COVER STORY
The Grid
Kurt Andersen and painter Chuck Close talk about art on and off the grid.

Living Inside the Grid
Producer Simon Rentner explores how the grid has served artists throughout history.

Go to the New Museum's "Living Inside the Grid" site

Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was composer who decided graph paper could set his music free. He created a whole new way of notating music in the 1960's. It included a lot of scribbled marks in rows of little boxes. The music scholar David Bernstein and percussionist Jan Williams describe how Feldman's graph music worked. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.
Go to a biographical page on Morton Feldman
See the score for "King of Denmark"

The Urban Grid
Kurt Andersen walks the streets of Lower Manhattan with Marilyn Taylor. She is the chairman of the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill -- and heads its urban design and planning practice. Her firm is rebuilding 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings destroyed alongside the towers. On a late spring afternoon, they walked around those blocks toward the empty World Trade Center site, and Kurt asked her why the grid is so central to the process of making cities. Produced by Leital Molad.
See World Trade Center site plans at the LMDC
See an aerial view of Houston's grid
See photos of the city from WTC in 1997
Go to Skidmore Owings and Merrill architecture firm

SPECIAL GUEST
Chuck Close
Chuck Close has been painting since the 1960s. He helped create a renaissance of portraiture in the 1970s with his huge photorealist canvasses of family and friends, and his recent works explode with pixelated blobs of color. His work has been the subject of major retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Go to Chuck Close on Artcyclopedia
Go to MOMA's page on Chuck Close

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Fiction writer Timothy Westmoreland has type 1 diabetes, a chronic illness that need not be, for most people today, catastrophic. But for Westmoreland the illness has been about as bad as can be -- and has led him to specialize in fiction about characters who deal (and don't deal) with their chronic ailments. Jerome Weeks talked with the writer.
Go to a review of Timothy Westmoreland's "Good As Any"

Ken Butler
We'd tell you what instruments musician Ken Butler plays, except you've never heard of them before. Because Ken Butler builds everything he plays. Produced by Mallory Kasdan.
Go to Ken Butler's site
See photos of Ken Butler's instruments

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