John Sparagana is associate professor of visual art at Rice University. He has recently presented solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, and Houston. Mieke Bal is academy professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"Formidable art writer and cultural critic Mieke Bal rises to the new occasion of rising star John Sparagana to ignite a steadily illuminating interplay of image and text. For all the eloquence and pithiness of Bal's discourse, in the conversation this book sustains the pictures are always speaking back. Sparagana's images do not set out just to flay a skin-deep commercial culture. They layer it with a distancing webwork of mystery, opening it at times to its own unconscious enigmas and often netting the unexpected. Twenty-six times, Bal enters the space thus opened or implied. She has never been better. And it's hard to imagine Sparagana being better served." - Garrett Stewart, author of The Look of Reading"

John Sparagana is associate professor of visual art at Rice University. He has recently presented solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, and Houston. Mieke Bal is academy professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"Formidable art writer and cultural critic Mieke Bal rises to the new occasion of rising star John Sparagana to ignite a steadily illuminating interplay of image and text. For all the eloquence and pithiness of Bal's discourse, in the conversation this book sustains the pictures are always speaking back. Sparagana's images do not set out just to flay a skin-deep commercial culture. They layer it with a distancing webwork of mystery, opening it at times to its own unconscious enigmas and often netting the unexpected. Twenty-six times, Bal enters the space thus opened or implied. She has never been better. And it's hard to imagine Sparagana being better served." - Garrett Stewart, author of The Look of Reading"

John Sparagana is associate professor of visual art at Rice University. He has recently presented solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, and Houston. Mieke Bal is academy professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and cofounder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her many books include Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"Formidable art writer and cultural critic Mieke Bal rises to the new occasion of rising star John Sparagana to ignite a steadily illuminating interplay of image and text. For all the eloquence and pithiness of Bal's discourse, in the conversation this book sustains the pictures are always speaking back. Sparagana's images do not set out just to flay a skin-deep commercial culture. They layer it with a distancing webwork of mystery, opening it at times to its own unconscious enigmas and often netting the unexpected. Twenty-six times, Bal enters the space thus opened or implied. She has never been better. And it's hard to imagine Sparagana being better served." - Garrett Stewart, author of The Look of Reading"