Jane Dickson in conversation with Lynne Tillman

Jane Dickson
in conversation with
Lynne Tillman
Saturday, September 6, 4–5pm

Karma
22 East 2nd Street
New York

Karma presents a conversation between artist Jane Dickson and writer Lynne Tillman on the occasion of Dickson’s exhibition Wonder Wheel at 22 East 2nd Street, New York.

Jane Dickson makes paintings and drawings that explore the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson’s practice was forged in the crucible of New York’s late-1970s counterculture, where she participated in artist collectives like Fashion Moda, Collaborative Projects Inc., and Group Material. Working figuratively from her own photographs, especially of New York’s Times Square, where she lived for nearly thirty years, Dickson portrays strip clubs, diners, motels, sex workers, and their seemingly straight-laced foils: suburban homes, driveways, and businessmen. Using oils and acrylic on canvas and linen alongside a range of atypical surfaces such as vinyl, felt, Astroturf, and sandpaper, she achieves impressionistic textures that often blur her subjects in hazes of neon and darkness. In her compositions, the tradition of social realist painting collides with postmodern feminist cultural critique, yielding paintings that are simultaneously representational and conceptual. Dickson lives in New York.

Lynne Tillman’s novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction); American Genius, A Comedy; and Men and Apparitions (nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize). Her nonfiction includes The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–67; What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism); and Mothercare, a book-length essay on caregiving her mother. Her essays and stories are published in Frieze, BOMB, Bookforum, Aperture, n+1, Worms, and Tank; as well as in monographs on the work of artists such as Dana Schutz, Steve Locke, Stanley Whitney, Amy Sillman, and Raymond Pettibon, and in museum catalogues for exhibitions at, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, and MOCA. Tillman’s most recent books are Thrilled to Death: Selected Stories and The Mystery of Perception, a book-length conversation with Taylor Lewandowski (both 2025). Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Contributions to Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.