Book Talk! Jennifer Sichel: Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices

Event Details

Book Talk and Reception
(Rescheduled!) Thursday, February 5, 2026 | 4:30-6:00 p.m.

Please join us for a lecture and conversation to celebrate the publication of Hite professor Jennifer Sichel's book Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Tracing Swenson's and Johnston's intertwined paths, the book provides a history of queer practices that were central to the development of avant-garde art but have been largely overlooked. Criticism Without Authority makes their work visible not just as criticism, but as its own form of art. 

“An essential, vivid, and brisk account of two renegade art writers in postwar New York, Criticism Without Authority is as flush as its subjects with creative energy and the conviction that it’s important to sit with things, ideas, and histories we are not sure about. Beyond its importance to scholarship, this book is deeply moving.”

-Prudence Peiffer, author of The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever