Megan O'Grady with Kealey Boyd Live at Tattered Cover Colfax

Join us for an inspiring conversation with local author and assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Megan O'Grady and art writer and critic, Kealey Boyd on Thursday, April 30th at 6:00 PM at our Colfax location.

Registration includes the following options:

• A signed Hardcover copy of the book … OR

• A $5 Gift Card to Tattered Cover Book Store

We will have a limited supply of additional books for guests to purchase in store. Only a book ticket guarantees you a copy of the book.

If you are unable to attend the event after purchasing a ticket, you are required to pick up your copy of the book (with proof of purchase from your event registration) within 7 days after the event date. If the book is not picked up by that date, you relinquish your copy to Tattered Cover Book Store.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A vital testament to how art makes us who we are—and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.

Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.
When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.
Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made—often drawing on personal conversations with the artists—O’Grady examines the work’s rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, our selves, and the connections between the two.

A quick word of warning–this book will make you ravenous to engage with art. Be careful reading if you are more than 15 miles away from a museum or gallery. Pending immediate proximity, you may find that hours have passed looking up Do-Ho Suh’s ghostly fabric sculptures of his childhood home, zooming in on the Thorne miniatures on the Art Institute of Chicago’s online archive, or comparing shades of blue in digital renderings of Agnes Martin’s Night Sea. This book foments an insatiable need to answer the question, “What art is near me and how can I engage with it?” and invites profound reflection about the artwork that has punctuated ones own existence up to now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER
Kealey Boyd is a writer and critic who covers the intersection of art and economics. Her writing appears in Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, Colorado Public Radio, Frieze, Art Papers, The Belladonna Comedy, College Art Association, Artillery Magazine, and several art catalogs and books including a recently published essay in "Artists as Writers" (Intellect Books, 2025). Boyd is also the 2025 Clyfford Still Museum Institute Fellow in Art Criticism investigating the financial conditions of the American artist since 1940.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Tattered Cover Book Store