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Telegraph
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Literary star Catherine Lacey: ‘The editor saw my draft and worried about libel laws'
As I sit on the patio of a French restaurant in Brooklyn, the beautiful and intimidatingly tall sommelier comes over, and tells me that there'll shortly be a reading in the bar. I ask who's reading. 'A novelist!' she says, beaming. I decline, and resist telling her that not only do I have my own novelist on the way, but it's Catherine Lacey. It would be easy to be awed by Lacey; many people in the literary world are. She has only just turned 40, but she's already on her fifth book, the first four having earned critical acclaim; her second, The Answers (2017), in which an ill young woman becomes a narcissistic actor's hired girlfriend, is being adapted for television by the director Darren Aronofsky. She was named one of Granta's best young American novelists in 2017; she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Lacey, in other words, has scored the rare hat-trick, among leading young writers, of accolades, prolificity and cultural cachet (or to put it more bluntly, coolness). Her extraordinary new work, The Möbius Book, is a tête-bêche, meaning that it's formed of two autonomous though related parts. You can start reading from either end, and when you get to the middle, you flip and restart. In one direction, it's non-fiction, a relatively straightforward chronological catalogue of the mental disarray that followed the end of a relationship between Lacey and her partner of several years, known as 'The Reason', a man whose behaviour is portrayed as coercive, controlling and obliterating. Lacey doesn't use the word 'abusive' in her account, but readers are bound to ask whether it's applicable. The Reason's behaviour is depicted as imbued with rage. He has a tantrum when Lacey wants to leave a light on in the stairwell for a female friend sleeping in their guest room. When Lacey looks at her phone during a film he had wanted her to watch, he punches a wall so hard that he breaks a part of it. He habitually slaps her on the backside – ' playfully (his word)' – despite her voicing her dislike of it, and then is outraged at how she reacts. Until their 2021 break-up, Lacey had been in the relationship for six years. The end came when Lacey received an email from her partner, who was in another part of their house, to tell her he'd met another woman the previous week and so was ending the relationship. She writes: 'This isn't what I want so much as what you want, he told me, and when I said it wasn't what I wanted he simply said yes, it was.' 'The first chapter of the non-fiction,' she explains to me today, 'is exactly what I wrote in the bedroom as it [the break-up] happened. I was like: 'This is what's f------ going on.' And I didn't edit that part, I think, at all.' She wrote the non-fiction part of The Möbius Book first. The fictional part introduces us to two friends, Marie and Edie, who meet around Christmas and discuss the painful fallout of their failed relationships. Across the hall, a substance that may or may not be blood emerges from beneath a neighbour's door. Why the two-part form? 'I showed the non-fiction to my agent,' Lacey says, 'and she was really happy with it... I'm close to my agent and she was p----- off for me [about the relationship], so I think she was happy to see a book that was this fire-pit of p------off-ness.' Not everyone was satisfied. 'My editor told me that with memoirs, because libel laws are different, sometimes things that can be published safely and legally in the US can't really be published in the UK. And I was thinking: my very angry book, yes, there might be things in there... 'But I also started thinking: why did I have to write about this thing? Why does it have to be non-fiction? I started thinking about rewriting the whole work as fiction, in a different shape. Or maybe I could publish it in the UK as a novel and in the US as non-fiction, but give it the exact same title. I think, now, that the libel issue was an excuse for me not to publish the book as it was. There was nothing untrue, but it wasn't fully right.' Lacey wrote a piece on Substack last year about adding to The Möbius Book, late in the editing process, a scene between herself and The Reason that she had tried, in real life, to forget. The passage, she tells me, describes him observing that Lacey had gained a negligible amount of weight, and providing her with a workout plan and guidance on what to cut out of her diet. 'He was concerned,' she writes. 'He didn't want this to begin a pattern.' 