To mark the recent opening of Hauser & Wirth’s new gallery and bookshop in Downtown Palo Alto, please join us for a conversation with Jed Perl and Marius Sosnoski for the launch of Perl’s new book, ‘We Never Called It Frisco,’ from Coffee House Press.
The discussion will explore Perl’s latest novel alongside his acclaimed two-volume biography of Alexander Calder, ‘Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940,’ and ‘Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940 - 1976,’ on Calder’s formative years in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the cultural landscapes that shaped his life and work.
The event takes place alongside ‘Calder | O’Keeffe,’ the inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Palo Alto gallery. Developed in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, the exhibition brings together exceptional works by Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe, complemented by archival materials documenting their decades-long friendship.
Copies of ‘We Never Called It Frisco’ and 'Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940’ and 'Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940 - 1976’ will be available for purchase, and Jed Perl will sign books after the talk.
This event is free; however, reservations are recommended.
Photo: Cover Image of ‘We Never Called it Frisco’
About the publication
‘We Never Called It Frisco’ is a provocative novel about art, artists, and their tempestuous relationships in bohemian San Francisco from the 1940s to the 1960s. During intermission at a modern dance performance, esteemed and incorrigible cultural critic Marica Lang collapses into a banquette and dies on the spot. Her lover, Burt, soon discovers that Marcia willed him her entire estate – including an incomplete draft of the memoir she was writing, ‘We Never Called It Frisco.’ Jed Perl, one of America’s most esteemed art critics, guides his readers down the back alleys of a blistering mid-century San Francisco populated with painters, puppeteers, paperback revolutionaries, and writers like Marcia who were helping to define everybody’s place in the cultural ecosystem. Through energetic and immersive prose, ‘We Never Called It Frisco’ tests the structural limits of the novel as a site of reconstitution and remembrance.
About Jed Perl
Jed Perl is the author of the two-volume definitive biography of Alexander Calder and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Among Perl’s many other books are ‘Paris Without End,’ ‘Gallery Going,’ ‘New Art City,’ and ‘Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts.’ He was a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade, the art critic for The New Republic for twenty years and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. ‘We Never Called It Frisco’ is his first novel.
About Marius Sosnowski
Marius Sosnowski is a writer and co-editor of the Berkeley-based arts and culture magazine ‘Dispatches.’ He is working on a book about artistic and literary life in Los Angeles.
