About the Author

James Meyer is Curator in the Department of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He was previously Winship Distinguished Research Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Dia Art Foundation.

Reviews

"Meyer's The Art of Return is a hybrid of genres: autobiography, art criticism and non‐fiction. He follows two parallel trajectories, one being his personal memories of the 1960s - from hitchhiking adventures in childhood to his traumatic experience of J. F. Kennedy's assassination, to his more recent trip to the campus of Kent State University - and the other a socio‐historical account of that era, a combination that makes the book fun to read. These mnemonic and chronological lines exist parallel to one another but intersect from time to time."-- "Art History"

"Meyer is a critic and art historian of extraordinary rigor and insight, and there are few who are better equipped to write on the 'long' Sixties. The Art of Return is a striking and generous reflection on that moment's effect as reimagined by artists, writers, filmmakers, and art historians. Meyer is to be especially commended for his capacious analyses of histories too often marginalized in art-historical treatments of the long Sixties and the connections he draws in taking a more global view of art history."--Pamela Lee, author of New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art

"Meyer shows nuance in distinguishing between the historical '60s and what our present cultural imagination has made of the decade . . . . The Art of Return is written primarily as an overview of postmodern art from roughly the last thirty years. Meyer provides extensive readings of works by a diverse number of artists--in the media of photography, the novel, painting, film, and installation art--all of whom reenvision, in one way or another, the afterlives of the '60s against our contemporary backdrop."-- "Public Books"

"The Art of Return: The Sixties & Contemporary Culture offers a thoughtful account of how art and history inform each other, even in postmodern art. Meyer examines a generation of artists--his own--who use their work to remember the 1960s. They were only children during Camelot and Civil Rights and the Summer of Love, and later felt they'd missed out on a revolutionary time. Like 19th century Romantics born too late for Napoleon becoming obsessed with his memory, these 'Sixties children' live with a 'gnawing sense of belatedness' driving them 'to take charge of the history we did not experience; it goads us to understand what happened--to reconstruct, reimagine, and retell.'"-- "The Washington Free Beacon"