Beth Nguyen’s Owner of a Lonely Heart

By Mai Tran

JULY/AUG 2023 | Books

Beth Nguyen’s second memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart, revolves around a story that is still “uncomfortably dramatic” for her to tell in real life. When Nguyen’s family flees Saigon a day before the war in Vietnam ended, Nguyen’s mother stays, or is left, behind. In the aftermath, Nguyen spends the eighties growing up in a mostly white town in Michigan, where her given name Bich, and her multigenerational household that consisted of family members both biological and not, were unconventional for the area. Safety is found in silence, in not provoking her father’s anger or longing for people and places she cannot remember.

Homage to Ferl, the Owner of the Building

By Garrett Caples

APRIL 2021 | Poetry

Garrett Caples is a poet and an editor for City Lights Books. His latest book of poems, Lovers of Today, will appear in the fall from Wave Books.

Sands Murray-Wassink: In Good Company

By Titus Nouwens

JUNE 2021 | ArtSeen

Over the years Sands has produced an exhaustive amount of paintings, videos, performances, and texts, at once completely and unabashedly about him and at the same time about much more than himself—his loved ones, his fellow artists, the artworld, the role of artists, and patriarchal society at large.

Darrel Ellis: Regeneration

By Ksenia Soboleva

JULY/AUG 2023 | ArtSeen

Darrel Ellis (1958–1992) was engaged in a lifelong love affair with history, from the European nineteenth and twentieth century paintings that he meticulously studied on visits to the MoMA and the Met to the 1950s negatives he inherited from his photographer father. But like any love affair, this one did not come without quarrels. Traveling from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Darrel Ellis: Regeneration at the Bronx Museum is the first major museum exhibition of Ellis’s work. Expanded to triple the size of the previous venue in his birthplace, the Bronx Museum installation presents nearly two hundred works on paper, paintings, photographs, and archival material. It is an impressively comprehensive survey of Ellis’s oeuvre.