Four, slim volumes covered in soft, matte black paper set inside the recess of a black, rectangular box, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: DRAG, COLOR, JOIN, FACE tangibly announces its subject. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s study focuses on the sculpture for which Nevelson is best known: monochromatic found-object wood assemblages, frequently consisting of modular (if not always movable), rectangular, “shadowbox” reliefs, which Nevelson built continuously from the early 1950s until her death in 1988. If this “signature” visual language brings to mind some of the central tenets of Euro-American modernism (for instance, the grid, abstraction, individualism), Bryan-Wilson argues that the colors, forms, materials, and circulation of Nevelson’s sculpture trouble not only the narrow categories, strict hierarchies, and exclusionary logics of that dominant art history, but also those of normative society in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States (DRAG, 9). Echoing some of the qualities of Nevelson’s sculpture in her queer feminist approach, Bryan-Wilson builds an idiosyncratic patchwork of critical lenses and art historical methods across four, modular volumes, implicating herself—specific but not singular—to “consider the politics of [Nevelson’s] forms, her artistic achievements, and the complications of her works’ afterlives, with a persistent attention to race, sexuality, and gender” (DRAG, 8).

As an interpretative study interested equally in Nevelson’s artwork and its history of reception, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture is an important contribution to the artist’s bibliography. Bryan-Wilson embraces the range of responses to Nevelson’s sculptures (public and private, historical and contemporary, positive and negative, “amateur” and art world; verbal, visual, and pedagogical) and constellates them associatively, rather than strictly historically, to unspool her analyses. For instance, she studies the language of published commentary during Nevelson’s lifetime to elaborate on the patriarchal, heteronormative underpinnings of the public characterizations of Nevelson and her work, especially critics’ tendency to dismiss the latter as repetitive and “excessive,” often eliding the work with Nevelson’s self-fashioning as an eccentrically femme and resolutely single, aging woman (DRAG, 15). Meanwhile, Bryan-Wilson’s discussions of historical and up-to-the-moment homages by queer and feminist artists illuminate Nevelson’s gender trouble from an affirmative position, suggesting the ongoing, generative power of Nevelson-as-icon for individuals operating at an angle to normative gender and sexuality.

Bryan-Wilson reads Nevelson’s artwork, choice of materials, and ways of working for political significance, in the past and the present, by constructing a critical framework of interdisciplinary theory and formal comparanda from around the globe: theorizations of drag’s reiterative operations by Judith Butler and José Muñoz; whitework embroidery from Ukraine; theorizations of Blackness (racialization), blackness (color), and opacity by Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, Adrienne Edwards, Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and Tavia Nyong’o; conceptual artworks by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; aesthetic traditions in Jewish thought; scavenged assemblages by Lonnie Holley and Noah Purifoy; theorizations of queer affect and materialities by Mel Y. Chen and Sara Ahmed; wooden sculptures by Saloua Raouda Choucair, Doris Salcedo, and Mildred Thompson. This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a long one to convey the scope of Bryan-Wilson’s purposefully “undisciplined” inquiry, to borrow Chen’s term (Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire, Duke University Press, 2023). Animating the operations of Nevelson’s art and artmaking with such an assembly of interlocutors, Bryan-Wilson questions established art historical hierarchies and lineages (craft/fine art, Global South/Global North) and foregrounds issues of labor (with regard to class, gender, and race) as well as the complexities of intersectionality and solidarity (as lived and as practiced in scholarship). If Bryan-Wilson’s analyses will interest scholars and students of postwar art in the United States, her methodology, reflexively positioned and forthrightly explained throughout the text, and the experimental “counter-monograph” it manifests ultimately address a wider readership—suggesting an aspiration to political urgency within the discipline more broadly.

Bryan-Wilson frames her project in opposition to the orthodox monograph and its individualist history within art history: the teleological celebration of a single artist, which proceeds chronologically, cover to cover, periodizing the artist’s “development” to the beat of heteronormative biography. Finding affinity between her own queer feminist and Marxist commitments and the modular, transparently constructed, reiterative differences of Nevelson’s paradigmatic assemblages, Bryan-Wilson fashions her queer approach to the monograph, materially and conceptually, after Nevelson’s artwork. This correspondent organizing method (not uncommon in recent projects informed by queer theory) might be particularly efficacious when studying artists like Nevelson, whose work seems to negotiate the conventions and categories of modernism otherwise. The logic of the work, in other words, can become a model for the historian invested in contending with that past and its legacy and in writing, instead, of modernisms, plural. With the historian’s and the artist’s necessarily different approaches, past and present, drawn into intimate and intermittent relay, it is a strategy that registers the historian’s “queer desire for history . . . [for] a history that is not straight” as Carolyn Dinshaw has put it (“Theorizing Queer Temporalities: a roundtable discussion,” GLQ 12:2-3, 2007, 185).

