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Lilly Dancyger is the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press, and the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She is the founder and host of Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter and quarterly reading series co-curated by Narratively, The Rumpus, Guernica, Granta, Literary Hub, and Catapult, featuring the best memoir writers of today. Her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on Twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger).

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Lilly Dancyger appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

I was so sad to hear this morning about the death of Jason Polan. I didn’t know Jason Polan personally, but his art and Instagram presence (@jasonpolan) made my life better. His drawings are deceptively simple but full of humor and love for the quirky weirdness of the world. He’s perhaps best known for his project trying to draw every person in New York which felt like a love letter to the whole city and all of humanity.

My friend Janna Herman and I used to direct message his Instagram posts to each other when we knew the other needed a good laugh––he would write long, rambling, hilarious stories in the captions of his photos about the people and things he saw around New York––and it was always our goal to go to one of his Taco Bell Drawing Club meetings, but the timing never worked. Janna did get to meet him once, when she bought me the little giraffe notebook I have framed in my home, and she said he was so nice and unpretentious and clearly wanted everyone to be able to afford a piece of his art.

I am upset knowing that Jason Polan is gone, but I’ll think of him every time I adjust the temperature in my apartment.

The post Artists You Should Know: Jason Polan appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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As part of Wellesley Underground’s ongoing Wellesley in Art series, WU Assistant Editor, E.B. Bartels ’10, had the chance to interview Maryam Eisler ’89. Eisler was born in Iran, left in 1978 before the Revolution, and was then raised in Paris before attending Wellesley. After receiving her BA, Eisler pursued an MBA at Columbia University, spending the first part of her career working in marketing for L’Oreal and Estée Lauder. Now, Eisler is not only a trustee of Wellesley College, but she is also co-chair of the Tate Middle East North Africa Acquisitions Committee, a Tate International Council member, a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, as well as a member of the Guggenheim Middle East Circle. In the last five years, Eisler has contributed to four book titles, co-published by TransGlobe Publishing and Thames and Hudson, including Sanctuary: Britain’s artists and their Studios, as well as Art Studio America: Contemporary Artist Spaces. Eisler was also just voted by Artnet as one of 100 most influential women in the art world.

So how did Eisler move from business to art? WU spoke with Eisler to find that out and more.

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Janet Malcolm’s latest book, a collection of her essays on artists and writers, is titled Forty-One False Starts after the opening profile on the artist David Salle. Malcolm mimics Salle’s collages and conglomerate paintings in her own writing – “a kind of parody of his melancholy art of fragments, quotations, absences – an art that refuses to be any one thing or to find any one thing more interesting, beautiful, or sobering than another” – by juxtaposing forty-one different ways she could have started the profile piece. Opening with this unusually structured essay prepares the reader from the start: this is no ordinary journalism. This is Janet Malcolm.

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