Nicole Kaack

Tomorrow, Thursday, April 30 at 6 PM, we’ll mark the final days of Rosaire Appel: Chatter / Shatter at @centerforbookarts with the launch of a new edition indexing a selection of drawings from the exhibition. Chatter gathers drawings of the same name made between 1999 and 2025, reflecting the ways Rosaire’s practice moves between analogue and digital forms. Across the series, found materials, Illustrator graphics, photographs, and asemic inscriptions accumulate into a layered visual language. Rosaire and I selected the drawings for Chatter collaboratively, taking turns choosing and sequencing works from across the series. The pages gradually came to feel like an exploded book or an ongoing, wordless conversation built through formal echoes and visual correspondences—a circling shadow rhyming with a meandering doodle, or the outline of a conical prism resurfacing in another form. Continuing Rosaire’s longstanding interest in revision and the reworking of existing material, this new edition takes the form of two-tone risograph prints featuring “redlined” revisions of the original drawings 🖍️ Rosaire and I will speak about our creative and curatorial collaboration on both the exhibition and this edition. I hope you’ll join us for the launch and for a final chance to spend time with the work! Big thanks to @corinabetty and Camilo Otero for making this possible—and to @billly_ellliot for exquisite design ✨

We hope you’ll join us on Wednesday, May 6, 7:30–9:30 PM at the Wythe Hotel (@wythehotel ) to celebrate the launch of Nude Ascending a Staircase by Sam Lavigne (@samlavigne ) and Georgica Pettus (@georgica ), the sixth issue of the collaborative artist book series prompt: (@promptcolon ). Drawn from an archive of text prompts scraped from the generative AI platform Civitai, the project traces the strange gap between desire and its algorithmic rendering. These inputs—part smut, part source code—pair with images that never fully resolve, suspended as shifting abstractions: beige noise, kaleidoscopic forms, orificial buds, floating protrusions. The result is an open-ended vision of bodies in the process of becoming. The evening will feature a reading by the artists, followed by a conversation on their collaboration moderated by prompt: publishers Mira Dayal (@miradayal ) and Nicole Kaack (@kaackattack ). The publication is now available for preorder! If you’d like to pick up your copy at the event, use code PICKUP on prompt:’s website to waive shipping. RSVP at the link in the @promptcolon bio 🗓 Wednesday, May 6, 7:30–9:30 PM 📍 80 Wythe Ave, Brooklyn 🍸 Complimentary drinks Many thanks to Alessandra Gómez (@alessandrrraaa ) for hosting us as curator of the Wythe Hotel Art Program! ⭐️

A real pleasure to speak with Tyler Coburn (@tylercoburn123 ) for BOMB Magazine about his recent book Some Monologues, which traces a portrait of his wide-ranging monologic performances over the past fifteen years. Tyler’s practice defies easy definition, engaging subjects from content farming and speech-recognition software to legal entities. Focusing on process and his relationship to documentation, our conversation touches on speech as a form of writing, the social histories that shape and emerge from artistic practice, and the tension between presence and memory. This interview extends an ongoing dialogue with Tyler, as well as my longstanding admiration for Wendy’s Subway’s Documents series. Read the conversation at the 🔗 in bio. Congratulations to Some Monologues editor Rachel Valinsky (@langue_pendue ) and designer Bryce Wilner, and many thanks to Alan Gilbert (@alan_d_gilbert ) for giving this conversation a platform through BOMB.

Next Friday, April 24 at 6PM, I will have the honor of moderating a panel on abstract comics with Rosaire Appel and Bill Kartalopoulos, in tandem with the exhibition of Rosaire’s work that I curated for the Center for Book Arts. Since the early 2010s, Rosaire has incorporated the conventions of comics into her practice, producing elaborate—if wordless—accordion and board books. Her interest in the graphic potency of comics as form originated in a mid-2000s visit to the Jewish Museum exhibition “Masters of American Comics.” “I didn’t read the comics, I looked at them,” she recalls. “Comics are graphically direct; you can take them in easily without getting hung up on niceties.” Drawing on Bill’s expansive knowledge of vanguardist comic histories and Rosaire’s material experiments with this graphic form, our dialogue will explore the tension between narrative structure and abstract mark-making. I’m so looking forward to diving into this conversation. I hope you’ll join us. Registration link in bio!

