of a blazing, but obscured, sun with opaque gouache and then enriches dark passages with richly saturated tones of translucent cobalt blue.

In the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly fascinated by an optical phenomenon called the Purkinje Shift. It is the gradual, glitchy transition in color sensitivity in diminishing light. As light levels decrease, the human eye shifts in dominance to the blue end of the visible spectrum. As day turns to night, one kind of retinal cell (cones) yields to the other (rods), with rods interpreting texture in grayscale. The lack of color information making its way to our brains should not be mistaken for a lack of color in our darkened environment.

My studio is a red barn in the woods somewhere. There are no streetlights and no ambient artificial lights. One evening, I was headed indoors at dusk and noticed, with alarm, that the red of the building and certain nearby flowers had turned a gray color rather than simply a darker shade of red. The green of the grass and other foliage looked like darker versions of themselves. This liminal period, which can last for many minutes is perceived by humans as a bluing out of the landscape and is called in navigational argot, Nautical Dusk, meaning just that the horizon and the brightest stars are simultaneously visible—useful for ship’s navigation.

This effect was first noted in 1819, by Jan Evangelista Purkynje, a Czech anatomist. It bears mentioning that in my putting together this response, I learned that Purkynje was elected to the Royal Society in 1850, so may well have known Turner.

Turner said, “I paint what I see, not what is there.”

My encounter with the Purkinje Shift sparked an acceptance of color and perception as illusory experiences specific to our species and has fostered an excited interest in creating images that were made, at least in part, to be seen in low-light and meant to become activated at the brink of our ocular limits.

There is great power in that which is indeterminate.

I have begun re-considering colors imperceptible to the human eye, but which bookend our spectrum: infrared and ultraviolet. That we cannot see these colors doesn’t mean they are not colors. Infrared is perceptible through the heat it evolves and ultraviolet light is so effectual that when Sea View was gifted to the Scottish National Gallery in 1900 (along with a suite of thirty-seven other works), by a collector and personal friend of Turner’s, a stipulation was made that the works could only be shown for one month a year: January, when daylight was expected to be weakest. Upholding that mandate has protected the fugitive pigments in these watercolors from the typical blanching effects of UV light. Consequently, these works have an uncommon radiance that is thrilling to behold.

At Sea

The artist on the works of J.M.W. Turner in a new essay

Cy Gavin Seeks a New Way of Seeing



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Published on the occasion of a critically acclaimed 

 of the artist's work organized by Helen Molesworth at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020, 

 provides a crucial record of his extraordinary oeuvre. Through a series of interviews, the book tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators.

Deana Lawson interviewed by Helen Molesworth, 2019

“Noah knew about my work way before I even knew he knew about my work. I applied to the William H. Johnson Foundation, which gives grants to emerging African American artists. I had applied twice, and I didn’t get the grant either time. The second time I applied I remember thinking, ‘I’m not applying anymore.’ I felt that I would never get a grant like that because the nature of my work, the subjects I was photographing, just didn’t fit their scope. Years later, I think it was at the barbecue, Noah said, ‘I was the person organizing the slides for the William H. Johnson award, and I saw your work and I called my brother right away, and I was like, ‘Yo, this artist here, we have to meet her.’”


Cover image: Noah Davis and Moses Davis, Los Angeles, c. 2010–2011

Exceptional Works: Noah Davis

Deana Lawson on Noah Davis

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.