Darby English & Cornelia Lauf – Pick a Book
A spread from Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966 (Barbara Goldsmith Rare Book Room, American Academy in Rome)
Two art historians and curators, Darby English (2024 Resident) and Cornelia Lauf, will discuss books that have been—and are still—relevant to their thinking. Choosing to discuss Kara Walker and Toni Morrison’s Five Poems and Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Ed Ruscha, both in the Academy’s exhibition Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge. English and Lauf will unfold the significance of these works, their personal connection to the books and their place within the history of art, actively reassessing its scope and limits.
Lauf is an art historian and curator whose exhibition projects include Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books (1998) for American Federation of Arts; Wall to Wall: Carpets by Artists (2016) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland; and Indeed (2011), an international traveling exhibition on certificates of authenticity by artists.
English’s current areas of specialization include the rhetoric of abstraction, sociality and aesthetics, the politics of modernism, and contemporary historiography. Among his publications are How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007) and Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (2003).
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