March 16, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Sarah Larson’s “Talk of the Town” story “Big Time.” It’s a mini-profile of master rigger Joe Vilardi, who installed Michael Heizer’s new exhibition “Negative Sculpture” at a Gagosian gallery in Chelsea. The show, Larson says, “features ‘Convoluted Line A’ and ‘Convoluted Line B’ (2024), two eighty-seven-and-a-half-foot curved steel troughs that wend through the gallery’s floor like a figure skater’s tracks on ice.” These sculptures weigh more than eighteen tons. That’s nothing for Vilardi. Larson says that he’s worked with “a Who’s Who of colossal sculpture: Heizer and Serra, but also Simone Leigh, Jeff Koons, MOMA. The biggest and heaviest stuff can involve cranes, hydraulic gantries, barges, and police escorts.” 

Vilardi talks about the time he installed a Richard Serra work at Kenyon College:

“The vertical of the sculpture was sixty feet tall—massive. Years of planning, really difficult. A beautiful sculpture. We were all in awe as we were doing it,” Vilardi said. “You’re bringing in steel plates that weighed close to a hundred thousand pounds each, that had to be then stood up and then one leaned against the next. We had five cranes there, balancing these plates, guys up in baskets working the clamps and lining things up and welding. At the end of it, it’s pretty impressive. It’s crazy when you think, Look what we just accomplished. Who are we? We just started out as a bunch of riggers—and riggers are really what we are—and here we are assembling something, a combined weight of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, sixty feet tall, in the middle of a courtyard of a school, that will be there—it could be there forever.”

Larson’s delightful story reminded me of another New Yorker piece on Michael Heizer’s work – Dana Goodyear’s brilliant “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016). Goodyear visits Heizer’s monumental “City,” in Garden Valley, Nevada, and describes it in detail. Here’s a taste:

In every direction, at every angle, wide boulevards disappeared around corners, to unseen destinations, leading me into depressions where the whole world vanished and all that was left was false horizon and blue sky. Fourteen miles of concrete curbs sketched a graceful, loopy line drawing around the mounds and roads. Ravens wheeled, and I startled at a double thud of sonic boom from fighter jets performing exercises overhead. I sat down in a pit; flies came to tickle my hands. It was easy to imagine myself as a pile of bones. Before no other contemporary art work have I felt induced to that peculiar, ancient fear: What hand made this, and what for?

Michael Heizer, City (Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth)

Best of 2016: Reporting

Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“He walked over to the kissing point and got down on his knees. He blew some fine dirt from the joint and ran a finger through the dust. His silver cross hung down. The picture was: artist, archeologist, supplicant, looking at an entrance to the underworld”).

2. Tad Friend, “Holding the T,” January 18, 2016 (“I sent him on a long scavenger hunt, then decoyed him in for a backhand drop and flicked it crosscourt into open space. At 9–10, I thumped a series of forehand rails and then whipped a crosscourt by him. Another crosscourt got me a game ball at 12–11, and a backhand volley, a perfect nick at the perfect time, closed it out”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant,” August 29, 2016 (“Baehrel has concocted a canny fulfillment of a particular foodie fantasy: an eccentric hermit wrings strange masterpieces from the woods and his scrabbly back yard. The extreme locavore, pure of spade and larder. The toughest ticket in town. Stir in opacity, inaccessibility, and exclusivity, then powder it with lichen: It’s delicious. You can’t get enough. You can’t even get in”).

4. Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016 (“She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Patina,” September 19, 2016 (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”).

6. Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms,” July 4, 2016 (“She had no interest in trying to show who they were under the feathers and the fantasy: she was in love with the bravery of their self-creation, their otherness”).

7. Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World,” May 23, 2016 (“Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come”).

8. Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016 [“Either they were willing to have Trump speak in their stead (“I am your voice”), the very definition of a dictator, or else they wanted to speak for themselves, because the system was rigged, because the establishment could not be trusted, or because no one, no one, could understand them, their true, particular, Instagram selves”].

9. Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” April 4, 2016 (“Carola Quispé, a former Gustu student, aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish. ‘It’s made with papa-pinta-boca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,’ she said. It felt like drinking incense”).

10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice,” October 24, 2016 (“One iceberg reminded me of an airplane hangar, another of the Guggenheim Museum. There was a sphinx, a pagoda, and a battleship; a barn, a silo, and the Sydney Opera House”).

Honorable Mention: Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016.

Credit: The above photograph, by Jamie Hawkesworth, is from Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016).