How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves

O’Grady, an art professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, explores in her enlightening if dense debut how art “is lived and experienced.” Each essay uses an artwork as a springboard to explore the work of other artists and O’Grady’s own experiences. One chapter, for instance, uses Carrie Mae Weems’s photo-and-text Kitchen Table Series (particularly an image where a girl and her mother apply lipstick while looking into mirrors) to explore the complex relationship between women, their appearance, and their public and private selves. Along the way, O’Grady also unpacks the work of painters like impressionist Berthe Morisot as well as her memories of grappling with a narrow “ethos of beauty” when she worked at Vogue. Elsewhere, she uses conceptual artist Pope.L’s bottling of polluted water from Flint, Mich., to investigate the fraught concepts of home as a source of stability or chaos. The standout final essay ties Beverly Pepper’s monumental sculptures to the work of other “land artists” like Robert Smithson, meditating on how humans interact with natural wonders that dwarf them. In this entry, O’Grady exhibits a remarkable fluidity, leaping across continents and centuries with ease. In other places, her larger points get swamped beneath a wealth of personal stories and philosophical musings. There are plenty of gems here, but readers will need to be patient to unearth them. (Apr.)