Ed Schad & Liat Yossifor: Letters Apart

Ed Schad is a Los Angeles-based curator and writer for art and culture publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Art Review, Flash Art, Frieze, Modern Painters, and The Brooklyn Rail. As Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad museum in Los Angeles, in 2022 he curated a survey of William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows, as well as edited and wrote the book to accompany the exhibition. He previously organized and produced catalogues for the large scale exhibitions Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow and Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again. Schad has contributed essays to monographic catalogs on the work of Robert Irwin, Natalie Frank, Roy Dowell, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Sterling Ruby, Kaz Oshiro, Annie Lapin, Albert Contreras, Raimons Staprans, Charles Garabedian, Pieter Vermeersch, Kavin Buck, and Liat Yossifor. His poems have been published in the Blue Collar Review, Suturo, and The Nonconformist. His first collection of poetry is Letters Apart, a collaboration with the painter Liat Yossifor, co-published in 2023 by University of La Verne and DoppelHouse Press.Liat Yossifor is an Israeli-born artist based in Los Angeles. She has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including (solos) The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; the Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; and Pitzer Art Galleries in Claremont. Group exhibitions include those at the Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico; the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico; Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; the University of La Verne, La Verne, CA; the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Germany; and the Margulies Collection. Yossifor earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, 2002. She completed residencies at The Rauschenberg in Captiva Island in Florida in 2020, and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany in 2010 and was the recipient of Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship, Germany, in 2022. Select public collections include: Creative Artist Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection (CIAC), Mexico City, Mexico; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

In these beautifully rendered vignettes Ed Schad's observations and associations feel their way across Liat Yossifor's opaque, luscious surfaces. The result is a profound experiment in ekphrasis, where words shimmer against images, like air against water.—Jarrett Earnest, author of What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics and winner of the 2021 Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize