The Library Cafe
Yvonne Elet and Caleb Mitchell
Franc Palaia
May 11, 2022.
Rhinebeck artist Franc Palaia talks about his catalogue raisonné : Wall Works: Frescoes, Photo-Sculpture and Mixed Media 1973-2021. The discussion will help to introduce a restrospective exhibit that will be on view of Palaia's "Large scale frescoes and photo-sculptures installed to simulate a contemporary archeological site"at the Hudson Beach Glass Gallery on view May 14 - June 5, 2022 in Beacon, New York.
"I have been photographing walls, murals, signs, graffiti, street art, architecture and billboards since 1976. In my travels of 26 countries, I have compiled thousands of urban wall images that I use as reference for my wall works. I am a multi-disciplinary artist and work in photography, painting, sculpture and murals where I incorporate all four mediums into mixed media flat wall pieces and 3-dimensional floor sculptures. I have a saying: `walls are drop cloths of a society', whatever you seen on a city's walls gives you a sense of what is happening in that particular city or country. They signal the current state of their economy, politics and social condition." -- from Franc Palaia, "Artist Statement."
copies of the catalog are obtainable by emailing Franc Palaia at francpalaia1@gmail.com
Katherine Hite
Elizabeth Nogrady and Jill Schneiderman
In 1914, literary naturalist and Hudson Valley resident John Burroughs wrote, “In the snow-storm: we are admitted into Nature’s oldest laboratory.” This laboratory is part of the cryosphere, the term given to places on Earth where water is in solid, rather than liquid, form. Describing the fleeting and varied forms of the cryosphere—ice and snow in particular—is a challenge shared by artists and scientists alike. This Focus Gallery exhibition applies the approach and knowledge of an earth scientist to art that focuses on the cryosphere, with the aim of enhancing viewers’ understanding of not only the works themselves, but also the planet we inhabit. It features paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture from the nineteenth century to the present day, including works by Sanford Robinson Gifford, Taguchi Beisaku, Doris Lee, and Oshutsiak Pudlat. This exhibition is co-organized by the Loeb and Jill Schniederman, professor of Earth Science.
Hester Blum
Stella Beratlis
Julia Bolton Holloway
Aaron Sinift, Kahkashan Khan, Jitendra Kumar
The images in this book are traces of a world that exists even today and continues to provide a baseline means of self-sufficiency for tens of millions of people. Yet how we express ourselves is being transformed by our present circumstances and at this very moment is searching for its compelling voice. Perhaps this book is an opportunity to catch a glimpse before it’s gone of a more local sensibility that is unimpressed by glamour and worldliness, more focused on the ideals of communal harmony and love of country, particularly its rural pastoralist culture, what Gandhiji called “India’s heart and soul.”
As we reflect on these unique qualities (rasa), it is important as well to consider the present, the point from which we encounter the future, and from which we must find our voice. OTHER IMAGININGS is intended to create community (you included) and assert absolute equivalence among all participants so that no labor, no effort, no artist known or unknown is prized above any other. This artwork is an attempt to weave together stories rooted in community in order to create a primal resource for understanding and collaboration.
Changing Forms
Celebrating Dante at Vassar
Dora Apel

Suzanne Preston Blier
“It is a condition of masterworks that they attract, even demand, interpretation and reinterpretation. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a case in point. In 1946, Alfred Barr called it ‘a battlefield of trial and experiment’ marking ‘the beginning of a new period in the history of modern art.’ Twenty-six years later, Leo Steinberg argued that its psychic and pictorial ‘violence’ resides in its power of displacement, in ‘the startled consciousness of a viewer who sees himself seen.’ Others have examined its ‘primitivism’ and l’art negre as central to its power and originality. Now, Suzanne Blier, through a close textual and visual analysis of an astonishing range of references, argues that Picasso’s creativity ‘involved both drawing on and subverting the past’ while reimagining the present and creating the future anew. Blier's study rewards close reading, just as the painting rewards close and sustained looking.” — James Cuno, President and CEO, The J. Paul Getty Trust
“Combining the specialized skills of an art historian with the zeal of a detective, Suzanne Preston Blier offers a bold and transformative re-reading of the Demoiselles. She startlingly shifts the interpretive foundations of Picasso and the Demoiselles: she shows us a Picasso not as bombastic egotist but as capacious globalist; not as masculine master fixated on female sexuality and its attendant anxieties, but as explorer of the power and presence of women and their generative capacities. This provocative and pathbreaking book scrambles the logic of modernism, primitivism, and feminism in the discipline of art history.” — Debora Silverman, author of Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art
Robert Kipniss

Laurie Lisle
The author and biographer Laurie Lisle returns to the program to talk about her new memoir, Word for Word: A Writer's Life, newly published by Artemis Editions.
