A collaboration in abstract painting and poetry. Over the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a poet/curator and a painter correspond in their own mediums, developing a conversation across space and time during lockdown. Part monograph, part poetry collection, Letters Apart presents unusual events of language and a progression of abstracted imagery. In this beautiful and intimate book, personal memories, early Expressionism, lightness and darkness, fear and flights of fancy coexist. 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 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's 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. Her solo exhibitions include those at 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. Her work has been included in group exhibitions 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. 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. Letters Apart: Poetry and Painting in the Time of COVID  I had never really given much thought to the air until March 2020. In Los Angeles, the COVID-19 lockdown officially started on the 18th and I was one of many people who had little idea what was coming. What had been a rumor of a virus from Wuhan, China eventually not only came onto my doorstep, but also served to shut the door itself. I was behind it with a ten pound bag of brown rice, a grip of homemade masks, and enough uncertainty to fill every inch of my house. Outside of the door, the lawn, the street, the neighborhood looked the same, only empty of people (at this point, even going outdoors was discouraged). However, the air was different. I stared at the silence and the totality of it hovering full of fog in the morning and pollen in the afternoon. I distrusted it. The air became a character, a sinister presence.  About two weeks into lockdown, I wanted to see what Liat Yossifor was working on. I had one of her paintings, The Dancer from 2012, and over the years, I have watched it in various shifts of light and weather and circumstance. The small grey work — with the looks of a perpetually wet surface in the process of being mixed into various shades of white and blue — has proved quite the shape-shifter over eight years, sometimes full of figures dashing to and fro across the panel, sometimes merging into a single face. My best moments with the painting are when I am doing something else, not looking at it all, and suddenly, there it is, its frenzy of soft brushstrokes snapping into views that will be gone the next day. What Liat works on, as I thought, had something to do with how the air was transitioning....