April 2, 2018
132 West 21st Street, 6th floor
6:30pm
Free and open to the public
 
Join us for the fourth Quijote Talk of the semester, featuring MFA Art Writing Visiting Professor Lynne Tillman. Tillman will be reading from her new book Men and Apparitions (Soft Skull Press), followed by a discussion with artist Adam Pendleton. 
 
“The universe heaves with laughter, and I’m all about my lopsided, self-defining tale. How I came to be me, not you, how I’m shaping me for you, the way my posse and other native informants do for me, how I’m shape-shifting. I’m telling you that I’m telling you; my self is my field…”
 
The time is now, and Ezekiel Hooper Stark is thirty-eight. He’s a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer of family photographs, a wry speculator about images. From childhood, his own family’s idiosyncrasies, perversities, and pathologies propel Zeke, until love lost sends him spiraling out of control in Europe. Back in the U.S.A., he finds unexpected solace in the image of a notable nineteenth-century relative, Clover Hooper Adams. Zeke embarks on a project, MEN IN QUOTES, focusing his anthropological lens on his own kind: the “New Man,” born under the sign of feminism. All the old models of masculinity are broken. How are you different from your father? Zeke asks his male subjects. What do you expect from women? What does Zeke expect from himself? And what will the reader expect of Zeke—is he a Don Quixote, Holden Caulfield, Underground Man, or Stranger? Kaleidoscopic and encyclopedic, comic, tragic, and philosophical, Men and Apparitions showcases Lynne Tillman not only as a brilliantly original novelist but also as one of our most prominent contemporary thinkers on art, culture, and society.
 
Lynne Tillman writes novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Her novel No Lease on Life was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and her essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Tillman’s writing appears often in artists’ books and museum catalogs, including, most recently, those of Raymond Pettibon, Joan Jonas, Cindy Sherman, and Carroll Dunham. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/ Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing, and is a Professor/Writer-in-Residence at the University of Albany. She also teaches in New York City’s School of Visual Arts, in its MFA Art Writing program. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra.

Adam Pendleton is a conceptual artist known for his multi-disciplinary practice, which moves fluidly between painting, publishing, photographic collage, video, and performance. His work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the re-contextualization of history through appropriated imagery to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, as the artist has explained, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.”
 
Quijote Talks take place in our library on 21st Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues in Chelsea, usually on Thursdays at 6:30 pm. Named after our favorite after-lecture hangout, El Quijote in the Chelsea Hotel, and inspired by the knight errant himself, this new series consists of pointed talks and discussions about relevant pasts and possible futures. See our full lecture series archive here.