Reminiscence Bump: Art, Writing, and Memory
Friends of the Visual Arts, Barton Art Galleries, October 28, 2025
Reading List/Links
I’m preparing some notes for a talk I am presenting to the Barton Art Galleries Friends of Visual Arts Fall Series this week, and over the course of this year I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about and engaging with fellow writers and artists on the current state of arts writing. Being in my 10th year as an art writer/critic (a term that I have only just begun to embrace), I am struck by how similar the conditions are now that writers faced a decade ago.
To guide my thinking on this process, I turned to some prognostications from the past and looked at their present day resonance. They hold up remarkably well.
All of this has me thinking about how Octavia Butler’s prescience continues to leave me amazed. Her 1993 book Parable of the Sower is set in 2024 amidst a backdrop of environmental crisis, economic instability, and political violence catalyzed under the election of a fictional authoritarian demagogue who promises to, “Make America Great Again.” He spins the nation into chaos by dismantling the government, schools, environmental protections, and judicial guardrails. I frequently return to an essay Butler wrote in 2000 about this foreshadowing where she draws a direct line between the past and the future using the study of history and patterns.
“Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.”
And so I will end this post by sharing some links to encourage further review with the hope that it will attempt to help make sense of the present by understanding what came before it.
Octavia Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”, Essence Magazine, May, 2000.
Ben Davis, “Post-Descriptive Criticism.” Superscript, Walker Art Center, 2015
Ben Davis, “Artspeak after Social Media.” e flux Journal, June, 2025.
Christopher Knight, “The Role of the Professional Art Critic.” Superscript, Walker Art Center, 2015
“Criticism’s Blackout: Where are all the Black critics?”, Jessica Lynne, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Walker Art Center, June 9, 2015
https://walkerart.org/magazine/artsblack-where-are-the-black-art-critics
“The Role of Art Criticism in the Community”, Doug Sadownick, Art Papers, November/December, 1990
Colony Little
Culture Shock Art
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 
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