Spring 2023 Issue
In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents make a selection from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2023, we are honored to present the author Joy Williams.
Joy Williams in Amherst, Massachusetts, 2016. Photo: Jonno Rattman
Joy Williams in Amherst, Massachusetts, 2016. Photo: Jonno Rattman
Hans Ulrich ObristWhat is the role of titles?
Joy WilliamsTitles should be at the end of stories or concealed within them somehow. And prove to surprise or complicate the reader’s conclusions.
HUOWhat keeps you coming back to the studio?
JWI still harbor the hope (possibly delusion) that I might be able to create something marvelous through effort, chance, or inspiration.
HUOWhat is your unrealized project?
JWWriting hymns in the manner of the great Welsh hymnist William Williams.
HUOWhat have you forgotten?
JWHow to tan. I was once an expert. A true natural. Much admired.
HUOHow would you like to die?
JWWell, after reading sister Alicia’s research on the subject in Cormac McCarthy’s ”Stella Maris”, certainly not by drowning.
HUOHas the computer changed the way you work?
JWI’ve never used a computer. I think it would take an immediate and intense dislike to me.
HUOThe future is . . . ?
JW That which was ever intended.
HUOWhat ought to change?
JWExperimentation on animals must stop. The whole ghastly system—breeders—labs—vivisectors—should be shut down.
HUOWhat music are you listening to?
JWGlenn Gould playing anything. Albert Schweitzer on the organ. The piano music of G. I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann. The symphonic works of John Luther Adams.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Joy Williams is the author of five novels, most recently Harrow (2021); four collections of stories; and Ill Nature (2001), an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her many honors include the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming. Photo: Jonno Rattman
Ahead of Alex Israel’s exhibition of four new Fin sculptures at Gagosian, London, the artist spoke with Susan Casey, author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean (2010), about the ocean, surfing, and Los Angeles.
On April 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened the first midcareer survey of Derrick Adams’s multidisciplinary practice. Covering over twenty years of work, the exhibition, titled View Master, brings together the artist’s painting, sculpture, collage, performance, and video, as well as a vibrant new commission created for the museum’s façade. Ahead of the opening, Adams met with Tessa Bachi Haas, cocurator of the survey, to discuss his formative experiences with television, the impact of his work in arts education on his practice, and the importance of taking a more complex, more joyful, and more expansive approach to Black American life and culture.
Jeff Koons tells Alison McDonald about his appreciation for the pioneering artist and thinker Marcel Duchamp.
The Singular Experience at Gagosian’s Le Bourget gallery is the largest exhibition of Walter De Maria’s work in France in several decades. Organized by Donna De Salvo, senior adjunct curator at Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition marks the first time De Maria’s final sculpture, Truck Trilogy (2011–17), is being shown outside of the United States. Here, De Salvo speaks with artist Lucy Raven about her evolving kinship with De Maria and more.
Helen Oyeyemi continues her four-part story cycle with the second installment, “At the Auspicious Hour.”
Ed Ruscha sits down with the author and explorer Erling Kagge to discuss existence.
Following the debut of her Fall/Winter 2026 collection at Dia Chelsea, New York, Ulla Johnson met with Sarah Godfrey to discuss her recent collaborations with the Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner foundations, her upbringing in and dedication to New York City, and her nonhierarchical approach to collecting.
As part of a growing posthumous appreciation of the feminist writer Elaine Kraf, her previously unpublished novel Memory House was released by the Modern Library. Here, Alana Pockros explores Kraf’s iterative worlds.
The most recent edition of Picture Books, an imprint organized by Emma Cline and Gagosian, pairs Mary Gaitskill’s novella STAUF: A Tragedy with Jill Mulleady’s painting The Shift. In celebration of this forthcoming publication, Gaitskill and Mulleady discuss the myth of Faust, good and evil in the digital age, and the channeling of raw matter into art.
Andrew Durbin’s dual biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, tracks the convergences and divergences in the lives of the two artists, from their first meeting in Coral Cables, Florida, in 1956 through their generative romantic and creative partnership in New York, Italy, Fire Island, and beyond. Ahead of the release, Durbin met with the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier to speak about the development of the project, the sublime noncompliance of these two artists, and the motifs of love, death, and rebirth that weave through the telling of their story.
On March 28, a major exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work opened at Ca’ Pesaro–Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, bringing together nearly thirty paintings from the 1990s to the present. The exhibition is curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the museums division at Venice’s Ca’ Pesaro, Museo Fortuny, and head of MUVE in Mestre. Saville’s monumental canvases are set in dialogue with the great Venetian artists of the past, creating a unique encounter between contemporary painting and the city’s artistic heritage. Here, the artist speaks with Stefania Ventra, professor with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, about her early trips to Venice, the radicality of Titian’s painting, and depicting emotional truth.
Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, met with the Quarterly’s Derek C. Blasberg at the maison’s historic headquarters at 21 place Vendôme, Paris, following the Schiaparelli Fall/Winter 2026–27 ready-to-wear show. Since taking the helm in 2019, Roseberry has been credited with advancing the heritage of the house through unpredictable sculptural designs that carry Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist spirit into a new century. The pair discuss the much-anticipated exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, as well as Roseberry’s early exposures to art, his continued dedication to drawing, and the enduring legacy of Elsa Schiaparelli’s daring vision.