"With Word for Word, Laurie Lisle enters the pantheon of great memoirists . . . Bolstered by exquisite, evocative observations of the physical world that inform her prose, past and present, she threads a fine line between revelation and reticence, generously exposing her most intimate feelings about the conflicts and sacrifices inherent in the need for both love and freedom, as a woman and a writer. If ever there is a book that will trigger a desire to pen one's own memoir, this is it." --Marnie Mueller, author of My Mother's Island
"Word for Word is a perfect title for a memoir about the hard-earned creation of a writer's life that is wrested out of the honest self-examination of a woman who faces the personal, family, class, and social forces that shaped—but did not determine—the person and writer she would become. A richly rewarding read."--Lois Rudnick, author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds
"Word for Word is a beautifully told story about the growth of a woman writer of the second-wave generation, whose intellectual and spiritual debts are to women writers, feminism, and, more generally, strong women." -- Carol Ascher, author of Afterimages: A Family Memoir
Patricia Phagan
Buzz Spector
"Taking cues from Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers—two influential 20th-century artists whose careers shaped the course of contemporary art—Spector draws from art historical precedents and adapts borrowed materials, injecting poetic humor and philosophical musings along the way. . . .
"Spector is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of contemporary art. He taught painting, sculpture, and two-dimensional design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis for a decade before retiring in 2019. This is the first presentation of the artist’s work at a St. Louis museum."
The Rowland Atkinson skit we mention.
Art Speaks: a 53 minute video on Buzz Spector: Alterations by SLAM
Miriam Cohen and Mark G. Seidl
Laurie Lisle
"Portrait of an Artist is a sensitive and beautifully documented biography. It moved me deeply--I can't remember when a book involved me so totally."
Patricia Bosworth, author, Diane Arbus: A Biography
"What a personality emerges from these pages!...Portrait of an Artist is filled with riches."
Joyce Carol Oates, Mademoiselle
"Through interviews with O'Keeffe's friends and acquaintances, by delving into the published an unpublished sources and letters...she gives a fine and poignant accounting of the relationship between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz...Above and beyond the personal portrait, Lisle's biography is a marvelous evocation of the American places that have been important in the development of O'Keeffe's character and her art."
James R. Mellow, The Saturday Review
David Tavárez
Liza Donnelly
Photograph by Elena Rossini |
Cartoonist, activist, author, and frequent visiting Vassar professor Liza Donnelly visits to talk about cartooning and the retrospective exhibition of her work, Liza Donnelly: Comic Relief, on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Liza is a New Yorker staff cartoonist, a resident cartoonist for CBS News, and has published in a host of news and cultural outlets, including the New York Times, The Nation, CNN, Cosmopolitan, Cobblestone, Habitat, the Daily Beast, Open Salon, Forbes, and the Huffington Post. She is also a columnist on politics and global women's rights for the online journal Medium Magazine. Among her 17 published books are Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, and a series of illustrated children's books.
Other links to Donnelly's work:
Bryan W. Van Norden
Lindsay Shepherd Cook
Broadcasts During the Remainder of Spring Term
Dear Listeners, Due to the restrictions placed on movement in the shadow of the CoVid-19 pandemic, we will only be broadcasting past episodes of the Library Cafe during our regularly scheduled air time on Wednesdays, noon to one p.m. The current broadcast list of episodes follows below. These will be mostly interviews with Vassar College faculty about their research, or programs directly related to the College. Of course you can also listen to these and former interviews going back to October 2006 here from our website / archive by scrolling through episodes below.
I hope you are all well and will remain that way, and that despite our dearth of current interviews you will find enough material here to entertain and inform you through this period of isolation to help keep you distanced and healthy.
Spring Schedule:
April 8: Wendy Graham, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at Vassar College, talks about her latest monograph, Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia University Press, 2017.)
April 15: Michael Halpin McCarthy, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Vassar College, returns to talk about his recent book Toward a catholic Christianity: A Study in Critical Belonging (Lexington 2017).
April 22: Mardges Bacon, Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Art and Architecture Emerita, Northeastern University, discusses her book John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).
April 29: Nicholas Adams discusses his biography of the 20th century architect whose work defined the built environment of corporate modernism: Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (Yale University Press 2019).
May 6: Holly Peppe, scholar, editor, and literary executor for the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, discusses Millay's life, her work, the new edition of Millay's Selected Poems (Yale, 2016), and the exhibition "Treasures from Steepletop" on view in the Main Library, Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center from January 22 through June 11, 2017, in celebration of the centennial of Millay's graduation from Vassar College.
May 13: Arielle Saber, Professor of Romance Languages & Literatures at Bowdoin College, discusses her book Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy, winner of the 19th annual MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication and the Newberry Library's 2017 Weiss-Brown Publication Award (U Toronto, 2017).
May 20: Lindsay Shepherd Cook (VC'10), Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, returns to discuss her English translation of a new monograph by former Vassar Professor of Art Andrew Tallon and Dany Sandron, University Professor at the University of the Sorbonne, entitled Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History(Penn State, 2020). This will be a new broadcast.
Laurie Lisle
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Louise Nevelson with her cats, 1975, Pedro E. Guerrero, Vintage Silver Bromide Print |
Author and biographer Laurie Lisle discusses her book Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life (Simon & Schuster 1990; Rev. Ed., Open Road, 2016.)
'From her birth in Russia, her girlhood in Maine, to her years as an artist in Manhattan, Nevelson's life was difficult, dramatic and, after years of struggle, finally triumphant. Her rich iconography expressed in black, white, and gold wooden assemblages is an enormous and extraordinary prize-winning body of work found in parks, plazas, and museums throughout the world. Lisle has conscientiously investigated the numerous bizarre events in Nevelson's long life" -Washington Post Book World
"Lisle's book is impressive in its thoroughness . . . its eclectic introduction of psychological analysis" -Woman's Art Journal