Book Review
The Trafficker Who Furnished the Museums of LA
A team of researchers excavates the story of Earl Stendahl, a mid-century gallerist who shamelessly stole ancient Mesoamerican objects and marketed them to the institutional art world.
Books
Book Review
Finding Vermeer in Unexpected Places
Artists, filmmakers, poets, and the art market itself still bear traces of the Dutch painter’s influence, writes historian Ruth Bernard Yeazell in “Vermeer’s Afterlives.”
Books
Dorothea Tanning Beyond Max Ernst’s Shadow
A new biography attempts to make the case for Tanning’s independence and artistic strength in her own right, but remains frustratingly tethered to her husband.
Book Review
“Thinking From Black” Is a Glossary of Possibility
Artists, poets, and scholars mull over words of their choosing in this book, offering new definitions of phrases from which Blackness proliferates: “world,” “water,” “care.”
Book Review
Turning Turner’s Legacy
“Turner and the Slave Trade” recasts Romanticism’s relationship to nature and landscape painting as a vehicle for colonial propaganda.
Feature
New Book Chronicles Studio Museum in Harlem's 58-Year History
Contributors include artists such as Dawoud Bey, who wrote that the venerated institution has "changed the shape of my life."
Feature
No One Is Reading, Except at the New York Art Book Fair
The overlooked, subversive, and playful currents of politics and queer culture flow freely at the fair’s 20th anniversary edition, held at MoMA PS1.
Book Review
The Unsung Craftspeople Who Built Ancient Egypt
A new publication reflects a growing interest in the lives of the makers behind the civilization’s arts and crafts, long marginalized and erased by mythologized depictions of the ancient world.
Book Review
What “The Book of Genocides” Teaches Us
Dana Mashoian Walrath’s work of graphic nonfiction points to historical patterns across 10 genocides, from Germany and Turkey to Gaza.
News
Leon Black Plans to Turn Woolworth Mansion Into His Own Museum, Book Reveals
The disgraced financier, whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein are being investigated in Congress, told author William D. Cohan that he wants to turn the Manhattan property into “his version of the Neue Galerie.”
Books
Alma Thomas Opens Up Our Crowns
The cornrows of Thomas’s paintings, often inspired by her own garden, evoke the infinitely diverse ears of native corn and the sisterhood of braiders across the diaspora.
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.