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1 month ago | 
theparisreview.org | Hilton Als
Interviewed by Hilton Als
Margo Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947, to Irma and Ronald Jefferson, two members of what W. E. B. Du Bois once described as the Talented Tenth, or the Black leadership class.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | Hilton Als
The guys over at 15 Orient have been hitting a lot of home runs lately. Pardon the sports idiom: if you think of the art world as a competitive marketplace devoted to capital gains and winning with a team of star players, then the metaphor is apt. But the gallery’s founders, Paul Gondry and Shelby Jackson, accomplished a great deal with a minimum of flash and hollow hustling.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
criterion.com | Hilton Als
Essays— Jan 14, 2025 Richard Pryor was and remains a great American artist.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
thebeliever.net | Hilton Als
Dearest friend of my youth, I ’ve wrestled with, and then worried about, the form this piece should take for some time now, for days and weeks, really, because on some level I wanted to write to you out of the same kind of immediacy, not to say intimacy, that Lynette’s images engender in me, and to get at that immediacy—the feeling of one voice addressing another—I finally settled on the epistolary form, just as Lynette’s paintings can be viewed as letters sent from that currently...
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Hilton Als
Ever since the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced, in the mid-eighteen-twenties, what is now the world’s oldest surviving photograph—a lonely, ghostly image of a rooftop taken from a window—the medium has inspired a bounty of beauty and melancholy. As a kid, I’d stare at pictures—family photographs—that were kept in binders, in plastic sleeves. Some of the images filled me with a sense of loss, of times gone by in a world I’d never know.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Hilton Als
In 1960, the twenty-nine-year-old Alvin Ailey premièred his landmark work, “Revelations,” with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, the company he’d founded to showcase Black culture through dance. This marked the end of his apprenticeship as a young choreographer who’d grown up revering Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton, Martha Graham, and Jack Cole—American masters with an international perspective. It also launched him into critical purgatory.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Hilton Als
“South of Pico,” by Kellie Jones—a 2017 book about a circle of Black artists in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—is a landmark work and a great gift to contemporary art history. Among the many things I admire about Jones’s text is what she doesn’t do in it: obscure the fascinating and vital works and lives she examines with fashionable but ultimately draining theoryspeak.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
yalereview.org | Hilton Als
The reporter knew of no greater modern practitioner or melder of journalistic ethos and the morality inherent in fiction than Richard Pryor. The comedian’s work and life were rife with such issues. “Tell me the truth so I can look at these lies,” one made-up Richard Pryor character said to another through the real Richard Pryor, once.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
bobmorris.biz | Hilton Als
Black guy sits at the counter, and Opal offers him some potato soup—“something nourishing,” she says. Black guy has moist, on-the-verge-of-lying-or-crying eyes and a raggedy Afro. He wears a green fatigue jacket, the kind of jacket brothers brought home from ’Nam, which guys like this guy continue to wear long after they’ve returned home, too shell-shocked or stoned to care much about their haberdashery.
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Apr 8, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Hilton Als
If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was certainly fascination. I spotted him one afternoon in the East Village. Pale-skinned and thin, in an oversized trenchcoat tightly cinched at the waist, he looked like no beauty I’d seen before. His large eyes were lined with kohl, and his lips were painted a moist pink. His shoulder-length hair, straight and full, was dyed a kind of ash blond (he let the darker roots show).
