(Didion and her late husband moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1964, where they worked as highly successful screenwriters, producing scripts for 1971's The Panic in Needle Park and 1976's A Star Is Born, among other works, before returning to New York 20 years later.) And from her New York perch, Didion was able to observe the political scene more closely, writing trenchant pieces about Clinton, El Salvador and most searingly the Central Park Five. As a Westerner transplanted to New York, Didion was able to look at her native land, its mores and fixed rules of behavior, with the loving and critical eyes of a daughter who got out and went back. In Joan Didion: What She Means, the writer and curator Hilton Als creates a mosaic that explores Didion's life and work and the feeling each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics.Īrranged chronologically, the book highlights Didion's fascination with the two coasts that made her. Joan Didion: What She Means is organized by Hilton Als in collaboration with Connie Butler, chief curator, and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, curatorial assistant.An exploration of the visual corollary to Didion's life and work and the feeling that each generates in her admirers, detractors and critics-including artists from Helen Lundeberg to Diane Arbus, Betye Saar to Maren Hassinger, Vija Celmins and Andy Warhol

Opening less than a year after her death at age 87, and planned since 2019, Joan Didion: What She Means follows a meandering chronology that grapples with the simultaneously personal and distant evolution of Didion’s voice as a writer and pioneer of the “New Journalism.” The exhibition closely follows her life according to the places she called home and is laid out in chronological chapters-Holy Water: Sacramento, Berkeley (1934–1956) Goodbye to All That: New York (1956–1963) The White Album: California, Hawai‘i (1964–1988) and the final chapter, Sentimental Journeys: New York, Miami, San Salvador (1988–2021)

Organized by critically acclaimed writer and New Yorker contributor Hilton Als, the exhibition features approximately 50 artists ranging from Betye Saar to Vija Celmins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maren Hassinger, Silke Otto-Knapp, John Koch, Jorge Pardo, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, and many others, with 250 works in media including painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of the films for which Didion authored screenplays.

Joan Didion: What She Means is an exhibition as portrait, a narration of the life of one artist by another.

What joan didion means