TOUCHING THE ART

“[Touching the Art] blurs the lines of genre convention and polyvocality by assembling a multivoiced collage of texture, feeling, and evidence. Sycamore works with archival materials, resuscitated and reconstructed memory, and interviews to produce a collection that’s part art history, part art theory, and part memoir, collapsing the spaces between authorship and authority, and between knowledge production and inheritance… Sycamore paints with language, using it as a device to translate her grandmother’s canvases into multisensory descriptions that branch off into various sites of memory, analysis, and juxtaposed quotations, modeling how inseparable art and life are… The book invites the reader to put down the collection and reconsider the relationship to the visual world at large, and to the book they’re holding as an art object… By collaging these various fragments together, Sycamore offers a truer, more dynamic living portrait and makes a claim about queer time and geography that challenges us to push against notions of linearity and inherited borders… [Touching the Art] asks us to place our hand and tongue directly on the painting, to know that it becomes ours through this contact, and that both we and the artwork will be changed by our touch.”
—Sam Sax, The Believer

“In this searching meditation on art, Sycamore, the author of three novels and three books of nonfiction, reflects on family, identity, race, and trauma… Frank, intimate reflections on art, life, and their often complex intersections.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“When Sycamore was a kid, her grandmother Gladys nurtured everything that made her different: ‘She was an abstract artist, and she wanted to set me free.’ Sorting through Gladys’ belongings after her death, Sycamore expands her memoir to look closely at the creative impulse in society and its role in her own work, and to examine her late grandmother’s life against a culture that dismisses women’s creative arts.”
—Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

”Touching the Art is ostensibly a book about Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s relationship with her late grandmother, Gladys Goldstein—a notable visual artist who worked in Baltimore during most of the twentieth century. Sycamore and her grandmother had a complicated, entangled relationship. Throughout this work—part memoir and part lyric essay—she attempts to reconcile their conflicting life experiences. In doing so, however, Sycamore finds more questions than answers. Each of these questions forms its own satisfying narrative arc within the broader story… Possibly the most brilliant choice the author made was arranging this book as a kind of collage—a nod to the medium in which Goldstein worked. Sycamore explains how her grandmother’s pieces interact with one another and their environments, both historically and physically. As she describes these works, Sycamore seems to be searching for new ways to look at the world, at Goldstein, and at herself… There are almost no question marks at the end of Sycamore’s sentences—the state of wondering is constant.”
—Mikhal Weiner, Jewish Book Council

“The wide take is crucial for Sycamore. Context matters. Only through understanding the time, place, and cultural moment a person lived within can we begin to glimpse them… This widened frame contains the history of Baltimore, white flight, Jewish assimilation, and racialized violence. Zooming out, the expansive structure holds intergenerational trauma, familial homophobia, sexual violence, and the gendered dynamics of the art world. The long take also makes space for joy…Touching the Art reminds me that what is forgotten by history is as revelatory as what is remembered.”
—Elizabeth Hall, Full Stop

"'Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations,' writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in Touching the Art, a book that, on its face, is a biography of Baltimore artist Gladys Goldstein, but—because Sycamore is so comfortable writing into this gap—ends up being so much more... What legacy do generations of artists leave one another? Art is never created in a void, but it creates voids that can be written about. Touching the Art rejects easy answers for a stretching of forms…"
—Daniel Allen Cox, The Brooklyn Rail

"I found honest interrogation of self and of kin in Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, an expert at weaving together the personal and political. She, however, might argue the weaving is intrinsic to the human experience under capitalism and that she’s merely pulling apart the strands one at a time. In any case, it is an expert disentangling, with an assured voice that gives meticulous, spare sentences the illusion of stream-of-consciousness."
—Alejandro Varela, The Millions

”Sycamore frames and reframes our conceptions of how we might walk through cities; talk to our ancestors; look at a single square of paper until it opens up a new space inside our stomachs. She teaches us that to truly honor our beloved is to be attentive to every aspect of their real and possible selves.”
—Forest Smotrich-Barr, Poetry Project Newsletter

