Background

Linda Yablonsky was born on February 12, 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States to the family of Irving Yablonsky and Selma Flounder.

Education

Linda Yablonsky graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970.

Career

Linda Yablonsky has been writing about art and artists for nearly thirty years. Her reviews and feature stories have appeared in print and online in The New York Times and in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, as well as in Artforum, ArtNews, W, Wallpaper, Elle, Porter, The Art Newspaper and many other publications. From 2004 to 2009 she was senior art critic in the U.S. for Bloomberg News.

Online, Yablonsky is internationally known for her art world coverage in Artforum’s “Scene and Herd” diary, as well as in her own column, “Artifacts,” for T. She is also the author of “The Story of Junk: A Novel” (FSG, 1997) and of numerous essays in exhibition catalogues for such artists as Anish Kapoor, Mark Morrisroe, Richard Phillips, Marilyn Minter, Pipilotti Rist, Keith Sonnier and, most recently, Elmgreen & Dragset.

Throughout the 1990s, Yablonsky directed and hosted NightLight Readings and NightLight for Kids!, an innovative writers-in-performance and illustrated storytelling series that introduced more than two hundred authors to a broad audience in New York, where she lives, and a number of classics to children from all five boroughs of the city. In 2004, Yablonsky became a founding producer and host of spoken-word programs for WPS1, a streaming arts radio channel for MoMA PS1. From 2001 to 2010, she was a member of the undergraduate faculty of the School of Visual Arts.

Currently, she contributes a monthly column (“Linda on the Loose”) to The Art Newspaper and is at work on the first book to take full account of the dramatic life and career of the artist Jeff Koons. Central to the story is an examination of what forces and conditions combined to make this polarizing artist a primary reference point in cultures around the globe. The book, based on personal information from the artist and close to 200 interviews with significant figures in contemporary art, is forthcoming from Henry Holt & Co.

Achievements

• Since publishing her acclaimed first novel, The Story of Junk, in 1997, Linda Yablonsky has enthralled readers with her globetrotting reports from the front lines of the contemporary art world. She has managed to build a reputation of an internationally respected art critic and successfully continues her career in this field.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Story of Junk

    (Witty, terrifying, and utterly cool, Yablonsky’s roman à ...)

    1997
  • Tim Noble & Sue Webster: 2000 Words

    (Male and female, sex and violence, art and trash: the pow...)

    2015
  • Keith Sonnier: Sculpture 1966-1998

    (The book is a catalogue accompanying the artist's first M...)

    1999
  • Elmgreen & Dragset

    (Elmgreen & Dragset's constructed environments have been c...)

    2019
  • The New Fuck You

    (A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, gu...)

    1995
  • Canvas Detroit

    (A compelling look at the contemporary art and artists tha...)

    2014
  • Sculpture

    (The book was published in conjunction with a show that ra...)

    2007
  • Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist 2007
  • The Marijuana Chronicles 2013

Membership

• American Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists , United States

Personality

Linda Yablonsky, who has faced heroin addiction herself, has written a novel whose protagonist is a failed author and female heroin addict in New York City during the eighties.

Interests

• cooking, gardening

Connections

There is no information on Linda Yablonsky ever being married or having any children.

Father:

Irving Yablonsky

Mother:

Selma Flounder

Acquaintance:

Michael Stipe

Acquaintance:

Kofi Atta Annan

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998