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Joan Didion: What She Means is an exhibition as portrait, a narration of the life of one artist by another. 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, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, and many others. The more than 200 works include painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of the films for which Didion authored screenplays.

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).

Joan Didion: What She Means is organized by Hilton Als in collaboration with Connie Butler, chief curator, and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, curatorial assistant.

EXHIBITION TOUR SCHEDULE

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles: October 11, 2022–February 19, 2023
Perez Art Museum, Miami: July 13, 2023–January 7, 2024

Via Hammer Museum.

… it seemed to me that the exhibit homed in on what I consider to be Didion’s most overlooked works, including the book Where I Was From, her essay “Some Women,” and her groundbreaking investigation of the Central Park jogger trial, titled “New York: Sentimental Journeys.” “What She Means” provides a timely corrective to some of the backlash bashing of “Saint Joan,” as Daphne Merkin mockingly called her.

Evelyn McDonnell

JOAN DIDION: I am more attracted to the underside of the tapestry. I tend to always look for the wrong side, the bleak side.

ALS: I feel very defensive about her in that way. And it’s just – it’s bizarre to me that it’s even an issue, what she looks like. Please just read her.

ALS: No, because her work is alive. You have to think about it as an alive thing. So how could you respond by mummifying it? You could only respond by saying what was beautiful and what you’re responding to because you’re alive to the experience of reading her. No, she’s alive. Those words are alive.

The structure of the exhibition and the work it presents are ultimately difficult to follow, though pleasurable if one is a fan of both Didion and Als as thinkers; it leaves the viewer with little if any larger statement about the author’s life and impact that has not already been stated elsewhere in Als’s previous writings or in the 2017 documentary about Didion’s life, The Center Will Not Hold. However, the show does offer an important gesture; a nuanced, rich, and beautiful memorial for Didion.

Olivia Gauthier

“Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery.” Joan Didion.

“Black performance and quotidian practice were determined by and exceeded the constraints of domination.

[..]

Scenes endeavored to illuminate the countless ways in which the enslaved challenged, refused, defied, and resisted the condition of enslavement and its ordering and negation of life, its extraction and destruction of capacity. The everyday practices, the ways of living and dying, of making and doing, were attempts to slip away from the status of commodity and to affirm existence as not chattel, as not property, as not wench.”

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.