'His logic would be there,' Lacey says now, 'and I would go along with it because it was rhetorically very powerful. That was one of the details [where] I was kind of sickened by the idea of it being published – partially because of my own self-betrayal in accepting that from him, and then the idea of my whole family knowing it. I got kind of mangy for a few years. There was nervousness around my basic mental and physical health. And here was more evidence that when I had thought I was doing fine, I was not.' Lacey was born in 1985, and raised devoutly religious in Mississippi. She wanted to be a preacher as a child. When she began to lose faith in God at the age of 15, the shock took away her appetite. Though Pew (2020), her third novel, was also concerned with faith – a mercurial stranger with no memory arrives in a devout town and reflects its contradiction back – The Möbius Book is her most direct addressing of the subject so far. It investigates faith in many different forms: cycles of existence; the impossibility of conclusion when it comes to portraying a life. Why return to the topic? 'I've been trying to write about faith for as long as I've been an adult,' she says. 'But I think I needed to get a lot further away from the period of time [in which] I stopped believing in order to see it. I needed to have my metaphysical understanding of the world changed a few times. 'I needed to stop being so p----- off and self-righteous about the culture I grew up in. And I needed to have experiences that humbled me again out of my just-as-dogmatic atheism. What was going on in my life in my mid- to late-30s changed the way I saw the past. It uncovered things I'd been unable to look at or understand.' How does she think of romance now? 'I see my friends as angels sent from God, the finest human beings to ever walk the planet. And I have seen them at their worst, but I still think that. There's something kind of Christian there – the idea that you should treat everybody like they're Jesus. That radical idea of Christianity is part of what I connected to as a child. I felt very odd.' She smiles as she describes what an ideal, rather than realistic, rendering of Christian faith might look like, a faith where the radical offering of acceptance and love was actually universalised: 'In my Southern town, I didn't fit in, and I was always attracted to this beautiful idea of that Christianity. All these people say they're Christian. I'm like, if they can only see it, right? We can be in paradise.'
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Don't change books to be more PC – that's like cutting Jane Austen's buggery joke'
'I always think of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen with this view,' says Dr Paula Byrne, looking through the window at a jumble of green and gently wooded hills. 'I feel like I'm Marianne Dashwood when the rain comes lashing down, I'm out there and I want Willoughby to come up and rescue me.' Byrne, arguably Britain's leading authority on Jane Austen, as well as a novelist, biographer, teacher and family counsellor, is standing in an airy converted barn outside Oxford, rather than Wessex or Devonshire, and the space is bathed in warm spring sunshine rather than a storm, but you can see what she means. It is a romantic view. Besides, she can be forgiven for having both authors on her mind, especially this year. As the more glamorous half of arguably Britain's pre-eminent literary-criticism power couple – her husband is Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, an expert in Shakespeare and the Romantics – Byrne has moved frequently for his work, most notably to Arizona, where Sir Jonathan has been a professor of humanities since 2019. This year, however, it is Byrne's turn to reclaim the spotlight – 2025 is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth and Byrne will be central to the festivities. Sir Jonathan, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship last month, has taken a sabbatical to research a book about the history of gardens. The couple have moved back to the UK in anticipation of Byrne's bumper year. 'It's going to be one of those things that rolls and rolls,' she says. First up is a three-part BBC documentary-drama starting on Monday, Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius. Byrne is one of the expert talking heads; other contributors include Greg Wise, Samuel West, Tamsin Greig and Helen Fielding. This summer she will publish Six Weeks by the Sea, a novel imagining the first time the young Jane fell in love. It is her first fictional treatment of Austen, after three acclaimed non-fiction books including 2013's The Real Jane Austen: A life in Small Things. In October she will give the plenary lecture at JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, where they dress up in 'bonnets and stuff' and 'really know their stuff'. 'One of my emphases is how funny [Austen] is, because it gets overlooked,' Byrne says. 'She's not a romantic writer. She's an anti-romantic. She's always puncturing romance and satirising it. But irony is difficult for some people to get. You can read her for whatever reason you want, but she's hilariously funny, which tends to get a little bit lost. Or Mrs Bennet can become a caricature, which is a shame. Jane Austen's too subtle for caricatures.' It is one of many aspects of Austen she says most of the countless screen adaptations get wrong. 