Loading

Bob Nickas
The Dept. of Corrections
Karma, New York, 2015
408 pages
9 × 6 12 inches
Edition of 1,500

“ART, AFTER ALL, IS A SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES, BUT AS EVIDENCE IT SHOULD IN NO WAY BE VIEWED AS CIRCUMSTANTIAL.”

This new collection of writing marks thirty years for the critic and curator Bob Nickas, widely considered one of the few independent voices, and willful misfits, still at work today. Nickas introduces and reintroduces us to artists from ’60s to the ’80s, to those working today—Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and On Kawara, Isa Genzken, Steven Parrino, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kelley Walker, and Pierre Huyghe. Writing as if they were passing us by in real time, often in the streets of New York, he also traces the disappearance of artists and the city over three decades.