Allison C. Meier is a former staff writer for Hyperallergic. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering visual culture and overlooked history for print and online media since 2006. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
Books
What if all your woes could be healed by some good thinking? Back in the 19th century, mesmerism was all the rage, merging nicely with the DIY Victorian parlor entertainment and hefty dose of quack medicine making the rounds — from questionable experiments in electricity to phrenology.
Books
As companions in our centuries of wandering and settling, dogs have given their loyalty blindly, in both good and bad, as sacrifices to animal testing, as scouts to survivors on battlefields, as guardians to sleep by the door at night.
Art
The Library of Congress has an incredible digitized archive of Depression-era photographs, taken between 1935 and 1945 on behalf of the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information.
Art
Up in the Bronx, at the end of the line of the 4 train, is a "remarkable museum of American funerary art," as the wall text for Sylvan Cemetery: Architecture, Art and Landscape at Woodlawn at Columbia University's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery puts it.
Performance
Set against the economic optimism and then despair of a family-owned paper company going public, Trade Practices, presented by HERE on Governors Island, asks audience members to invest in its story lines. The immersive theater production that kicked off on Labor Day Weekend stages the experience aro
Art
While dating back 3,000 years, no one recognized how special the oracle bones of the Shang Dynasty were until 1899.
Art
What if the day Picasso and Le Corbusier had spent wandering the Unité d'habitation in Marseille turned into a real structural collaboration? Italian illustrator Federico Babina has imagined such collisions of visual artists with architects in a series called Artisect.
Books
London-based artist Dominic Wilcox sees potential for improvement in all aspects of life, whether it's a GPS for remembering names in social situations or a work desk that could be a future coffin for "those who work hard all their lives and then die."
Art
When photographer J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere passed away this February, he left behind an archive of over 10,000 photographs of his home country Nigeria.
Art
Among peeling paint and creaking floors, the Governors Island Art Fair returned this past weekend to the former military homes of Colonels Row out in the New York Harbor.
Art
Filmmaker Sonia Bible considers Rosaleen Norton "the most persecuted artist in Australian history." With a new documentary, she's hoping to set a more accurate record of the life of woman who in the 1940s and 50s scandalized the country with her occult art, and bold sexuality.
Art
A 1511 edition of Dürer's Apocalypsis (The Apocalypse) is just one of the many literary and artistic achievements in Marks of Genius: Treasures of the Bodleian Library now at the Morgan Library & Museum.