Paintings by Liat Yossifor
Poems by Ed Schad

96 pages. Full color.
Softcover with die-cut window and flaps
2023

Copublished with LaVerne University

9781954600201 |  $26.95 (pb)

Over the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in Los Angeles, a poet/curator and a painter correspond in their own mediums, developing a conversation across space and time during lockdown.

Part monograph, part poetry collection, Letters Apart presents unusual events of language and a progression of imagery that conjure personal memories, early Expressionism, and the capacity for lightness and darkness, fear and flights of fancy to coexist.

Read an interview between Yossifor and Schad in The Art Section.

PRESS AND PRAISE

In these beautifully rendered vignettes Ed Schad’s observations and associations feel their way across Liat Yossifor’s opaque, luscious surfaces. The result is a profound experiment in ekphrasis, where words shimmer against images, like air against water. 
—Jarrett Earnest, author of What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics and winner of the 2021 Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize

PRAISE FOR PAST WORKS

The works evoke walls and plastering, as well as the human desire to leave behind one’s permanent mark. The surface shifts — from smooth, creamy pathways to deep gouges — imbue the paintings with an object-like tactility, and render the works topographies sensitive to changing light. […] At time when our collective anxieties are pushing for solutions, Yossifor reminds us that answers are likely to be temporary, while change is inescapable.
—John Yau, “The Tension in Liat Yossifor’s Paintings,” Hyperallergic (2021)

In the tradition of Giorgio Morandi and Philip Guston, Yossifor is a painter’s painter. […] The vital energy of the brushwork, the nihilistic palette, the viscerally uncertain subject matter, all these address me, engaging my imagination and eliciting a sense of reflection. In the aesthetic response feelings awaken but nothing adds up. The paintings reverberate.
—Karen Lang, “Liat Yossifor, Below the Eye,” X-TRA (2009)

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Ed Schad is a Los Angeles-based curator and writer for art and culture publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Art Review, Flash Art, Frieze, Modern Painters, and The Brooklyn Rail. As Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad museum in Los Angeles, in 2022 he curated a survey of William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows, as well as edited and wrote the book to accompany the exhibition. He previously organized and produced catalogues for the large scale exhibitions Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow and Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again. He is also responsible for organizing the public project Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Couleur Additive and was the host-curator of Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth co-organized by The Broad and the Royal Academy of London. He is the editor in chief of 50 Artists: Highlights of the Broad Collection, and he is the managing editor of The Broad Collection; The Broad: An Art Museum Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro; The Broad: Art and Architecture; and Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, all published by Delmonico Books. Schad has contributed essays to monographic catalogs on the work of Robert Irwin, Natalie Frank, Roy Dowell, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Sterling Ruby, Kaz Oshiro, Annie Lapin, Albert Contreras, Raimons Staprans, Charles Garabedian, Pieter Vermeersch, Kavin Buck, and Liat Yossifor. Schad’s poems have been published in the Blue Collar Review, Suturo, and The Nonconformist. Previously, he taught writing as an adjunct professor at Claremont University, and in 2021, he became a fellow of The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. His first collection of poetry is Letters Apart, a collaboration with the painter Liat Yossifor, co-published in 2023 by University of La Verne and DoppelHouse Press.

Liat Yossifor is an Israeli-born artist based in Los Angeles. She has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including (solos) The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; and Pitzer Art Galleries in Claremont, CA; PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL; Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; and Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany. Group exhibitions include those at Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico; Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico; Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; University of La Verne, La Verne, CA; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Germany; and the Margulies Collection.

Yossifor earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, 2002. She completed residencies at The Rauschenberg in Captiva Island in Florida in 2020, and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany in 2010 and was the recipient of Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship, Germany, in 2022. Select public collections include: Creative Artist Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection (CIAC), Mexico City, Mexico; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.