Hilton Als is best known as a writer. His essay collection “White Girls” was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his theater criticism at The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for more than 30 years. But in the art world he’s equally visible as a curator. He has organized a major show about Joan Didion at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and curated a traveling series of painting shows at the Yale Center for British Art, as well as two shows of Alice Neel’s portraits at David Zwirner Gallery.
Just at the moment, Victoria Miro gallery in London is reprising the more recent Zwirner show, and the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea is hosting “The Writing’s on the Wall,” in which Als has assembled work by 32 artists, including Vija Celmins, Ina Archer and Cy Twombly, to investigate how visual art overlaps with writing.
It is unusual for a critic at a major publication to get paid for curating gallery and museum exhibitions, though Als, 64, has cleared his independent hat-switching endeavors with his boss, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. And Als says he stays clear of reviewing any institution where he has curated a show.
We sat down over lunch in New York’s West Village to talk about whether he still considered writing his signature medium, how he keeps his roles clear, and which great American novelist is still in need of a documentary. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Can you tell me something about your relationship to visual art, where it comes from?
Well, I think that if you grow up without access to, you know, the annual trip to Europe to look at paintings, something else happens. And that something is having a parent who’s very inventive about finding cultural things for free, for kids. So I went to these free figure-drawing classes at the Brooklyn Museum. And I remember liking the role of the artist. I wore a little striped shirt, and I liked enacting being an artist. Which I think was kind of parallel, in a way, to talking about my gayness. And eventually I would walk to the Brooklyn Public Library, and they had these extraordinary photo books, and I remember finding or discovering Avedon, Penn, and I was fascinated by the worlds that they were capturing. So much so that I wrote a letter to Dick Avedon offering my services. I was 13. If the work was alive to me, and if the person was alive, why wouldn’t you contact them?