The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007–2015 By Bob Nickas

This volume is comprised of years of recent writing by the influential New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas, widely considered one of the few independent voices still at work today. The 50 essays and interviews, written since 2007, are spread across five chapters, touching on encounters with artists from the 1960s to the ’80s to the present―among them, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, On Kawara, Isa Genzken, Steven Parrino, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kelley Walker and Pierre Huyghe. Writing as if these figures were passing us by in present time, Nickas traces the disappearance of artists, architecture and culture in New York over three decades. As a way to keep the past in every sense present, his writing is always issued from his fictional “Dept. of Corrections.”