Author Archives: caillemillner

Rivers, First Draft

By Caille Millner, The Paris Review Daily, Jan. 16, 2016 In 1982, the artist Lorraine O’Grady staged her first major performance piece in Central Park, “Rivers, First Draft.” In the park’s bucolic Loch section, the audience watched a black woman in a red dress walk down the ravine. Red is a sign for wanton women,…

The Surrogate

Cecily is six months pregnant with someone else’s child when her husband tells her that he wants a baby of his own. It’s not a complete surprise — if he never grew jealous of all the other babies she’s carried, she’d wonder. *Read the full text of this short story at Joyland Magazine.

Historical Fictions, Unimaginative Revisions

LOS ANGELES — Historical Fiction, Tyler Shields’s new photography show at the Andrew Weiss gallery in Los Angeles, is an interpretation of some important moments in 20th-century US history. Shields, a former professional inline skater who launched his photography career on MySpace, fancies himself a provocateur. The greatest surprise of this show, though, may not…

Nagano’s Tokyo

Why does Tokyo look so unfamiliar in Nagano Shigeichi’s photographs? He used no slights of hand; followed no special methodology. His influences were the usual ones for his generation — William Eugene Smith, Life magazine, celebrated Japanese photojournalists like Kimura Ihei and Fujimoto Shihachi. He didn’t have pretentions of being an art photographer, a title…

Connecting Their Visions: Tracing the Lines between Martín Ramírez and Robert Walser

MARTÍN RAMÍREZ, a Mexican-born peasant who spent the last three decades of his life in a California mental hospital, is now recognized as one of the state’s greatest artists. His alleged misdiagnosis and subsequent incarceration in a psychiatric institution, almost certainly against his will, inspired some of his greatest work — part of a trend…

Alfredo Jaar and the Happiness of Chile

SEE THE MAN.  He’s standing next to a newsstand on a busy street in Santiago de Chile, talking to people as they rush by. At first you try to avoid looking at him, worried that he might be a beggar or something worse. For years it’s been too dangerous to talk to strangers. You never…