My writing on substack, The Culture Diet, is another repository of my writing and voice, which, to quote a friend, “weaves together cultural threads and personal thoughts on everything from kintsugi to closing the gender divide in monuments, to, yes, softness.”
Marsha Pels at Frieze New York, 2022
Lubov Gallery
Wrote the press release for Marsha’s acclaimed installation at Frieze’s “Frame” section. Available here.
Gagosian Quarterly
My article, Conclusions Never Reached: Nancy Rubins in Fluid Space explores the newest body of work from the monumental sculptor. Published following months of original interviews and research. Available here.
Installation view, Nancy Rubins: Fluid Space, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, June 24–August 6, 2021. Photo: Brian Guido.
Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
Served as guest writer for in-gallery exhibition texts for a new collaborative project by Justin Kimball and Jonathan Jackson. More info here.
Justin Kimball, Oak Street, 2017, inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist.
The Pandemic Post
For The Pandemic Post’s fifth issue, on food, I wrote “The Sisterhood of Jewish Cooking,” an essay about a sub-genre of crowd-sourced cookbooks, all found in my grandmother’s kitchen, that were published by sisterhood groups at local synagogues–exploring the intimacies of Jewish community cooking through its various recipes and my grandma’s recollections. Available here.
Marsha Pels: Solace
LUBOV gallery, NYC
I wrote the press release for an exhibition of the work of sculptor Marsha Pels, whose feminist practice examines war, politics, and gender identity; the show debuts the monumental Fallout Necklace (pictured here) along side her Pieta. “Pels’s necklace, the trophy of abuse, embodies the insidious, interconnected architecture of nation- and world-making—its elaborate, pitiless beauty belying the inevitable fallout.” Text in full here.
On view December 10–February 7, 2021.
Ninth Street Women
Feature writer
I interviewed Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art in the “Revisionism” issue of the biannual feminist magazine The September Issues. “Ninth Street Women presents the argument that the radicality of the Ab-Ex movement was best embodied by the audacity of women, who took all the same risks as their male counterparts in art, enduring many, many more in life.” Full interview here.
The Museum Meets the Legal Advocates: Unpacking a Collaborative Exhibition on Racial Injustice
Paper and presentation at the College Art Association annual conference, 2018
Participated in the session “African Americans and US Law in Visual Culture” with a paper detailing my curatorial work on the exhibition The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America, including the implications of the collaborative model and the exhibition’s timing. Text in full here.
Material Cultures
Exhibition catalogue, BRIC
For the exhibition Material Cultures (2016) at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY, I wrote essays about the work of three of the eight participating artists in the accompanying catalogue: Xenobia Bailey, Adrian Esparza, and Sophia Narrett.
sara.softness@gmail.com
Sara Softness 