Performance
A Staggering New Play Creates Space for Black Interiority and Grief
What to Send Up When It Goes Down holds Black people at its center, inviting unique moments of commiseration, anger, and helplessness with no apologies.
Erica Cardwell
Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Believer, Frieze, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and social justice at The New School.
Books
Ishmael Reed Picks Hamilton Apart, Bit by Revisionist Bit
The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda deconstructs the Broadway play’s abolitionist portrayal of the founding father with incisive, impeccably-researched satire.
Art
An Artist Probes Her Southern Lineage in Luminous Shades of Blue
Gathering hair, indigo, and artifacts from two South Carolina plantations, Adebunmi Gbadebo: A Dilemma of Inheritance considers the materiality of the past.
Art
Making Art Against the Backdrop of Incarceration
In a year of perpetual change, Marking Time demonstrates the urgent need for a shift in culture, one where crisis need not be the charge for moving towards a better world.
Art
Karyn Olivier Subverts the Formal Seriousness of Monuments
Using materials both random and familiar, Olivier’s Everything That’s Alive Moves questions our physical, psychic, and material relationship to history.
Art
Probing the Tensions Between the Universal and the Specific in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls
Then and now, Shange’s work responds to an urgent fever pitch humming beneath the taut surface of pain and respectability. A dazzling revival at the Public Theater reminds us of its timelessness.
Art
Consciousness, Conflict, and Contradiction in the Art of Robert Colescott
After viewing Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott — the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective to date — it feels fair to assume that factions of society still aren’t ready for Colescott.
Art
The Undersung Art of Native American Women, Front and Center
Inside a years-long effort to show a millennium’s worth of art by Native American women.
Interview
Empathy, Fantasy, and the Power of Protest: A Conversation with Chitra Ganesh
In artist Chitra Ganesh’s latest exhibition, Protest Fantasies at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco, protest becomes something more than rebellion — it becomes internal.
Art
Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Immortal Black Life
Often, I consider what people will make of my notebooks after I am dead.