Essays

At some point in the late ’70s, when Douglas Crimp and I were art history doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY, he invited me to the ballet.

The archivist and writer’s recently translated triptych fuses autofiction, essay, and criticism to study the complex lives of three female artists in the public eye.

I am in the shower washing off the day’s yard work. Mid-scrub I realize I missed a Black Lives Matter Cleveland rally in support of defunding the police. Relief pours over me.

The writer on her new book Brown Album, personal essays, camp as armor, the hyperreal, and designing her own Barbie.
The condition of most of our lives is that of continuous flight, in some manner or form—flight from faulty logic, from place of birth to the place we alight, from situations that no longer serve us, from political precarity—flight, as in rupture.

Stagg’s essays, stories, and profiles on art and fashion speak to the new spaces and meanings created by the Internet.
My mother sits on a coral reef, her gray hair undulating around her head, face blank, her eyes like a fish’s…

The essayist on writing about birds to bridge thematic leaps from fathers to tattoos to cross-continental moves.

The writer discusses what Laika, the first Soviet space dog, can teach us about companionship and loneliness.

The writer on surviving assault, deepening our standards for justice, and resisting forgiveness as the only way to move through pain.