The Un-Private Collection: David Salle and Hilton Als

The Un-Private Collection series, featuring conversations with cultural leaders and artists, began in 2013 and has featured sold-out conversations including Eric Fischl and Steve Martin, Kara Walker and Ava DuVernay, Jeff Koons and John Waters, and more. 

The next program in The Un-Private Collection series will present a conversation with artist David Salle and writer Hilton Als. The pair will discuss Salle's new book HOW TO SEE: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, among other topics. A book signing with David Salle will take place after the discussion. HOW TO SEE: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art will be available for purchase at the program.

Tickets are now sold out but tonight's talk will be livestreamed on this page beginning at 7 p.m. PT. Tickets include same-night access to the museum before the program starting at 5:30 p.m.

Watch The Livestream

About David Salle

Painter David Salle has taken the device of pastiche and made it both the form and the content of his work. His canvases are populated with dramatic images lifted from sources as various as Salle’s own black-and-white photographs, eighteenth- through twentieth-century French and American painting, 1950s print advertising and how-to-draw manuals. The juxtaposition of these images gives his paintings a mystery and charge that intrigued the art world in the 1980s and made him a leading artist of what is commonly known as the return to painting or post-modernism. Salle’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Tate Modern, the National Galerie Berlin and many others. The Broad collection includes 14 paintings by Salle. 

About Hilton Als

Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1996, a theater critic in 2002 and chief theater critic in 2013. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race and personal identity, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, discusses various narratives around race and gender and was nominated for a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2014 he wrote the catalogue essay for Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art. He has also written articles for The Nation, The Believer, and The New York Review of Books, and collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston. Als has taught at Wesleyan, Wellesley, Smith and the Yale School of Drama. He lives in New York City.

About David Salle's HOW TO SEE

David Salle’s new book HOW TO SEE: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art (W. W. Norton & Company) is an expansive collection of essays about how art works that looks at art through the eyes of the artist. Salle is a deeply intelligent and charmingly irreverent guide, and HOW TO SEE explores the mechanics and structure of a successful artwork without pretension or jargon, “in the language that artists use when they talk among themselves.”

Each essay is loosely centered on a single artist or a small group, many of whom are among Salle’s contemporaries, friends and one-time classmates. Peppered with anecdotes and stories accumulated throughout a lifetime in the art world, HOW TO SEE also provides glimpses of the personalities and quirks behind the most revered names in contemporary art including Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Urs Fischer, Jack Goldstein and Thomas Houseago, all of whom have been shown at The Broad.

Exploring art “from the inside out,” the essays touch on topics such as the aesthetics of cool, the relationship between art and celebrity and the evolution of an artist’s style over a lifetime––always while paying close attention to and unpacking the workings of the art itself. Salle writes with such a deeply felt joy, generosity and enthusiasm for his craft and his community that his essays breathe new life into the act of art-viewing.