Art
Quiet and Haunting Photographs of Our Modern Ruins
Our fascination with ruins is nothing new.
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
The Short-lived 1940s NYC Tabloid That "Dared to Tell the Truth"
The New York PM Daily only lasted from 1940 to 1948, but in its short run it served as a vital progressive voice in New York City and promoted groundbreaking photography to accompany its stories.
Art
The 19th-Century Lady Who Used Audubon's Birds for Wallpaper
In 1827, when Lady Isabella Hertford finally installed the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper the Prince of Wales had gifted her two decades earlier, she thought it didn't have enough pizzazz for her drawing room at Temple Newsam in Leeds, England.
Books
Quiet Drawings from a Life Lost in Mental Institutions
In one of the drawings discovered in a well-worn album, fished out of the trash in 1970 by a teenager in Springfield, Missouri, a wide-eyed woman points to a bouquet of flowers below the words "ECTLECTRC PENCIL."
Art
Take a Bite Out of Modernism with MoMA's 1988 Architecture Cookie Cutters
Which modern architecture icon makes a better cookie, Eero Saarinen's sleek TWA Terminal or Frank Lloyd Wright's spiraling Guggenheim Museum?
Art
Posters Portend the Mortal Hazards of Modernity
MIAMI BEACH — For every skyscraper, zeppelin, airplane, or even lightbulb that demonstrated the progress of technology from the late-19th to mid-20th century, there were countless human bodies mangled, maimed, and electrified along the way.
Art
A Photographer Who Tracked Displacement, from Soviet Gulags to Ethiopia's Civil War
Ruth Gruber was the youngest PhD graduate in the world, earning her degree at the age of 20 with a doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf (the first academic work on the author), when she trudged out into the Arctic and became the first journalist to interview prisoners at a Soviet Gulag in 1935.
Books
An Eccentric Visual History of Our Most Basic Shapes
In the 1960s, Italian artist Bruno Munari explored the visual history of the square, circle, and triangle in three books, which Princeton Architectural Press recently compiled.
In Brief
Erased Nude Discovered in a Leonardo da Vinci Notebook
It seems like there's always something new to discover in the thousands of pages of notes and drawings left behind by Leonardo da Vinci, whether it's a sketch for an early refrigerator or an illustration of a viola organista fusing a piano with a stringed instrument.
Art
An Artist Serves Up Decadent Feasts for Wild Animals
Over the past few years, New York-based artist Dana Sherwood has organized a picnic for wild baboons on the South African coast, left banquets for raccoons in the suburbs of South Florida, and concocted a molded terrine of jellied spam, beef, hot dogs, and marrow bones for coyotes.
Art
Could NYC's Island of the Dead Become a Green Burial Park?
Each year, hundreds of New Yorkers are buried in trenches dug deep in the soil of Hart Island, a sliver of forgotten land in the Long Island Sound off the eastern shore of the Bronx.
Books
The Humble Art of Decorated Paper
In April of 1789, a few months before the storming of the Bastille, the paper factory of Jean-Baptiste Réveillon in Paris was taken over by labor protestors, who commandeered the machines to print paper in red, white, and blue.