A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s August 15 issue.
On a road trip this August, I stopped at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. The house she lived in for most of her life, including the bedroom where she wrote, and her brother’s family’s home just across a lawn are open to the public for guided tours. Before continuing on to Walden Pond, farther east in Massachusetts, my boyfriend and I—inspired by Dickinson’s beautiful herbarium—wandered across the lawn and picked up fallen leaves from some of the older trees on the museum’s property, to press and frame.
The cover of our Summer Issue, a painting titled Butes (2023), is by the Barcelona-based artist Guim Tió. Many of his slightly surreal landscapes have the elastic, sun-blinding quality of a midsummer day. I love his surreal palette and the scale of his small figures. In a rare double feature, which we’ve only done once before (with the artist Rachel Levit Ruiz in our May 25, 2023, issue), we used another of Tió’s paintings, Nedadoro (2019), inside the issue, to illustrate an essay that I wrote about Diana Nyad and the problem and prevalence of child abuse in sports. (This was my first written piece for the Review. Working with my rigorous editors reminded me of being coached by world-class coaches, without the creepiness.)
For Susan Tallman’s essay about the artist Christine Ramberg’s retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, we got to run three of Ramberg’s wonderful paintings. And for Ursula Lindsey’s review of the Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost,I chose a landscape by the Montreal-based painter Dagny Bock, Field (2022). In the book, Hammad writes about a West Bank theater troupe that performs Hamlet on a “hastily erected set…in an open field”—and I wanted a painting that could evoke that scenery.
For Brenda Wineapple’s review of The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts by Gregg Hecimovich, assistant editor Nawal Arjini found a gorgeous nineteenth-century profile portrait of a Black woman by an unknown artist, which suited the story of the book’s subject, a formerly enslaved author—of whom there are no existing images—who wrote what might be the first novel by a Black American woman. And for Adam Thirlwell’s rippling review of Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I contributed a last-minute portrait of the Kaiser.
Matt Dorfman, a designer and the art director of The New York Times Book Review, gave us a strong, bright illustration for Sean Wilentz’s essay about the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of broad presidential immunity in Trump v. United States. Dorfman depicted the court’s broken pillars atop a royal crown. For Christopher Benfey’s essay on five books about Herman Melville, the Norwich, England–based illustrator Maya Chessman drew a tender portrait of the writer.
We ran two illustrations by the designer and illustrator Lauren Peters-Collaer for Susan Faludi’s essay on the journalist Amy Chozick’s reporting, book, and eventual television show about her stint covering Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. After I reached out to her, Peters-Collaer sent a fantastic first round of sketches, but her idea to show a reporter being shot out of a cannon took on a darker cast after a man tried to assassinate Trump on July 13.
The series art in the issue was done by Larry Krone, a musician and visual artist whose sister I happened to meet at a Joan Jonas interview at the National Arts Club. After I described our approach to series art to her, she encouraged her brother to send some work.
When I presented my daughter with an oak leaf from Emily Dickinson’s lawn, she recited “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose,” a poem she memorized in exchange for a Starbucks gift card. She shrugged at the leaf. I framed it and put it up in her room anyway, hoping—a ribbon at a time—that she might someday appreciate more of Dickinson’s poems, or, at least, trees.
