Art
The Photographer Who Shot Truman Capote’s Brooklyn
Before Truman Capote's society girl Holly Golightly appeared in the November 1958 issue of Esquire, the author was in a heated argument with his editor over visuals.
Allison Meier
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
Meet Etti-Cat, NYC’s Feline Subway Etiquette Advisor of the 1960s
In the 1960s, New York City commuters were prodded into respectful behavior by subway posters featuring a black-and-white tuxedo cat.
Art
A Burial Suit of Mushrooms that Consume Your Remains
Despite embalming and sealed caskets being a relatively new tradition in American burial, brought about by the high mortality of the Civil War, we've quickly become uncomfortable with our mortal decay.
Art
Mourners from Around the Globe Gather to Share Our Traditions of Grief
As a New York gravedigger once succinctly put it to me: “We all have dead.” No person is isolated from loss.
Art
Glimpsing the Evolution of Glass Lenses in Three Centuries of Microscopes
CORNING, NY — To closely inspect the evolution of the microscope, the Corning Museum of Glass is highlighting the lens-making behind the optical tool.
Art
An Overgrown Naval Cemetery Is Reborn as a Park
The curving boardwalk of the new park at the Brooklyn Navy Yard is respectfully raised above the earth where the remains of unknown sailors may still be interred.
Performance
An Operatic Lament for the Lonely Artist
"When we meet the very best, we have to give up," baritone Rod Gilfry intoned in The Loser, composer David Lang's one-act opera that debuted last week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
Art
An Unlikely East-West Collaboration in 1830s Portraits of Tumor Patients
Guangzhou, then called Canton by Westerners, was the only Chinese port open to foreign trading until the Opium Wars of the 19th century, and it became a rare hub of direct interactions between the two cultures. One of these resulted in a surprisingly moving series of paintings portraying bodies disf
Books
How Photographs Have Shaped Our View of the National Parks
There were two prominent types of landscape photographs in the 1860s: Civil War battlefields strewn with the dead, and sweeping vistas of the West.
Art
A Mural Honors the Ruins of an American Indian Boarding School
CONCHO, Okla. — Overgrown grass creeps up around the decayed remains of the Concho Indian Boarding School, its faded yellow walls pocked with gaping doorways and boarded windows.
Art
After Sunset, Phantoms of Montreal's Past Appear
MONTRÉAL — At sunset in the oldest streets of Montréal, ghosts of the city's past animate on its walls.
Art
A New Online Trove Brings Historical Silhouettes to Light
The popularity of silhouettes in the 18th and 19th centuries wasn't only due to them being an affordable form of portraiture before the era of photography, the art also fit with popular pseudosciences like phrenology.