In conversation with Leigh Raiford, Julia Bryan-Wilson introduces her new book, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023), a radical rethinking of the art of renowned sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899–1988). Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process—dragging, coloring, joining, and facing—the book explores how the artist’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is a noted art historian, critic, and curator. She is also Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo. Her books include Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era and Fray: Art and Textile Politics.

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley and Codirector, with Tianna S. Paschel, of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three-year initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black studies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle and, with Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler, the forthcoming Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography.