On the occasion of her first book of collected art writings, Malleable Forms (ARP Books), Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings magazine, speaks to guest-host Jarrett Earnest about geographic isolation, the eroticism of art writing, her connection with an emerging spiritual lineage, and about a set of relationships driving her engagement with art. In this far-ranging and generous conversation around publishing, editing, looking, and listening, Walsh reflects, “I’m happiest when I’m writing.”
Meeka Walsh is a writer, art critic, editor, and curator who has had a major influence on the arts in Canada. She is the editor of Border Crossings, an internationally renowned and award-winning quarterly magazine that investigates contemporary culture. Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018); editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, 2019), The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955 (David Zwirner 2020), and Devotion: today’s future becomes tomorrow archive (PUBLIC books, 2022), among others. His criticism and long-form interviews have appeared in New York Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Vulture, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Review of Books, Art in America, New York Magazine, and many exhibition catalogues and other publications. In 2021 Earnest was awarded a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin prize for visual arts journalism.
Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Jarrett Earnest and Meeka Walsh for their contribution to our fifth season.
Many thanks to SFU Galleries for their support; you can listen to their ten-part radio program Listening to Pictures: Artists on the Art Collection, featuring artist voices with lived experience on the West Coast.
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