Over the past decade, Anne Walsh (Art Practice) engaged in an ongoing artistic response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s 1974 feminist novella, The Hearing Trumpet, and spent time with Carrington before her death at age 94. Walsh discovered in the artist and her novel a thrilling, subversive example of old age. In Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh (No Place Press, 2019), Walsh casts herself as an “apprentice crone” who stalks old people and takes selfies with them, becomes a mother, passes through menopause, and attends “elder theater” classes. In a multimedia story that encompasses post-it notes, photographs, and hand-written letters to Carrington, Walsh studies and rehearses the trauma of old age.

Walsh is joined by Julia Bryan-Wilson (History of Art), whose work is included in the book. After a brief conversation, they open the floor for discussion.