Exhibitions

Essays on Art and Atrocity

by Jehanne Dubrow

Published by: University of New Mexico Press

147 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback
9780826365262 | September 2023

$19.95

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EPUB
9780826365279 | September 2023

$9.99

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Description
Contributors
Acclaim
Table Of Contents

What happens when beauty intersects with horror? In her newest nonfiction collection, Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through the making and viewing of art, we are--for better or for worse--changed.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including The Arranged Marriage: Poems (UNM Press), and two books of creative nonfiction. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.

"Exhibitions is a fantastic book--both smart and inviting, intimate and outward-looking, creative and critical. It's the best of all worlds in an essay collection, and one I will return to again and again."--Randon Billings Noble, author of Be with Me Always: Essays

"These ekphrastic essays do more than extoll beauty or privilege erudition. They insist that art, in all its forms, acts as the ballast against the pain of human cruelty and folly, against the vagaries of time."--Hasanthika Sirisena, author of Dark Tourist: Essays

"Exhibitions unsettles art and its purchase. In tautly interlinking essays, Dubrow describes what is unseen, overlooked, or dismissed, and she refuses to look away."--Spring Ulmer, author of Bestiality of the Involved

"Told in precise and dreamy detail, Exhibitions portrays truths--the vivid memory, the unexpected detail, the unforgettable word--with the clarity of glass before it breaks."--Alexander Nemerov, author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York

Gallery One
Landscape with Basilica
Gallery Two
The Red Picture and the Blue
Snapshot / Warsaw, 1981
The Dead Class
From the Archives: Lessons in American English
Essay, Made of Antique Glass
Snapshots / Warsaw, 1987
Gallery Three
Mother and Child
Portrait on Metal with Patterned Scarf and Streak of Light
Snapshot / Washington, DC, 1986
Lost Vessels
Snapshot / Lubumbashi, 1978
On the Color Matching System; Or, Marriage
Seventy-Seven Steps
The Lodger
Snapshot / Dallas, 2022
Gallery Four
Ambivalent Things
Gallery Five
Jewel Box
Dear Rose
Snapshots / Denton, 2018
Provenance
The Resonator
You Must Stumble
Still Life with Tattered Passport
Gallery Six
About the Artist

Acknowledgments
Works Cited