Art Review
Sandra George’s Portraits of Working-Class Dignity
The unsung Black British photographer’s work is the complete opposite of so-called poverty porn.
Eileen G’Sell
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. She is a 2023 winner of the Rabkin Foundation Prize in arts journalism and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Art Review
The Counterpublic Triennial Pollinates a Budding St. Louis
The sweeping third iteration of this exhibition of public art is well-suited for a city both frozen in time and ripe for a wildly revitalized future.
Book Review
For Sophie Lewis, Femininity Is Not the Enemy of Feminism
In “Femmephilia,” the author reclaims femininity, sexual pleasure, and adornment from patriarchal narratives in art and theorizes their liberatory powers.
Art Review
The Scent of Ancient Rome in St. Louis
An exhibition makes a case for the sensuality of these marble sculptures, recreating the perfumes and balms that once adorned them.
Film Review
The Thorny Politics of Protest Photography
A new documentary follows the work of activist and photographer Misan Harriman, but risks overly aestheticizing the movements he captures.
Art Review
The Queer Surrealists Who Fought Nazis With Paper Bullets
Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore shared a magnificent life as both romantic and creative partners, one in which gender proved as mercurial as the political climate of World War II.
Book Review
The Hidden History of Stock Photography
In her first book, scholar Simona Supekar mines the history of stock imagery as a vessel for racism and sexism and considers its role in the age of AI.
Film Review
“I Shot Andy Warhol” Upends the Myth of the Great Man
The radical feminist author of “SCUM Manifesto” and the bygone world of Warhol’s Factory come to life in the 1996 film, now restored to 4K.
Film Review
The Best Part of “Moss & Freud” Is When It’s Over
In the film, Kate Moss is looking for the right man to get her sober, and Lucian Freud is a Great Man who magically sees the “truth” in young women.
Film Review
Diaries of a Chairwoman
Juliette Lewis turns into a chair in a film that critiques mass culture’s conflation of femininity with consumerism and envy.
Art Review
Anselm Kiefer’s Rustbelt Romanticism
In Becoming the Sea, nostalgia for the Rhine River of Kiefer’s childhood flows into homages to the Mississippi as a symbol of both industry and creative freedom.
Film Review
The Sacrifices of the Single-Mother Artist
Artists in Residence tells the story of Lois Dodd, Eleanor Magid, and Louise Kruger as they forged lives as working artists and single mothers in midcentury New York.