'They do the big houses and play up the smocks and frocks element,' she says. 'She doesn't write about the aristocracy, she writes about the gentry. Pemberley is a big house, but most of the time in the other novels the houses aren't that big.' She admires the 'dirty hems and pigs' of Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice, but her favourite Austen adaptation is Clueless (1995), the knowing, hilarious Hollywood adaptation of Emma set in 1990s Beverly Hills: ' Clueless so gets what Emma's about. Who's in, who's out, the class nuances. And there's not a line of Jane Austen in it.' Austen's 250th year will see all manner of other celebrations. As well as the projects Byrne is involved in, there are two new Pride and Prejudice adaptations in the works, one six-part series for Netflix written by best-selling author Dolly Alderton, and starring Olivia Colman, Jack Lowden and Emma Corrin, another a BBC spin-off focusing on Mary Bennet, The Other Bennet Sister. In October Winchester Cathedral, where Austen is buried, will unveil a new statue. What would Jane have made of the Austen industrial complex? 'There's a lot of snobbishness around Jane Austen,' Byrne says. 'But there's nothing wrong with having fun with it and dressing up. 'Janeites' is the derisory term. But they're having the best time. And they know their stuff. I'm terrified of giving a talk to Janeites.' Austen was a war novelist, she points out; her fiction has long been a comfort to the terrified. 'During the First World War there was a special edition of her novels published for soldiers in the trenches. There's something very moving about soldiers reading about what they're fighting for, in a sense: villages and countryside and the English way of life. 'She was also one of the first writers to write about heroine-centred stories, and that should be celebrated,' she adds. 'When I first came to Austen people said 'oh it's just about marriage and stuff'. But money does matter when you don't work yourself. Status matters when you are poor. Many 18th-century novels are unreadable now. She was doing something very different. 'It saddens me that she never knew how famous she'd be. By the end of her life people weren't really buying her books. For many years after her death (in 1817) she was out of print. It must be hard writing for an audience you don't think you're going to get.' At 58, in jeans and knee-high boots, with a Merseyside accent unaffected by years spent living in London, Oxford and Arizona, Byrne is a refreshing figure by the standards of literary biography. She grew up in a working class family in Birkenhead, on the Wirral, the third of five girls – 'just like the Bennets' – out of seven children in total. Her father was a lorry driver, now retired, her mother a housewife. Byrne was identified as the bookish child early on and enthusiastically encouraged. 'My siblings say I just read so I didn't have to do any housework, which is kind of true,' she recalls. 'I didn't have parents who read to me as a child, they read but weren't big readers, but I was just obsessed with books,' she says. 'I always think if I won the lottery I would give the money to Birkenhead library because it saved my life. My mum would say 'spend as much time as you want in there'.' She developed her taste early, too. 'I always loved the classics,' she says. 'I remember [American novelist] Judy Blume coming; I hated it.' Contemporary fiction still leaves her 'a bit cold'. In a recent column for Prospect magazine Byrne called Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You 'wretchedly unreadable and dull'. 'She's venerated and Americans love her,' Byrne says. 'Some of my friends really like it and I'm like, 'do you really like it? Am I missing something?' But the lack of grammar and the no chapters, it all feels a bit pretentious. I accept she's a good writer but no, not for me.'' Academic career Byrne's critical apparatus offered a route into a different kind of life. She did her teacher training in Chichester and taught in a boys' grammar school and a college of education, before going back to university, this time in Liverpool, for an MA and PhD on Austen, work that formed the basis of her first book, Jane Austen and the Theatre, published in 2002 when Byrne was 24. Byrne met Sir Jonathan in 1994 at Liverpool University. Both had been married before. When she met him, she was a masters student and he was a professor. 'People get upset when you say it,' she says. 'But I wasn't 18, I was 26, and we've been married for 30 years.' They have three children: Tom, 26, Ellie, 24, and Harry, 18. In 2016 the couple founded The ReLit Foundation, a charity devoted to treating 'stress, anxiety and other conditions through slow reading of great literature, especially poetry'. The charity's website lists all three children as team members. 'Jane Austen changed my life, no question,' Byrne says. 'I am passionate about education and reading because if you are working class it is your only route into a different life.' Having seen how her children were taught in the US, she worries that Britain is slipping 'backwards a bit' on education. 