For four decades, Constance DeJong has demonstrated what language is capable of—how it can be more than just a delivery system for the conventions of novels and short stories. Her scrupulous writings, recordings, and performances are typically suffused with sensitivity and humor, confessions and criticisms. Below she discusses how “the movement of thought” across the mind is a source of structuring language for her and her new works in “Let me consider it from here,” a four-artist show on intimacy at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which is on view through January 27, 2019.

THIS IS THE

Mark Grotjahn’s latest exhibition, “New Capri, Capri, and Free Capri,” imbues abstraction with complexity and contradiction. For the paintings in the show, the Los Angeles–based painter executed monochromatic grounds with vivid yellows, pinks, and greens, as well as black and white oil paints. Then, he added impasto-rich lines formed from equally compelling hues and extended the somewhat loopy marks from side to side and sometimes from top to bottom across the cardboard surfaces. Meanwhile, vertically arrayed, gridded segments that suggest a cross between slugs and caterpillars project a rhythmic

British director Peter Brook has been a gale force in theater for well over half a century. From his legendary nine-hour adaptation of the ancient Indian war epic, The Mahabharata; to his work with countless acting luminaries such as John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, and Glenda Jackson; to his founding of the International Centre for Theatre Research at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, France; to his award-winning works for film and television, he has, in essence, devoted his life to mastering the craft of storytelling. Although he is ninety-three, his passion for theater is no less fiery than it has

The Delhi-born photographer Dayanita Singh published her first book, Zakir Hussain, in 1986. The eleven books that followed, including Museum Bhavan (2017), document and form the bedrock for Singh’s observational and omnivorous photography. Interested in the photobook’s relationship to other objects and infrastructures, Singh has increasingly drafted custom objects—from bespoke cabinets, cases, and desks to bookshelves and beds—to serve as mechanisms of display and logical extensions of her project. Her work is currently featured in the Fifty-Seventh Carnegie International at the

As many as thirteen thousand people have been executed at the Saydnaya Military Prison in Syria since 2011, a number that remains an estimate as the site is inaccessible to independent monitors. The prisoners are mostly kept in the dark or blindfolded and thus develop a sharp awareness of sounds. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s current exhibition in London details the experiences of former Saydnaya detainees through an extensive sound library and a listening room, with an audio essay charting the subtle transformations of their voices within Saydnaya following the 2011 uprising in Syria. “Earwitness

Why do we believe the stories we’re told? The artist Hank Willis Thomas recasts pop culture iconography to foreground the ways that representation dissembles. His recently published monograph, All Things Being Equal... (Aperture, 2018), is a comprehensive survey of his photographic approaches. The book is also a prelude to his first solo museum show, which debuts in October 2019 at the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon.

I’D BEEN TALKING WITH APERTURE about doing another book since 2008, after publishing my first monograph, Pitch Blackness. Over the past couple of years the conversation

Lorraine O’Grady’s longtime engagement with the diptych, as seen in her recent collage series “Cutting Out CONYT,” 1977/2017, which she discusses below, is highlighted in two solo exhibitions this fall: one is on view at Alexander Gray Associates in New York through December 15, 2018, and the other is at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia through January 13, 2019. “Cutting Out CONYT” is a radical selection from her earliest artwork, “Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT),” 1977, now reworked and distilled into what she calls “haiku diptychs.” The eminent New York–based artist and critic

Narcissister’s neo-burlesque performance works seem to spring from a limitless body. Masked and anonymous, she transforms herself through acrobatic prowess and ingenious stage and costume design, as she plays with themes of race, sex, gender, and pop culture. Her documentary Narcissister Organ Player––which explores her relationship with her mother, who occasionally appeared in her work––is on view at Film Forum in New York through November 20, 2018. There will be a Q&A Saturday, November 17, 2018 at 7pm with Narcissister and Lissa Rivera, the Museum of Sex Curator. 

IN 2012 I WAS WORKING ON 

For nearly two decades, Jeffrey Gibson has sought to complicate ideas of identity and heritage through multiform work rooted in modernist abstraction, indigenous traditions, and queerness. His art is currently on display in a retrospective at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson; a survey at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York; the inaugural exhibition at the Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery at Georgetown University in Washington, DC; and a solo show of new paintings at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York City, which is on view through November 27, 2018.  

I WAS BORN IN THE BRONX at Fitch Sanitarium, which no longer exists. My parents lived on Featherbed Lane, and years ago their building collapsed. It no longer exists. My stepmother taught at a junior high on Sheridan Avenue. That school no longer exists. My father, a Golden Gloves boxer, lived with my stepmother in an apartment building on Grandview Place at 167th Street. It no longer exists either. Their synagogue closed, and was converted into the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Soon, I, too, will no longer be around. That’s the point of a retrospective. The show will include parts of my 2009–10

Writer and artist Edmund de Waal creates delicate porcelain vessels decisively arranged in meditative metal displays evocative of the conceptual intersection of Minimalist sculpture and modern craft. His work is currently on view in “the poems of our climate,” at Gagosian in San Francisco through December 8, 2018, and in “—one way or other—,” his first architectural intervention in the United States at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House in West Hollywood, California, through January 6, 2018, which he discusses below. 

I’VE BEEN OBSESSING about the Schindler

German artist Andrea Büttner has a long-standing practice of using appropriated imagery as a historical and philosophical tool. For the first time, three of Büttner’s slide projections are being shown together as large-scale, standalone installations. “Shepherds and Kings,” a solo exhibition of Büttner’s work, is on view at Bergen Kunsthall in Norway until October 28, 2018. She is also participating in the São Paulo Bienal, on view through December 9, 2018.

I’VE LONG BEEN INTERESTED IN depictions of poverty. Considering how much we know about representations of wealth and power across centuries,