Peter Schjeldahl

Peter Schjeldahl was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and grew up in Minnesota. He dropped out of college and moved to New York City to pursue journalism. In 1964, he spent a year in Paris. Schjeldahl once noted in an interview that he “started out to be a surrealist poet” and named his “heroes” as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Baudelaire. Associated with New York School poets such as O’Hara and Ashbery, Schjeldahl published a few books of poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, including Since 1964: New and selected poems (1978), until he abandoned poetry to pursue art criticism full time.

Schjeldahl has written on art for numerous publications, including Artforum, Art in America, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Hewas the art critic for the Village Voice from 1990–1998 and since 1998 has been a staff writer at the New Yorker. His writings on art and culture have been collected in four books of criticism, including The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl (1993) and Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (2008).

Schjeldahl’s honors and awards include a Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, a Frank Jewett Mather Award, a Howard Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.