'My youngest went to a school that was taught Socratically. They read John Locke, Pride and Prejudice. It is fantastic and they don't dumb down. The worst thing you can do is dumb down. Of Mice and Men? Come on, do me a favour. When I taught 11-year-old boys I begged to teach Henry V because they would love it. The head said no, you've got to start with Romeo and Juliet, but eventually he let me. Afterwards the boys were all rushing around the playground screaming 'once more unto the breach'. 'Don't patronise kids, don't patronise working-class people. They can do big words. It's fine. If we give them stupid texts, we'll get stupid people.' That said, a university degree is 'not for everyone'. 'Everyone should have access [to university], of course, but also I've taught people who were sold a bit of a lie and got into a lot of debt and it didn't really do them any good. It's so difficult.' America was also liberating because the people around her did not make an instant judgment based on her accent. 'I always found that very liberating,' she says. 'I wasn't judged in the same way. In England you're so judged by your accent. I don't think I had a chip on my shoulder, but I did a literary festival once and the minute I started speaking people got up and walked out. I was talking about Jane Austen, and obviously I didn't have the right voice for it. Americans have their own class system, too, it's just [about] money.' Publishing itself has experienced dramatic changes in the time Byrne has been working. In early 2023, The Telegraph published an investigation into Roald Dahl revealing the extent of the changes his publishers were making to the original texts to suit modern standards of political correctness. Subsequent investigations found similar alterations in Enid Blyton, Ian Fleming and many others. 'It's ridiculous, isn't it,' she says. 'Messing around with anyone's books is not OK. Jane Austen makes a very rude joke about buggery in the navy in Mansfield Park. It would be like taking that out. It's patronising, it's wrong. I don't approve of that. Don't treat people like they're stupid. If it's not for you, put it down, there's plenty of other books. Don't change a book just because it's not PC anymore. I can't bear it.' Character assassination Byrne has experienced first hand the destructive power of language. In 2015, a letter dropped through the family letterbox in Oxford, addressed to Sir Jonathan, who was provost of Worcester College from 2011-2019. 'Please, please do something about your wife,' it began, going on – as Byrne wrote in an article about the ordeal three years later – 'to assassinate my character, my looks, my dress sense, my grammar, my mothering skills, my work as a writer'. It was the first in a series of poison pen letters over the next few years. These were not the ramblings of a stranger but someone who knew Byrne's family and her work. She and Sir Jonathan started to suspect people around them. Byrne even wondered if her first husband might even have nursed a grudge for more than 20 years. The stress brought on a heart attack. After 14 letters, when the writer attacked ReLit, Byrne decided to go public, eventually putting the letters in a novel, Look to Your Wife, published in 2018. 'It was a very tough time,' she says. 'I knew it was an Oxford don [writing the letters] because the letters were hilarious and so well written. I'm not meant to talk about this case because I've settled out of court. But I thought 'I'm going to put these letters in a novel to flush this person out'. I did and it worked. 'It sort of changed my life because I never thought I had a novel in me,' she adds. 'So some good came out of it. But it gave me a heart attack. It was stress-induced. There's no [heart trouble] in my family. When the surgeon went in he said you can measure [the stress]. At the time I didn't realise how stressful it was.' As they were able to catch the heart trouble early, and she had a stent fitted, she has had no lasting effects. The letters were the most extreme manifestation of an Oxford environment Byrne found oppressive, rife with bitchy academics. 'These communities, like the priesthood, where it's quite a closed world, you're sleeping and eating together. The famous thing about Oxford is that the fights are so vicious, because the stakes are so low. It's true. You think 'Why does this stuff matter to people so much? Why are people upset about whether I wear a gown or not? I've got real things to worry about, I have children to raise.' That was not a great part of my life.' Working with teenagers This experience, along with the financial realities of being a professional writer, led Byrne to retrain as a counsellor when they moved to the US. 'I was very interested in the relationship between stress and mental and physical illness,' she says. 