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.
Art
While the World Cup opens today in Brazil, another international soccer tournament is on the horizon for this fall. The Homeless World Cup, started in 2003, will stage its 12th edition this October in Santiago, Chile, engaging players across the globe who live in poverty.
Books
A silhouette of a ballerina is fading on an abandoned semi truck, a sign for Lover's Lane warns of "falling rocks" and "high water." And not a person is around. What is this strange and desolate landscape?
Art
The Romantic landscape artists of the 18th and 19th century were so obsessed with nature and the skies above that in 1856 critic John Ruskin called the frenzy "modern-day cloud worship."
Art
PARIS — In forming an exhibition on the Orient Express, the railroad line most steeped in myth, it was wise to bring in the body of the train itself.
Performance
Thunder and rain hurtle over the violent, staged sorrow of this new spectacle of Macbeth, installed heath and all in the gaping drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory.
Art
Three stations on the M subway line in Ridgewood, Queens now have permanent art installations that bring moments of home into the commute.
News
NYPL closes Reading Room after falling plaster, Gurlitt art in limbo, new leaders for Picasso Museum and Hirshhorn, and more from the week in art news.
Art
PARIS — One of the newest cultural centers in Paris took over a cavernous funeral factory in 2008. Now established, it's still striving to bring contemporary practice into the city's art dialogue.
Books
After having deadly disappointment earlier this year when it was revealed two of the three books at Harvard University believed to be bound in human skin were both sheepskin, the third has been confirmed as being hominid-made.
Art
Like Victor Frankenstein manipulating his monster from the scavenged remains of tossed-away corpses, artist Nancy Grossman started her career by building "machine-animal hybrids" from a tumult of salvaged metal, wood, and leather.
Art
There's a reason Matisse left white borders of blank canvas in his paintings, and why your dogs don't appreciate a Mark Rothko color field the way you do (aside from dogs' general disregard for art). Our perception of color is linked to the brain, and highly subjective. While on the surface this see
Art
Many of the native plants in New York have been pushed out of the city's concrete expanses, but that's not to say the boroughs don't have a botanic profile. Artist Ellie Irons has spent three summers cultivating and creating pigments from the invasive plant species that have taken root in vacant lot