Deborah Solomon | |
---|---|
Born |
New York City |
August 9, 1957
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Journalist and biographer |
Deborah Solomon (born August 9, 1957, New York City) is an American art critic, journalist and biographer. Her weekly column, "Questions For" ran in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011. She is currently the art critic for WNYC Public Radio, the New York City affiliate of NPR.
Solomon was born in New York City and grew up in New Rochelle, New York. Her parents, Jerry and Sally Solomon, owned an art gallery. In an interview with Francis Ford Coppola, Solomon disclosed that her father was born in Romania and fled as a child in 1938. She was educated at Cornell University, where she majored in art history and served as the associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1979. The following year, she received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 in the category of biography.
Solomon began her career writing about art for various publications, including The New Criterion. For most of the 1990s, she served as the chief art critic of The Wall Street Journal. She has written extensively about American painting and is a frequent interviewer on art subjects. She has also written three biographies of American artists.
In 2003 the New York Times Magazine hired her to do a regular weekly column in which she interviewed various people. She became "an expert at forcing her subjects... to say something" and developed a reputation as a "bulldog" interviewer, "one of the toughest interviewers around." According to Kat Stoeffel in an opinion piece for The New York Observer, Solomon's weekly "Questions For" column "has been a slow-burning controversy since Ms. Solomon’s debut in 2003. Ms. Solomon’s editing practices (despite the weekly disclaimer) led some of her subjects–including Tim Russert, Ira Glass, and Amy Dickinson–to cry foul. But then some weeks’ interviews–Das Racist comes to mind–seemed to redeem the whole practice."