'I also just couldn't make money [as a writer]. In the past 10 years it has become a hobby. I defy anybody, unless you are Alan Hollinghurst, it's so hard to make a living. You are working for nothing. I'm so poorly paid it's ridiculous. Part of me retraining was I want to keep working, I feel I have things to offer, what could I do that would be challenging and fulfilling. 'People to me are endlessly fascinating in themselves and their family dynamics. The more you can get into a room you think 'oh my god, look at the dynamics'. Everyone has a different story.' Jane Austen would probably agree. As a counsellor, her favourite groups have been teenagers and couples. 'I didn't like doing children, because I found it too upsetting,' she says. 'But I loved couples and adolescents. I'm a bit Polyannaish about it but teenagers are a great group because they're so hilarious and amenable and easy to change. 'Couples therapy is fascinating too, because you have two people in a room and you're trying to make the relationship better. It can be so rewarding.' As for her own relationship, she says she and Sir Jonathan are 'really, really competitive'. Along with his academic positions and knighthood, he has published books including The Genius of Shakespeare and Radical Wordsworth, considered classics of criticism. 'But we get each other as writers. We can work in the same room. I'm his first reader, he's my first reader. I love that we share that.' Not dissuaded by the precariousness of the field, their own children are 'in the business of books', too. Their eldest is doing a masters at creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin. 'He wants to be the next Michael Ondaatje,' Byrne says. Their daughter Ellie works for Penguin Books and is going to Harvard to do a masters in the autumn. The youngest, Harry, is going to Durham to do classics. 'Three kids at uni, it's a disaster,' she jokes. 'I'm like 'can you please get a job'.' With a daughter and two sons, Byrne has witnessed the change in education in recent decades, which has seen girls supersede boys at all levels of schooling. 'Girls are overtaking boys at everything,' she says. 'Part of me thinks great, because they've been put down for long enough and it's their turn. But I'm the mother of two boys and I can see the other side, where boys feel like their voices don't matter anymore and there's nothing that they have to say of interest, because they're a privileged boy. But they can't help their privilege.' Young working class boys are being increasingly pushed out. 'I was very aware of that in Birkenhead,' she says. 'With the closure of the shipbuilding I could see it on the ground level, that white working-class males who weren't educated were being marginalised.' What's to be done? 'Read,' she replies. 'Read Jane Austen!' If Austen were around today she might, as Byrne says, be surprised at the scale of her reputation. But she would be delighted to have Paula Byrne in her corner. 'Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius' is on BBC iPlayer and BBC Two from Monday May 26, 9pm
Business Upturn
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Upturn
LONG BEACH CITY COLLEGE PROFESSOR RECEIVES PRESTIGIOUS GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP
Long Beach, CA, May 13, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Long Beach City College (LBCC) Visual & Media Arts Co-Department Head and Professor of Drawing and Painting, Carolyn Castaño, has been awarded the highly prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for 2025, which marks the program's 100th anniversary year. She was recognized in the field of Fine Arts for her prior exceptional achievements as well as her future promise. 'This recognition is a powerful reminder of the caliber of faculty we are fortunate to have at Long Beach City College,' said Uduak-Joe Ntuk, LBCC Board of Trustees President. 'Professor Castaño's selection as a Guggenheim Fellow reflects the high level of talent, dedication, and scholarly excellence within our teaching ranks. Her achievements demonstrate what's possible at a community college and shine a national spotlight on the incredible work at LBCC.' 'It's not often that a community college faculty member receives this kind of national recognition, and that's exactly why Professor Castaño's Guggenheim Fellowship is so meaningful for our students,' said Dr. Mike Muñoz, LBCC Superintendent-President. 'Her achievement sends a powerful message that excellence knows no boundaries — and that students at Long Beach City College are learning from some of the most talented, visionary educators in the country.' First awarded in 1925, Guggenheim Fellowships offer support to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form. Each Fellow receives a monetary stipend up to $90,000 to pursue independent work at the highest level under the freest possible conditions. This 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows includes 198 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines, chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants. Professor Castaño was one of just 32 recipients awarded in Fine Arts. 