Megan O’Grady at Explore Books: How It Feels to Be Alive

Daniel Merritt joins author Megan O'Grady for a discussion of her new book, How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves.

About the Book:

A vital testament to how art makes us who we are—and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.

Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive blends criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.

How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, our selves, and the connections between the two.

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Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.

Daniel Merritt is Chief Curator of the Aspen Art Museum, where he organizes exhibitions, programs and publications. At Aspen Art Museum, he has curated exhibitions by Jacqueline Humphries, Glenn Ligon, Heji Shin and Jasper Marsalis, among many others. Previously, he was Curator and Head of Residencies at Swiss Institute (SI) in New York City, organizing several exhibitions and public programs by artists including Ser Serpas, Julien Nguyen and Sable Elyse Smith. As part of SI’s offsite series of exhibitions, he organized Noé Martínez & María Sosa: Tepalcates de Sueños at Seminario 12 in Mexico City and Michael Wang: Extinct in New York, an inaugural exhibition at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governor’s Island. He is a frequent contributor to Flash Art, where he has profiled and interviewed artists including Luc Tuymans, Aki Goto and Hardy Hill. Merritt holds an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute, London, and a BA from Columbia University, New York.