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
Miniature mummies carved from wood and carefully wrapped in tiny shrouds overlook a model of a Chimú palace, one of the small-scale representations of a lost precolonial world in Design for Eternity: Architectural Models from the Ancient Americas.
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Many of the first European maps of the Americas included warnings of cannibalism, despite no proof of such activity.
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At the Paris studio of Auguste Rodin in 1906, Siberia-born American painter Abraham Walkowitz met modern dancer Isadora Duncan.
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Over 3,000 undelivered letters in six different languages are preserved in a postmaster's trunk in The Hague, with hundreds unopened since the 17th century.
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This August, activist group Osez le Féminisme (Dare to be Feminist) installed guerrilla signs in Paris to rename streets and parks after women like singer Nina Simone, sailor Florence Arthaud, and author Simone de Beauvoir.
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Number of sculptures the Rodin Museum in Paris is allowed to cast from each original Rodin mold = 12
Books
Prolific 20th-century polymath Harry Smith picked up every paper airplane he saw on the streets of Manhattan from 1961 to 1983.
Art
For November's Digital Distractions, journey through Twitter as a rotund bird on a mission, relive the awkward AIM conversations of the early 2000s, and give a monster a makeover.
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In the early-morning hours in turn-of-the-century New York City, a photographer who was afraid of the dark took his camera out into the light.
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"Moving through the world brings the world alive," Alec Soth told Hyperallergic. "I considered myself a photographer for about a decade before I seriously started traveling. Once I hit the road, everything changed. I found I could more deeply connect with the people and places I encountered."
Art
There are few fictional characters that can be evoked through just a symbol, but Batman is one of them, with the outline of his flying namesake, or a suggestion of the crime fighter's black mask.
Books
There's no shortage of myths and legends about the Dakota, that formidable, castle-like apartment building at West 72nd Street and Central Park West in Manhattan.