FGWL #2 Redniss
Like most New Yorkers, I live in the city with the expectation that most of my time will be spent outside of my apartment. Spending so much time at home recently has meant digging into my past, in particular, pulling out old sketchbooks. Below are a few pages from notebooks I’ve kept over the years. They include a combination of drawings, clippings, and writing—ideas, book recommendations, notes from shows and lectures. Sometimes I cut out a sentence or two from the newspaper and paste them into my sketchbook. Removed from their original context, these fragments invite new interpretations.
From a lecture on the geopolitics of ping pong.
I can’t remember why I drew these albatross.
Drawing of Charlotte Bronte’s shoes, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library.
“Daddy warned me about men and alcohol,” she once said. “But he never warned me about women and cocaine.”
Drawings of the audience and notes from a lecture on Lew Albert, 19th century Jewish tattoo artist and wallpaper designer.
Drawings from Deborah Baker’s lecture on her book “The Convert.”
“People would say, ‘Oh, that’s fascinating.’ And then they would go to asleep standing up like a horse.”
“The bad guy had been vanquished, the Gallo wine quaffed, the gelato devoured. It was time to hit the trail.”
Lauren Redniss is the author of several works of visual non-fiction. Her recent book, Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future, won the 2016 PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her previous book, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. She is also the author of Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Doris Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies. Her new book, Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, will be published this fall. Lauren's writing and drawing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, which nominated her work for a Pulitzer Prize. A 2016 MacArthur Fellow, she has also been a Guggenheim fellow, a New America / New Arizona Fellow, a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers, and was the first Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History. She is associate professor of Illustration at Parsons School of Design. More of her work can be seen at laurenredniss.com.