Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, professor emeritus, Art Center College of Design, is a painter who also writes about art and related matters, both on his own and with Rebecca Norton, as the collaborative Awkward x 2. He is the author of Beyond Piety (1995) and Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999,) and other books and essay; his awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting and NEA Fellowships in both painting and criticism, and he was the 1988 recipient of the College Art Association’s Mather Award for Art Criticism. The CAA’s Mather Award was given to him in part for his “Blankness as a Signifier,” which was first published in Critical Inquiry and would become a chapter in his Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (1999).