On March 1 at 8PM, at a location to be disclosed upon RSVP, Tyler Coburn will present “People,” a new performance created in recognition of the community that has sustained and shaped his practice over the past fifteen years. The work unfolds as a series of stories, each centered on someone who has been involved—directly or indirectly—in one of Tyler’s past performances or productions. In this way, “People” turns its attention outward, reflecting on the relationships and exchanges that make artistic work possible. The evening also marks the launch of Tyler’s book “Some Monologues,” produced as part of the Wendy’s Subway Document series, which gathers scripts from previously unpublished performances and makes them newly accessible in print. Following the performance, I’ll join Tyler in conversation about his practice—tracing the themes that have guided his research and production over time, and reflecting on the processes through which new works take shape. The discussion extends an earlier dialogue we’ve edited for publication in BOMB, forthcoming in the months ahead. It promises to be an intimate and thoughtful gathering. We hope you can join us. RSVP at 🔗

In tandem with her exhibition at SculptureCenter—and ahead of her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial—it’s been a sheer delight to be in dialogue with Pat Oleszko, or “Pant,” or “Splatt,” as she variously (and situationally) names herself. Corresponding with Pat is always an occasion for wordplay: messages that ask to be deciphered and dare a response in kind. In “Fool Disclosure” at SculptureCenter (on view through April 27), Pat’s hats and many personas come fully into view, alongside an irrepressible play with language, a keen attunement to the social world, and a fierce political critique running throughout. The exhibition is a generous, unruly celebration of an artist whose work has long moved between street and stage. Thank you to @artinamerica and my editor @andybattaglia9 for prompting this dialogue. 🔗⬆️

It’s been an honor to engage with the practices of Lucas Blalock and Julia Rommel in writing the introductory text for Hunks at Bureau Gallery (on view through February 21). In conversation with the artists, it quickly became clear that—while working in distinct media and registering very different affects—there’s significant overlap in how they approach process and seek to rewrite the parameters of their respective disciplines. Structured as a numbered list, the exhibition text centers on questions of procedure and the methodologies that make creative work possible. I’m delighted to return to these conversations with the artists this Saturday, February 7 at 6 PM. We’ll be discussing how each produces their work, the ways they unsettle conventions of painting and photography, and the relationships to language that emerge within their compositions.

Just published by A4’s The Amp: a conversation I had with Chang Yuchen on her video installation “For those who share mornings and evenings” (2025), installed at Smack Mellon last fall. The work emerges from a private archive Yuchen encountered after the sudden death of her husband, Yuan Yi, in 2014—screenshots and recordings from years of long-distance video calls between Beijing, Chicago, and New York. Returning to this material years later, Yuchen builds a quiet meditation on mediated closeness: on watching and being watched, on presence that never fully arrives. In completing the piece, she stepped into Yuan’s medium of durational film, continuing a collaboration after his death. Yuchen and I spoke over video call—mirroring the conditions of the work itself—about intimacy at a distance, loss, and the uneasy desires transmitted through screens. Thank you @shannpo for giving this dialogue a platform. 🔗⬆️

Four spots remain for the January 31 tour of Rosaire Appel’s exhibition “Shatter / Chatter” at the Center for Book Arts. Rosaire will share insights into her materials and working process, and I’ll speak about the evolution of her practice, beginning with its origins in “objective writing.” We’ll also spend time together looking closely at selected works from the exhibition in a small-group setting. I hope you will join us ✨ 🔗➡️👤

…. Gratitude to all of you who came by to see ‘shatter/ chatter’ last night @centerforbookarts , it was truly wonderful . And special thanks and appreciation to @kaackattack and @corinabetty who made it happen.xoxo

Please join us for the opening of Shatter/Chatter: Rosaire Appel on Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 6pm at Center for Book Arts! Rosaire Appel (@rappelx ) produced her first artists’ books and asemic texts in the 1990s after decades of working in painting, photography, and literature. Since then, her practice has grown to encompass abstract comics, unconventional sound scores, and books that emerge from diagrammatic, cartographic, calligraphic, appropriative, and redactive techniques. Shatter / Chatter, a two-part exhibition curated by Nicole Kaack (@kaackattack ), traces through-lines within the artist’s work across media and places her within a matrix of visual, literary, and sonic traditions. The following is an excerpt from Kaack’s curatorial essay: “Appel’s medium is asemic, or nonlinguistic, text. Teeming with physical and digital materialities— ink, paint, gelatin silver, scanned imagery, and vector graphics, all rebelliously misused—her practice is saturated with a fluvial restlessness, transforming from page to page and book to book. The inky murmurations are expressive, yet opaque.. Asemic writing might, at once, deny intention and admit the validity of all meaning. In 2008, Appel wrote, “You see a chair in a cloud, I see a chair. We communicate. Yet it doesn’t mean there’s a chair in the cloud. You see a chair, I see a pigeon, still there’s nothing to argue over. A cloud is still a cloud, its form is ordinarily wordless.” There will also be a guided tour with the artist and curator on Jan 31 at 2pm. #centerforbookarts #bookarts #artistsbook #asemicwriting

A few intimacies from install for Shatter / Chatter, an exhibition of work by Rosaire Appel that I’m curating at the Center for Book Arts. The show opens next Wednesday, January 21, from 6–8 PM. Tracing Rosaire’s development from experimental literature and photography to artist’s books, the exhibition invites viewers to follow motifs and methods that have resurfaced and evolved across her more than sixty-year career. I first worked with Rosaire nearly a decade ago, and even in the time since our first collaboration, her practice has continued to extend—now encompassing graphic notation and abstract comics. I hope you’ll join me next Wednesday to celebrate Rosaire’s vital, generous, and continually generative practice. More information at 🔗 @rappelx @centerforbookarts