John Yau presents Three Lectures on Jasper Johns

An award-winning and prolific writer on visual culture, John Yau has published more than 50 books of poetry, artists’ books, fiction, and art criticism, including The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns. The latter collection of essays, drawing on conversations with the artist over a period of 30 years, considers the relationship of Johns’s work to lived experience. Most recently Yau contributed two essays to SFMOMA’s catalogue accompanying the exhibition Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, examining Johns’s approach to his work. As Johns has said, “I am interested in the idea of sight . . . in how we see and why we see the way we do” — and how this challenges the viewer with the task of making meaning through seeing. Local poet Andrew Joron leads a Q & A with Yau following his talk.