Our Artist Friends

If you are a person who makes things as part of your life and living, I'm going to bet that you cherish the people in your life who also make things. I know I do.

This week, I went out for breakfast with my friend, Lisa. We live about six miles apart and we always meet at the same local diner in the middle and I think we usually both order the same thing. It's a date we make that often gets rescheduled many times when we’re both too busy but we eventually make it happen. We talk about our kids and our work and our MFA students and Lisa always recommends something cool that makes me whip out a pen so I can write it down.  

Lisa is an amazing photographer and in 2023, she asked me to write an afterward for the book she made with her husband and her eight-year-old daughter. The book is called In and it's a book of photographs made by the three of them from inside their bubble during the heart of the pandemic and it's a strange, beautiful, eerie book. It was my favorite job in 2023, writing that essay. When we left the diner after breakfast, we walked to Lisa's car and she gifted me with three magnificent photo prints from the book. I am thrilled and I love them so much. I may or may not be moving everything around in my office to give these prints the best wall real estate possible. This is another reason to love your artist friends. Art gifts. 

Lisa has a second photo book that just came out called Mourning and it currently sits on my coffee table and it is beautiful and compelling and built on a totally interesting premise. The publisher, Minor Matters Books, describes her book:

In early 2018 her father died suddenly, less than a year after her grandmother passed away. Managing grief from these dual and significant losses was made more difficult amid contentious family strife. When her father’s newly-erected headstone was toppled and had to be re-mounted, Kereszi was further distraught, and asked family members nearby to rig an off-the-shelf trail camera within view of the plot. Through that device and its auto-generated photographs, she could “visit” her father’s grave daily, though she was hundreds of miles away.

Kereszi amassed thousands of images over a seven-month period that culminated in the trail camera’s disappearance (it was later discovered tucked behind a headstone). With the forced isolation created by the pandemic, her life as a human, a mother, and a professor radically changed. Seeking order and control when the world provided little of either, she began organizing grids of the visual visits to her father’s grave. This album of her efforts to manage mourning is presented at scale to the hand-created book she lovingly compiled as a record of her grief. 

If you live in NY, Lisa Kereszi will be at Printed Matter, Chelsea, at 231 11th Ave, from 6 to 8 pm tomorrow, March 21st to sign books. Go meet this incredible artist. She is my favorite new art friend. 

https://www.printedmatter.org/programs/events/1783