Ursula: Issue 1

Ursula is a new quarterly art magazine from Hauser & Wirth featuring essays, profiles, interviews, original portfolios, and photography by some of the most thought-provoking writers and artists in the world. Ursula takes its name from the internationally admired co-founder of the gallery: patron, collector, mentor, and art world mater familias Ursula Hauser.

The inaugural issue of Ursula features contributions from writer Luc Sante (Low Life, The Factory of Facts, The Other Paris), a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books who explores the under-traveled history of Surrealism in Belgium, his homeland; Robin Coste Lewis, the National-Book-Award-winning poet and poet laureate of Los Angeles, who has written a new poem in response to the sculpture of Jack Whitten; Alissa Bennett, whose pop-culture literary zines have built a cult following and who, in a new essay, explores the nature of wealth, tragedy, and personal obsession; and Pipilotti Rist, whose recipe for homemade Japanese pickles is the first of many recipes planned for the pages of future issues.

The cover conversation, between two longtime friends – the pioneering dealer, filmmaker and activist Linda Goode Bryant and the artist Senga Nengudi – revisits the early days of the Just Above Midtown gallery, the first African-American-owned commercial gallery showing artists of color in Manhattan. The deeply personal conversation touches on questions on power, feminism, motherhood, the art world, social justice and food politics.

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Stories In This Issue

Making Doors: Linda Goode Bryant in Conversation with Senga Nengudi

‘People were saying, ‘They won’t let us.’ I was frustrated by us not letting ourselves. Not understanding that we, in fact, can create what we need. If the doors aren’t being opened for you, then go out and make your own doors. Artists need opportunities for their work to be experienced by others. So let’s just create that.’ – Linda Good Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown Gallery (1974-1986) and Project EATS.

This is not a photograph
by Luc Sante

Luc Sante, a son of Belgium and self-described historical spelunker, conducts a tour of Belgian surrealism’s undertraveled byways and its engagement with the camera.

Angry Birds: A Conversation with Ida Applebroog

Randy Kennedy meets Ida Applebroog in her SoHo studio to talk about the artist’s religious upbringing, navigating a domineering male world, and Applebroog’s new series Angry Birds in America.

Down to Earth: Architect Thomas Phifer’s explorations of architecture for art

A profile of the architect Thomas Phifer by Thomas de Monchaux: ‘After mastering a certain soap-bubble lightness, he wanted to understand how a building could be more like a river stone, embedded in the flow of its place. ‘We were trying to get at this heaviness, to get down to earth.’’

Americans Doing Everyday American Things

In a 2016 interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, Amy Sherald was asked about her motivations in painting African-American figures. She said she hoped her work would be seen as ‘portraits of Americans doing everyday American things.’

Mother Church Number Ten: Homage to Whitten

A new poem by Robin Coste Lewis in response to the sculpture of Jack Whitten (1939–2018)

Repetition Compulsion: On the unknown correspondence between Dominick Dunne and Baroness Marion Lambert
by Alissa Bennett

There is an undeniable psychic pleasure to be found in the recapitulation of the familiar. We are all tourists of the past, all bound to the people who haunt us.

Let’s Get Lost: Rediscovering a radical scholar as art shaman
by Randy Kennedy

An essay about the underground influence of the classics scholar and radical Freudian Norman O. Brown on postwar art.

Plein Air: A Look at New Work by Roni Horn

Roni Horn’s ‘Air Burial’ (2014–17) belongs to an important group of cast-glass works that the artist has made since the mid-1990s and is the first of these works conceived specifically by Horn to be sited outdoors amid the elements.