“[Sycamore] explores the fertile ground of her life with incredible nuance in prose that reads almost like stream-of-consciousness but is actually an intricate and deliberate prism of meaning."
—Sarah Neilson, Shondaland

”[A] singular mix of personal history, moral inquiry, and aesthetic revel.”
—Jim Gladstone, Passport Magazine

“In this engrossing and compassionate memoir, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore examines the intersections between family, trauma, art, class and memory as only she can. By combining candor and quips, history and currency, beauty and truth, Sycamore reflects on the complexities of life and creativity.”
—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“Unapologetic and reflective, Sycamore's memoir invokes the very nature of art and the mindset of the artist… in this outspoken, deeply felt examination of creativity, family, betrayal, and independent expression.“
—Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter

”[B]oth an homage to a passionate artist and a searing look into the ways that each of us is influenced by the environment—social, political, religious and ethical—in which we come of age.”
—Eleanor Bader, The Indypendent

“Sycamore writes: ‘I want a history of everything that was never recorded, and all the records that have been lost. I want a history of everything left unsaid. Everything that never happened, but should have happened.’ Touching the Art is just such a book. In her research, Sycamore is able to re-create a complex world, using documents, letters, videos, and other sources to imagine possibilities of communication between artists, to examine the sexual codes and to crack them, and in doing so to illuminate her own identity as a queer artist and activist.”
—Peter Valente, Heavy Feather Review

“Queer activist and author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has often been praised for work that escapes the limits of literature… Her writing mimics the disjointed, blurry snippets of dreams that continue to linger long after you wake… What’s remarkable about Sycamore’s writing is her ability to enfold the reader in the story of her grandmother while simultaneously prodding her own past, questioning her family’s foundational beliefs, and commenting on queerness, race, and privilege. This book feels like a warmly extended hand—It’s a personal invitation to dive headfirst into Sycamore’s life, using art as a floatation device and a source of universal connection.”
—Julianna Oclair, Out Front Magazine

“A thought-provoking, genre-defying kind of memoir that looks at intergenerational trauma, family relationships, queerness, and art. The book explores the relationship with her late grandmother, Gladys, who was herself an abstract artist, and who supported Mattilda’s work—until her work became queer. Sycamore looks at Gladys’s art as a variety of things, including as a clue to place her grandmother’s story in a larger context of Jewish assimilation, trauma, and much more.
—Jaime Herndon, BookRiot

“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore braids humor, tragedy, and unabashed presence in every single sentence she writes. With Touching the Art she blends history, essay, and memoir, telling her own secrets and truths through the lives of others. I adore Sycamore's writing and would follow her anywhere. Nobody touches the art like Sycamore.”
—Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

“In Touching the Art, Sycamore responds to the call for white artists to reckon with our pasts, our connections to power and privilege. The scalpel she takes to her own family, both the education, access, and love of art they gave her, and the intense and ongoing violence they did to her and cannot face, is brutally laser sharp. In all the messily queer craftsmanship we've come to expect from her prose, she offers us a handhold and a way forward: Touch the art, fuck it up, get free. Art is a part of our liberation and our future, and Sycamore is trying to write us all free.”
—Joseph Osmundson, author of Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between

“Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Touching the Art is ekphrastic, intimate, historical, and proximate. The art of the title, paintings by Sycamore’s grandmother Gladys Goldstein, appears only through description—and what description. We encounter the work, learn who Gladys was and who she was in relation to—how gentrification, redlining, and antiblackness shape space, and how 'family' organizes itself to refuse confrontation and to excise queerness. Sycamore employs diverging yet deeply related histories. Touching the Art is an education; a beautiful instruction in feeling and looking.”
—Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

“I love writers who take risks, who rattle cages, who overthrow the tables of the money changers, writers who can whisper truths or shout them fabulously from rooftops. Yes, I love Mattilda.”
—Rabih Alameddine, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope