Fifty Years Inside an Artist’s Mind: The Journal of Athena Tacha, covering the period from 1970 to 2020, demonstrates that Tacha, now approaching her 86th birthday, has made remarkable strides toward achieving the ambitious goal that she set for herself. The scale and the scope of the volume reflect at first glance the extraordinary ambition and breadth of Tacha’s career and of her omnivorous intellectual appetite. At the same time, as readers will quickly perceive, the “self-portrait” Tacha presents is unflinchingly and courageously intimate, revealing personal concerns and self-doubts, even as she relentlessly pursues the questions that inspire her art. Early in her career, she observes: “The problem with me is that I want to be everything: artist and scientist, maker and thinker, ascetic and sensualist, superhuman and yet human, classic and baroque in my art (balance through asymmetry). Is it possible?” [2].
A pioneer in the...