Tether 1 Contributors

W. C. Bamberger has translated work by Gershom Scholem, Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel, and expressionist authors Paul Baudisch and Louis Levy. His translation of two fictions by Paul Scheerbart, Rakkox the Billionaire and The Great Race, is forthcoming. His most recent novel is A Light Like Ida Lupino. He lives in Michigan.

Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute. His recent books of poetry are Expect Delays (Coffee House Press, 2014) and Snippets (Omerta, 2014); his criticism can be found in The Sweet Singer of Modernism (Qua, 2004), Sudden Address (Cuneiform Press, 2007), and For the Ordinary Artist (BlazeVox, 2010).

Chris Byrne is the author of the graphic novel project entitled The Magician (Marquand Books, 2013). Also a writer, curator, and co-founder of the Dallas Art Fair, he organized Susan Te Kahurangi King: Drawings from Many Worlds for the Andrew Edlin Gallery this past fall. Byrne is the former Chairman of the Board of the American Visionary Art Museum. He currently serves on the Dallas Contemporary’s Board of Directors’ Executive Committee as well as the American Folk Art Museum’s Council for the Study of Art Brut and the Self-Taught.

Douglas Crase is a poet and essayist. He is author of a poetry collection, The Revisionist, a commonplace book, Amerifil.Txt, and a biography of arts couple Dwight Ripley and Rupert Barneby, Both: A Portrait in Two Parts. His introduction to Emerson appears in the Library of America’s paperback of Emerson’s Essays, and his essay on Lorrine Niedecker’s evolutional sublime was recently reprinted by Wave Books in their edition of her long poem, Lake Superior.

Holly Day is retired Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Indianapolis Museum of Art and former art critic for Art in America and The New Art Examiner. She curated the exhibitions, George Sugarman: The Shape of Space; Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art, 1961–1991; The Crossroads of American Sculpture; Art of the Fantastic: Latin America : 1920–1987; New Art of Italy, and The Poetry of Form: Richard Tuttle Drawings from the Vogel Collection.

Robert Desnos, born in Paris in 1900, died of typhus in 1945, shortly after the liberation of Terezin, the concentration camp where he was imprisoned. The Seven League Boots, his first published book of poetry, was originally issued in 1926, with four watercolors by André Masson. Though André Breton had hailed him in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924) as the “prophet” of Surrealism, in 1929 he expelled Desnos from the movement for working as a journalist. The Seven League Boots was reprinted in Destinée arbitraire (Gallimard Poésie series, 1975). It is also contained in the most comprehensive collection of Desnos’ work to date, the Gallimard “Quarto” collection called Desnos: Oeuvres, edited by Marie-Claire Dumas (1999). Robert Desnos remains one of the enduring poets of the Surrealist Movement.

Paul Hammond is an English writer, painter, and translator domiciled in Barcelona. His most recent book, Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939, co-written with Spanish film historian Román Gubern, was published in 2012 by The University of Wisconsin Press. His other books include L’Âge d’or and Constellations of Miró, Breton. Among his translations are Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama of American Film Noir 1941–1953 and Michel Leiris’s Mirror of Tauromachy.

Nathan Kernan is a writer who lives in New York. He is working on a biography of James Schuyler.

Susan Te Kahurangi King stopped speaking around age four but drew prolifically through her thirties, when, suddenly, she stopped. In 2008, almost twenty years later, she resumed her work, picking up where she left off. Since then, King has continued her remarkable output of drawings in graphite, pencil, crayon, ink, and pens of various types.

Gerald Murphy (1888–1964), together with his wife and their circle, was the subject of a landmark exhibition in 2007 at Williams College Museum, Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, where all of Murphy’s surviving paintings were on view. Calvin Tomkins’s book Living Well Is the Best Revenge remains the best introduction to the couple’s legendary life.

Charles North’s most recent book of poetry, What It Is Like: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point/Hanging Loose), topped NPR’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. No Other Way, a selection of his essays on poets, artists, and critics, is available from Hanging Loose Press. More at charlesnorth.net.

Katherine Porter is an American artist born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1941. She received her BA from Colorado College in 1963 and has also received an honorary doctorate from Colby College. She has shown twice in the Whitney Biennial and had solo exhibitions at the Knoedler Gallery in London, the Nina Nielsen Gallery in Boston, and the Andre Emmerich and Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Tel Aviv Museum in Jerusalem.

Judith E. Stein is a writer and independent curator who specializes in postwar American art. Her biography of the art dealer Richard Bellamy is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

George Sugarman (1912–1999) was an American artist working in the mediums of drawing, painting, and sculpture. He pioneered the concepts of pedestal-free sculpture and is best known for his large-scale, vividly painted metal sculptures. In his will he provided for the establishment of The George Sugarman Foundation, Inc.

A. J. A. Symons (1900–1941) wrote one of the most famous of all British biographies in 1934, The Quest for Corvo, about the eccentric author Frederick Rolfe. Founder of the First Edition Club and co-founder of the Food and Wine Society, his scattered writings were published posthumously as Essays and Biographies, and he himself became the subject of a remarkable biography by his brother Julian Symons, A. J. A. Symons: His Life and Speculations.

John Willenbecher is a New York-based painter and sculptor. He studied art history at Brown University and then at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. His first exhibition was at the Feigen+Herbert Gallery in New York in 1963.

Trevor Winkfield exhibits his paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Recent publications include Georges Braque and Others: The Selected Art Writings of Trevor Winkfield (1990–2009) and How I Became a Painter (conversations with Miles Champion). A show of his collaborations with poets and writers was held this past winter at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, traveling to Poet’s House, New York, this fall.