YOU SHOULD READ HIM, remember him.

He is an important person and thinker.

More than that, he was kind. He did good things for many people and opened many paths. He was helpful and generous. He was there when you needed him. He was brilliant and helped others find their brilliance. He was brimming with ideas and confidence and yet was equally unassuming. He was a comrade and friend. He was a very good anthropologist. He was dedicated to struggles against inequality and for freedom—an unrelenting adversary of capitalism, wage slavery, debt, bureaucracy, racism, and patriarchal, state, and police

ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT and respected Chilean artists of her generation, Lotty Rosenfeld is best known as a founding member of CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) and for an incisive solo practice that interrogated power and the occupation of public space during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Her work Una Milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement), in which the artist turned traffic lines into crosses, or plus signs, or X’s, was first enacted on Avenida Manquehue in Santiago in 1979. This insurgent gesture, which she performed and documented throughout

THE DAY AFTER I LEARNED Joseph Bartscherer had died, I opened the New York Times Magazine to a feature on the seasonal workers who harvest cherries in the same Mattawa, Washington, orchards that Joseph photographed thirty-five years earlier for “Pioneering Mattawa,” 1984–92, a series undertaken in a former desert expanse two and a half hours north of Seattle. The magazine’s freelancer Jovelle Tamayo chose to partially shoot the cherry trees during the foggy morning hours, making somber, damp photographs. By contrast, Joseph’s images of these same vineyards and orchards shine with the sharp, arid

WHEN I LIVED in culturally and politically conservative Brisbane in the late ’70s and early ’80s, John Nixon was the first full-time practicing artist I ever met. He was from Melbourne and had moved to Brisbane in 1980 to be the director of the Institute of Modern Art, a beacon of artistic hope at that time. I was one of two singer-songwriters fronting the Go-Betweens, and to see the dark-clothed charismatic figure, hair swept back behind one ear, a fringe of black ringlets cascading over the other side of his face, gazing intently toward the stage during our pub and club shows was an unexpected

“YOU CANNOT BE AN ARTIST,” said the trumpeter, scholar, and world-traveler Jacques Coursil, “if you don’t have one foot on the ground and the other outside the planet.” Pursuing a career across three continents, he and his work embodied the principles of Black diasporic internationalism. Opposed to the notion of roots as guarantor of authenticity, he nonetheless traversed the routes of world history. “I don’t like identity things,” he insisted. “I don’t have to claim where I am from, it’s so evident.”

Coursil was born in Paris in 1938 to Martinican parents, his father a trade unionist and member

PARIS, JUNE 1981. Germano Celant and I are drinking at a bar after the opening of his exhibition “Identité italienne. L’art en Italie depuis 1959” (Italian Identity. Art in Italy Since 1959) at the Centre Pompidou. He points to a young woman on a banquette, engaged in intense conversation. “That’s Ingrid Sischy, the new editor of Artforum,” he said. “I’ll introduce you.” That introduction transformed my life.

Germano and Ingrid changed the magazine forever. They were perfect partners, truly phenomenal, each bringing out the best in the other. She: street-smart, a voracious consumer of the present

THERE ARE ENDLESS STORIES about Germano Celant, the truly imposing impresario who died of Covid-19 in April at the age of seventy-nine. Since his passing, he has been called the “North Star of contemporary art,” and “one of the last, if not the last, great myth-maker[s].” He has been compared to Zorro and dubbed a God. But he was also a contradictory figure. While some describe him as an extraordinarily sensitive curator, one who was always on the artist’s side, others saw him as an art-world player who could be utterly ruthless when pursuing his ambitions. “I don’t feel like a man of power,”

GIUSEPPE PENONE

For Germano:

Often the memories we have of friends are tied to small things that are marginal in the history of the friendship but which promptly come to mind the moment we remember them.

I met Germano in 1968. I had just made my works about the growth of trees in Garessio, a small town on the border between Piedmont and Liguria.

Germano asked me to send him material for a book he was preparing, the Arte Povera book published by Mazzotta.

It was only later that he told me that part of his family was from Leca d’Albenga, a Ligurian town twenty kilometers from mine.

This chance geographical

I FIRST HEARD OF LUTHER PRICE long before I saw him in person. Sodom (1989), his film juxtaposing Gregorian chants and gay porn footage that he had mutilated with a hole punch and then painstakingly put back together, earned him a legendary reputation in experimental film circles. We met in 2006 at Cinematexas, a disorganized festival on its last legs, and he was livid when his films were not presented as he wished. A negligent projectionist nearly destroyed one, which would have been a disaster, as the print was irreplaceable. Luther refused the convenient reproducibility of photographic media;

SALLY BANES was an intellectual pixie, an omnivore, fecund writer, and avant-garde and popular dance detective. Early on, in the 1960s, I became aware of her passion for dance when she came to interview me as I lay flat on my back convalescing from near-fatal surgical interventions. The book that eventually followed was Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-modern Dance (1980), a compendium of my generation’s challenges to our choreographic forebears. In 1978, she produced a 16-mm film of me performing something called Trio A, which, because I had not danced for some years while making films, would

I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Christo and Jeanne-Claude from a black-and-white newspaper photograph of their work in Documenta 4, in 1968, in Kassel. Titled 5,600 Cubicmeter Package, the tall thin sculpture caught my imagination.

Later that year, I was in New York and visited Leo Castelli’s first gallery uptown. I asked if he had any works by Christo. He replied that Christo was not represented by any galleries but offered the artist’s phone number in case I wanted to contact him (the contemporary art world was a very small fraternity in the ’60s). I called, and a very unreceptive Jeanne-Claude answered.

PERHAPS BECAUSE THE MOMENTUM OF THE ART WORLD thrusts us all into constantly changing relationships, long friendships between artists and curators are, in my experience, surprisingly rare. But when they do develop, they can be very special. I was fortunate to have had such a friendship with Susan Rothenberg.

I first met Susan in 1978, when I was a young curator at the University Art Museum, Berkeley (now the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), where I did her first museum exhibition the same year. It was an important moment for both of us, but more so for me. I was in need of knowledge