Bryan-Wilson defines “queer” as Nevelson might have understood it—“odd, eccentric, unconventional, defying social mores”—an adjective not exclusively linked to sexual practice, desire, or nominal identity as “improper attachment” (DRAG, 6). She stresses that she is not concerned with Nevelson’s sexual practices and, indeed, Bryan-Wilson enacts “queer” as the more contemporary, catachrestic verb throughout: in excess of signification for particular bodies or identities. Explaining, if not situating, this use of “queer,” which has been a central practice of queer studies since at least 2005 when David L. Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Muñoz characterized the field as one without “proper” subjects or objects, would have strengthened Bryan-Wilson’s capacious framework of “improper attachments” (“What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now: Introduction,” Social Text 85, 2005, 3, 7). As an art historian familiar with queer theory, I brought this notion to her stated goal to “queer the monograph” (DRAG, 3).  But Bryan-Wilson’s mode of address often suggests that she writes to initiate more traditionally minded art historians to a queer methodology: laying some of this theoretical groundwork could go a long way.

Bryan-Wilson aims “to rescu[e] the art from the artist,” so to speak, by eschewing the monograph’s conventions of linear chronology and individualist biography, which have historically limited our understanding of creative work by nonwhite, nonmale, non-Western artists and traditions (FACE, 4). Each volume takes its central motif from one part of Nevelson’s artmaking as Bryan-Wilson describes it, “first, [Nevelson] hauled objects into her studio (drag); then, she painted these individual elements (color); then, she composed and affixed parts into sculptures (join); and lastly, she circulated them back into the world (face)” (DRAG, 4). If Nevelson’s process was linear, Bryan-Wilson embraces the dizzying simultaneity of the final objects, exploring each key term as both verb and noun in her own associative assemblies. For instance, the volume FACE contends with Nevelson’s public art projects; the circulation of Nevelson’s face in photographs in the press; the queer and feminist homages mentioned above; the frontality of Nevelson’s sculptures in relation to her early portrait paintings, nineteenth-century Ukrainian architecture, and the discourse of postwar sculpture in the US; and what it might mean to “face” the wood of these sculptures now, extending from Bryan-Wilson’s experience in particular, as a queer body living amid climate crisis. Bryan-Wilson intends her arguments to accrue as disjointed facets among the volumes, “collectively add[ing] up to something else” (DRAG, 9). Consequently, she encourages readers to ignore the publisher’s arrangement of the volumes, which follows her subtitle—thus extending her queer approach to Nevelson’s practice to readers.

I accepted Bryan-Wilson’s invitation to choose my own adventure: after reading DRAG, I turned to JOIN, COLOR, then FACE. Ultimately, I wish Bryan-Wilson had held more forcefully to her stated desire to make an “unusual and risky book” (DRAG, 11). She addresses the issues of scholarly introductions and conclusions at the start of DRAG and the end of FACE, effectively positioning those as the first and last volumes. More importantly, Bryan-Wilson continues some conventions of linear argumentation, such as referencing “earlier” examples, which could cause more confusion than clarification not just across but also, at times, within individual volumes. I have to imagine concessions were made to the publisher, but I would have loved to see how a more unfixed collection of these ideas resonated together, to find and make connections among them myself. There are many glimmering moments—I especially loved the paean to dust at the end of COLOR, a volume that, on the whole, is quite strong—but, in reading, I often felt Bryan-Wilson’s “ideal reader will take [her] title as a guide” (Julia Bryan-Wilson in conversation with Lauren O’Neill-Butler, November, vol.6).

What I appreciated most in the execution of this “counter-monograph” was Bryan-Wilson’s commitment to a personal art history, from the inclusion of her own photographs of Nevelson’s sculptures to detailing the forms, durations, and affects of her labor in researching and writing the book. Of particular note are the citational ethics and socialities of the footnotes, where she names friends and lovers who contributed leads, ideas, and turns of phrase; neither Nevelson nor Bryan-Wilson worked alone. Motivated as much by her embodied encounters with Nevelson’s sculpture as by her particular experience and navigation of ongoing climate, economic, political, and social crises around the globe, Bryan-Wilson writes emphatically from and to the present moment. In making her case for the “continuing relevance” of Nevelson’s artwork, she makes one, too, for the work—the methods, the products, the labor—of a queered art history to meet the discipline’s exclusionary, extractive history and the issues of its present (DRAG, 12).