'I'm very honored to have received the 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and thrilled to be in the company of my thoughtful and talented colleagues in the arts,' said Professor Castaño. 'I'm looking forward to bringing the fruits of my research and the subsequent work to my Long Beach City College students, who continue to inspire me to stretch as an artist and a teacher.' Professor Castaño is a Colombian-American visual artist based in Los Angeles whose practice focuses on painting, drawing, video, and mixed-media installations with themes and images originating in Latin and South America. Her work, exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally, uses eco-feminist frameworks in painting, installation, video, and artist books to explore the landscape, migration, female and family identities in works that juxtapose drawing, photography, and performance with patterns found in textiles, design, and geometric abstraction. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master's in Fine Arts from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture. She became a full-time instructor for LBCC in 2015. In addition to this fellowship, Professor Castaño is also the recipient of the 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in Painting and Drawing, the 2011 California Community Foundation Getty Fellow Mid-Career Grant, and the 2011 C.O.L.A.-City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship. To learn more about the Guggenheim Foundation and to see the full list of 2025 Fellows, please visit # # # About Long Beach City College Long Beach City College consists of two campuses with an enrollment of more than 35,000 students each semester. The education program's primary purpose is to prepare students for transfer to baccalaureate-granting institutions, entry into work or career development, and to support businesses in economic development. Long Beach City College serves the cities of Avalon, Lakewood, Long Beach, and Signal Hill. Long Beach City College promotes equitable student learning and achievement, academic excellence, and workforce development by delivering high-quality educational programs and support services to our diverse communities. Visit for more information on Long Beach City College. Attachment Disclaimer: The above press release comes to you under an arrangement with GlobeNewswire. Business Upturn takes no editorial responsibility for the same.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
LONG BEACH CITY COLLEGE PROFESSOR RECEIVES PRESTIGIOUS GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP
Professor Carolyn Castaño Joins the 2025 Centennial Class of Fine Arts Fellows Carolyn Castaño Long Beach, CA, May 13, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Long Beach City College (LBCC) Visual & Media Arts Co-Department Head and Professor of Drawing and Painting, Carolyn Castaño, has been awarded the highly prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for 2025, which marks the program's 100th anniversary year. She was recognized in the field of Fine Arts for her prior exceptional achievements as well as her future promise. 'This recognition is a powerful reminder of the caliber of faculty we are fortunate to have at Long Beach City College,' said Uduak-Joe Ntuk, LBCC Board of Trustees President. 'Professor Castaño's selection as a Guggenheim Fellow reflects the high level of talent, dedication, and scholarly excellence within our teaching ranks. Her achievements demonstrate what's possible at a community college and shine a national spotlight on the incredible work at LBCC.' 'It's not often that a community college faculty member receives this kind of national recognition, and that's exactly why Professor Castaño's Guggenheim Fellowship is so meaningful for our students,' said Dr. Mike Muñoz, LBCC Superintendent-President. 'Her achievement sends a powerful message that excellence knows no boundaries — and that students at Long Beach City College are learning from some of the most talented, visionary educators in the country.' First awarded in 1925, Guggenheim Fellowships offer support to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form. Each Fellow receives a monetary stipend up to $90,000 to pursue independent work at the highest level under the freest possible conditions. This 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows includes 198 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines, chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants. Professor Castaño was one of just 32 recipients awarded in Fine Arts. 'I'm very honored to have received the 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and thrilled to be in the company of my thoughtful and talented colleagues in the arts,' said Professor Castaño. 