In Megan O’Grady’s Magnificent New Book ‘How It Feels to Be Alive,’ a Treatise on the Art of Looking

The world at large likes to tell us what art is and should be and, often, how it ought to be executed.

In 1508, Pope Julius was telling Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel in Rome when all Michelangelo wanted to do was sculpt. More recently, Mayor Giuliani, famously upset by a Chris Ofili painting in 1999, deployed that classic anti-art critique. “If I can do it,” Giuliani said back then, “it’s not art, because I’m not much of an artist, and I could figure out how to put this [painting] together.”

I most recently heard that line at Dia:Beacon, in the vicinity of a Robert Ryman painting—abstract white pieces that were, up until that moment, quietly leading me through questions about landscapes and emotions. “I mean, I could do that,” the person next to me said, and I remember being mortified, for fear that the paintings might have overheard.

I also remember feeling sad, a sadness related to all the societal pressures around artists and artwork—how it’s made, who the artist is or was, who gets to see and understand it. This particular sadness is addressed early on in Megan O’Grady’s How It Feels to Be Alive, a beautiful book that traces O’Grady’s own life with art and artists—from her first visits as a child to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, not far from her childhood Kansas home; to her work profiling contemporary artists for magazines; to her life in Boulder, where she is a professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado.

Early on, O’Grady tells a story that starkly sets the stakes for deeply considering the places that art—or the creations we call artwork—can take us if we allow it, or if, for example, we use that very human tool called empathy.

“Whenever I see a review of a novel or exhibition that claims the work isn’t relevant or relatable,” O’Grady writes, “I think of the couple who used to live next door to my parents in California. They told me that they had been reading The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s novel, for their book club, but ‘couldn’t relate’ to the characters: men and women, most of them queer, all of them contending with feelings of alienation or impending mortality. It did not feel relevant to their lives. It was too ‘niche’ and ‘about subcultures.’ A year later the wife succumbed to breast cancer and the husband hanged himself in their kitchen. Finding something relatable or relevant is subjective, sure, but the ability to recognize ourselves in each other, and the burst of compassion we feel when we do, is what makes us human.”

How It Feels to Be Alive looks at five artworks from five different artists, putting them in the context of when they were made and (to some extent) where the artists lived, but also putting them in the context of O’Grady’s own life. Friendship, by Agnes Martin, is the first painting we meet, a six-foot grid of gold leaf that feels like a portal. Martin suggested that a viewer approach it “as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.”

“That sounds about right to me,” writes O’Grady. “Ten or twelve paces away, the effect is one of infinitude, of having traveled a great distance to reach the edge of the shore. The world goes on, and we’re suspended within it.”

O’Grady met Friendship in her late 20s, at a time when an important partnership “didn’t abate my loneliness but worsened it.” O’Grady follows Martin’s road to the grid paintings while remembering her own encounters with Martin’s work, first in college in Houston and then in New York, where she worked for Vogue. Martin craved solitude and yet, like most humans, needed friends—“a hand across the dark rivers of self-doubt and anxiety,” as O’Grady puts it.

That warp and weft between companionship and isolation offers us a meditation on the way friendships are fashioned, and O’Grady shows us how Martin—who was born in the flatness of Saskatchewan and, as an adult, famously lived, monk-like, on a rift in the Colorado Plateau—was inspired and moved by her relationship with Lenora Tawney, the textile artist who gifted White Flower, Martin’s first full-scale grid painting, to the Guggenheim. That gift was a monumental career boost for Martin, and Martin’s letter of gratitude to Tawney is itself a sketch of the edges, a drawing of only the borders of a field of happiness, so as not to lessen gratitude with a deadening definition:

I am not going to be able to tell you anything really. You have made this day the turning point in my life. It means an enormous opportunity for me. Now I can take my time and really get to work. The whole scene is changed. There is no way to grasp the size of it. There is no way for me to get hold of it all. I do not think you will be able to imagine even a small part of the enormous changes in my position….

O’Grady examines the borders of her own relationships—with people as well as cities—and Martin’s work gives her space to breathe: “a retroactive reprieve.” She continues: “We live between so many lines and parameters, social, ethical, and professional. When the rules we live by no longer serve, when we refuse to—or find it no longer possible to—snap to grid, what is left?”

It’s the thoughtful and careful writing that makes the book work so wonderfully, together with the editorial choices. It’s a curated tour through one life, with its disasters and joys, complications and clarities, all set alongside the wonders of paintings and performances that add perspective to the aforementioned disasters and joys and et ceteras. In exploring Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series and the self-portraits and portraits of the French 19th-century painter Berthe Morisot, O’Grady considers her own relationship with her daughter. Remembering her interactions with Barbara Kruger—O’Grady explores Kruger’s Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) in the book and previously profiled her for the New York Times—she writes: “We call art making a practice because it is exactly that, a practice—a trying out of feelings and mediums that will never be fully mastered. All we have, as Kruger told me, is our best attempts.”

The late (and very great) Pope.L—perhaps best known for his “crawl” performances, which saw him crawling on hands and knees through cities and towns—is featured in a chapter that looks at the performance artist’s Flint Water Project, which Pope.L himself called “an art installation, a performance, and an intervention.” The chapter meditates on the meaning of home.

Just before COVID, O’Grady and her husband and daughter lost their Chicago apartment when the roof caught on fire. (Pope.L, she writes, “once said to me that when metaphors create themselves, that’s when you know you’re in for it.”) Flint Water Project shows us the ways that cities across the country are sorted by race and class—the great American apartheid that’s still mostly unspoken. But Pope.L shows us the ways we might move forward; the way we sense our bodies in safety, in danger, in all ways—a poignant proprioception that is exactly related to the safety and danger of others. “I have come to believe in a way home that doesn’t point backward, one that art can help us see,” O’Grady writes.

How It Feels to Be Alive ends at what feels like the end of the world, in a chapter centered on the large-scale sculptures of Beverly Pepper. And yet, as it closes, O’Grady’s book reminds us, as she writes from a Colorado of wildfires, that the world is simultaneously ending and beginning all the time. On a trip to Chaco Canyon, in northwestern New Mexico’s San Juan basin, she ponders the Chacoan civilization that engineered a multi-story urban settlement, that grew and stored food, that managed limited water supplies in an arid climate—the kind of place that a contemporary US community would struggle to keep air conditioned today. (In 2026, the ruins of Chaco Canyon are threatened by fracking.)

While visiting, she learned about the alignment of stone slabs that brings the light of the summer solstice onto a single petroglyph. It’s a mystery what, precisely, that signal said, or if it relates to why the people of Chaco Canyon left. It’s a mystery that artists working in large and small scales can help us scrutinize. What’s not a mystery is what one of O’Grady’s students said to her in an elevator after class not too long ago, which I’ve been thinking of since I read about their encounter: “Thank God for art, right?”