A Conversation about Dave Hickey and Terry Allen

Amarillo Highway (for Dave Hickey):

A conversation with Terry Allen, Jarrett Earnest, and Brendan Greaves, featuring a musical performance by Daniel Milewski

RSVP at events@davidzwirnerbooks.com

To celebrate the release of two new publications, Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002 by the late art critic Dave Hickey and Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen by Brendan Greaves, visual artist and songwriter Terry Allen, editor Jarrett Earnest, and writer Brendan Greaves, will be in conversation about Hickey and Allen’s fifty-year friendship and shared roots as fellow Texans and songwriters; the confluences and collisions of country music and the art world; and the relationships between artist, critic, editor, and biographer. Songwriter Daniel Milewski, a friend of both Hickey and Allen, will perform a short set of songs by each artist.

Dave Hickey was a singular voice on art, music, democracy, and culture. Known for his radical criticism, he united different worlds through a range of literary styles and techniques to ultimately explore what it means to be human. Feint of Heart unites twenty of Hickey’s characteristically astute essays on art from over twenty years, most of which were originally published in exhibition catalogues that are long out of print. The result is a volume that shows the writer at his most creative and incisive in an ever-relevant exploration of beauty and value.

Truckload of Art is the definitive, authorized, and first-ever biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic songwriter who occupies an utterly unique position straddling the disparate, and usually distant, worlds of conceptual art and country music.

Both books will be available for purchase and signing after the discussion.

Dave Hickey (1938–2021) was an American art critic and essayist known for his sharp wit and keen eye. In the late 1960s, he opened A Clean Well-Lighted Place, an art gallery in Austin, Texas, named after a short story by Ernest Hemingway, before moving to New York, where he worked as the director of Reese Palley Gallery. He served as executive editor of Art in America; staff songwriter at Glaser Publications, Nashville; and arts editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He later served as associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His writing appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Village Voice, and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. He received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1994 and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2001 for his influential art criticism. His books include The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997).

Terry Allen is a songwriter, visual and recording artist, and playwright. He’s released more than a dozen studio albums since his 1975 debut Juarez, and his wide-ranging artwork resides in collections around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, since 1989 he has resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and collaborator, the performer and poet Jo Harvey Allen.

Jarrett Earnest is a writer, curator, and editor living in New York. He is the author of What It Means to Write about Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid until Sunset (2023) as well as the host of Angelic Transmissions, an art talk show on East Village Radio. His criticism has appeared in exhibition catalogues and publications around the world, including regularly in The New York Review of Books. He edited and wrote the introduction to Feint of Heart: Art Writings, 1982–2002 by Dave Hickey.

Brendan Greaves is founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors and has collaborated on numerous projects with Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners (2019), for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes. A folklorist, essayist, and lapsed art worker, he studied at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and lives in Chapel Hill, NC, with his wife, Samantha, and son, Asa.

Daniel Milewski is an artist, singer songwriter and guitar player based in Miami. Drawing on the many rich influences in Americana, rock and folk, he carves out his own space with a playful spirit and a commitment to the song. Writing, collaborating and performing extensively, Daniel has shared the stage with such acts as Bonny Light Horseman, Cat Power, Jacuzzi Boys, and John Craigie, to name a few. He spends his summers working and writing in rural Maine with his family.