'I'm looking forward to bringing the fruits of my research and the subsequent work to my Long Beach City College students, who continue to inspire me to stretch as an artist and a teacher.' Professor Castaño is a Colombian-American visual artist based in Los Angeles whose practice focuses on painting, drawing, video, and mixed-media installations with themes and images originating in Latin and South America. Her work, exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally, uses eco-feminist frameworks in painting, installation, video, and artist books to explore the landscape, migration, female and family identities in works that juxtapose drawing, photography, and performance with patterns found in textiles, design, and geometric abstraction. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master's in Fine Arts from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture. She became a full-time instructor for LBCC in 2015. In addition to this fellowship, Professor Castaño is also the recipient of the 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in Painting and Drawing, the 2011 California Community Foundation Getty Fellow Mid-Career Grant, and the 2011 C.O.L.A.-City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship. To learn more about the Guggenheim Foundation and to see the full list of 2025 Fellows, please visit # # # About Long Beach City College Long Beach City College consists of two campuses with an enrollment of more than 35,000 students each semester. The education program's primary purpose is to prepare students for transfer to baccalaureate-granting institutions, entry into work or career development, and to support businesses in economic development. Long Beach City College serves the cities of Avalon, Lakewood, Long Beach, and Signal Hill. Long Beach City College promotes equitable student learning and achievement, academic excellence, and workforce development by delivering high-quality educational programs and support services to our diverse communities. Visit for more information on Long Beach City College. Attachment Carolyn Castaño CONTACT: Stacey Toda Long Beach City College 5629384004 stoda@ in to access your portfolio
Forbes
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Hometown Hero Raymond Saunders Honored At Carnegie Museum Of Art In Pittsburgh
Raymond Saunders, 'Celeste Age 5 Invited Me to Tea,' 1986. Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus, © 2025, Estate of Raymond Saunders. All rights reserved Visitors to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh are forgiven for not knowing the name Raymond Saunders (b. 1934). Eric Crosby, the museum's director, was unfamiliar with Saunders when Crosby relocated to Pittsburgh for a curatorial job at the Carnegie in 2015, and he's devoted his entire professional career to contemporary American art. Saunders is hardly an unknown or a recent 'discovery,' however. He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Awards (1977, 1984). Saunders' paintings are in the permanent collections of the nation's finest institutions including the Carnegie, the National Gallery, The Met, MoMA, the Whitney, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Pittsburgh native's lack of national notoriety has more to do with his remove from New York than anything else. New York and its museums and galleries and auction houses and collectors and arts media continue leading contemporary American art around by the nose. From Pittsburgh, Saunders moved to Oakland in the early 1960s. He received an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (1961) and later served there and at California State University East Bay as a faculty member. He continues living and working in the Bay Area. Saunders also, conspicuously, had zero interest in playing the gallery game or producing art for the market. And he's a Black man. That didn't help any painter's career in the 20th century. Crosby and the Museum shine an overdue light on the artist, featuring him in their signature spring exhibition, 'Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden' (through July 13, 2025), the 90-year-old's first solo show at a major museum and the most in-depth consideration of his practice to date. 'What struck me most, and what continues to strike me most about the work, is the degree of ambition that it holds,' Crosby told 'He is an artist who is a consummate student of painting, someone who has dedicated his life to the medium and embraces it in all of its complexity, all of its historical references, all of its symbolic and metaphoric illusions–so many different facets of the medium he brings to bear. I gravitate toward art that is complex and that makes me uncomfortable, that makes me ask questions, and Raymond's work does this consistently over the six decades of his career.' Raymond Saunders, 'Red Star,' 1970, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs, Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), National Gallery of Art, 2014.136.158, © 2025, Estate of Raymond Saunders. All rights reserved Saunders didn't spend much of his life in Pittsburgh–childhood through undergrad at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University–but the years he did spend were formative. Particularly time at the Carnegie Museum of Art. He participated in the Carnegie's still ongoing Saturday art classes for young people. His mentor, Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, the instructor of the classes and director of art for Pittsburgh public schools, also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. The Carnegie additionally hosts one of the most prestigious and longest running surveys of global contemporary art in America: the Carnegie International. Saunders attended these exhibitions in the 1950s, gaining exposure to radical abstract painting in Pittsburgh for the first time. 