The Girl Who Counted Numbers A Novel that Took 61 years to write 61 years ago, I rolled a large metal trunk that held a heavy German portable typewriter up the gangplank of the SS Jerusalem of the Zim Lines on my way from New York City to Haifa, Israel…

Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art The Jewish Museum August 20, 2021 — January 9, 2022 It was a fortuitous decision — not to read the New York Times review of the Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art exhibit at the Jewish Museum before seeing the exhibit…

Beverly Buchanan: Shacks and Legends, 1985–2011 Abigail DeVille: Homebody Andrew Edlin Gallery (212 Bowery) March 20-May 8, 2021 I first met Beverly Buchanan in January 1990 at her solo exhibit, “A Celebration of the Architecture of the Shack in Two and Three Dimensions,” in the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery on Greene…

Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America The New Museum on the Bowery (February 16 to June 6) Medium, March 13, 2021 By Roslyn Bernstein Eight years ago, I attended a press preview for The Rise and Fall of Apartheid at the International Center for Photography (ICP), organized by the Nigerian-born curator Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019). It was…

Where Novices and Professionals Work Side by Side San Miguel de Allende, Mexico In February 2020, I spent two weeks in San Miguel de Allende (SMA), Mexico. The idea was to escape the winter by vacationing in the small colonial town, where an ex-pat community of Americans and Canadians of…

I almost missed seeing the Grey Art Gallery’s (NYU) powerful exhibit of contemporary Iranian, Indian, and Turkish art, from the 1960s and 1970s. With only two days to go (it closes on December 7th), I popped into the gallery, gravitating almost immediately to three etchings by Krishna Reddy, an artist…

It’s the 150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, completed in 1869 by over 12,000 Chinese laborers who, under the harshest of conditions, laid the track from west to east, meeting up at Promontory Summit, Utah, with Irish laborers who had worked from east to west. According…