'As a young man who's learning about the possibility of painting in his own life, he's walking through the halls of this museum seeing extreme, avant-garde painting and learning through and alongside the museum,' Crosby said. 'That's a wonderful narrative that grounds the work, that makes us presenting this exhibition different from any other museum or gallery.' In addition to the caliber of the work, it is Saunders' embodiment of the Carnegie's mission that moved Crosby to not just champion, but curate the exhibition himself, a rarity for museum directors. 'As a young person, he learned how to become an artist in the halls of the Museum, learned from the Museum's collection,' Crosby added. 'This is the work of the Museum all the time, to educate young people and show them a path to choosing art in their own lives.' The life Saunders lived has been an inspiration to Pittsburgh through the generations. 'I first came to Pittsburgh and learned quickly about the legacy of Raymond Saunders within our community as someone who excelled as a young person in the arts and then went on to have a distinguished career as an educator and as an exhibiting artist,' Crosby said. 'Even though he spent relatively little time here, there is a lore about him as the successful artist who moved on from Pittsburgh. He went on to have this extraordinary career and younger artists have grown up in his shadow in Pittsburgh looking to him as a model for someone who grows up in Pittsburgh and then has a successful career in the arts.' Saunders has never forgotten the home folks. He has titled paintings after Pittsburgh. References to the Carnegie, the Museum's education program, the Saturday morning art classes, to Fitzpatrick, and specific artworks from the Museum's collection feature in his paintings. 'His paintings are very situated within his autobiography and integral to that autobiography is formative time as a young person learning about art here at the Museum,' Crosby explained. Raymond Saunders, 'Untitled,' 2000, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition Committee, in honor of Nancy L. Lane, and Greater Harlem Nursing Home and Rehabilitation Center, Inc., 2022.15, © 2025, Estate of Raymond Saunders. All rights reserved Flowers are also a consistent theme in Saunders' paintings. He has used the exhibition title, 'Flowers from a Black Garden,' to describe past exhibitions and paintings. Nearly every work includes flowers in some form. 'For me, the importance of flowers is around the possibility of beauty and love within the pictures,' Crosby said. 'His work is inherently abstract, and yet, somehow beauty can take hold. The flower is something that he's always been attracted to as a subject matter, I think, because it grows, it changes, it shape shifts, it moves through different seasons of life.' Same as Saunders' artwork. 'He never really had an inclination to ever finish a work, formally. He would always return to artworks,' Crosby explained. 'He would come back to them, revise them, reconfigure them, add elements to them, subtract things, continue to play with the artworks and often collaborate with others and children on the making of his artworks.' Yes, children. Throughout Saunders paintings, he's pasted drawings by children onto the surfaces, collage style. 'There was always a process of returning back to his work rather than completing one masterpiece after another (in) linear fashion; he'd always circle back, reconsider his own practice, learn something from it, and carry it forward,' Crosby said. These improvisations and innovations are visible across 35 works in the show, some as large as 16-feet-wide. They are filled with references to urban experience, education, Black history, pop culture, jazz, and, of course, Pittsburgh and flowers. While not overtly political at first blush, remember, Saunders was working in Oakland in the late 60s and early 70s, the Bay Area then the epicenter of the Black Power movement, the American Indian Movement, the anti-war movement. In his large-scale works, Saunders routinely deploys a black ground recalling a literal blackboard and the ideas explored in his 1967 essay Black Is a Color, in which he claims an expansive role for the Black artist. 'i am not here to play the galleries,' Saunders writes in a personal typographic expression. 'i am not responsible for anyone's entertainment. i am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.'
