This week, a newly donated tiny Seurat, Eli Valley on the use of art to fight anti-semitism, reviewing The Irishman, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s freedom stories, the kinds of Spanish in the US, and more.
November 2019
Posted inMusic
Taylor Swift’s Lover Surprises With Its Calm
Even on Swift’s most dramatic songs there’s an underlying calm to Lover, a sense of gratitude and relief at having made it this far.
Posted inBooks
A Peek Into Some of the Best Art Books of 2019
Paula Rego, John Ruskin, Donald Judd, Lucian Freud, Hokusai, and, yes, Leonardo da Vinci.
Posted inBooks
The Polymathic Mind of John Ruskin
Ruskin was captivated with more than just art and architecture. He wrote at some length on geology, mythology, crystallography, ornithology, herpetology — and who knows what else.
Posted inArt
Unconstrained Paintings of Terror and Love
Joe Coleman is a hyper-realist who crams every picture with data, producing an image of all-over intensity that is at once a scrumptious meal and hard to stomach.
Posted inArt
Positively Ninth Street Women
By the mid-1970s, critic Thomas Hess acknowledged the critical favoritism shown to postwar male artists when he singled out the women of the Ninth Street Show as “sparkling Amazons.”
Posted inArt
Artists of the Darkness and Light
While Tatsumi Hijikata and Eikoh Hosoe reflected the countercultural mood of Japan’s postwar avant-garde, the trauma of World War II is inscribed in both artists’ aesthetics.
Posted inArt
A Fresh Direction for Printmaking
Sarah Amos’s work may be labor-intensive, yet it conveys neither labor nor the consumption of time, but a meditative joy.
Posted inArt
A Viral List of Hundreds of Opportunities for Artists, Compiled by One Person to Encourage Community
Everest Pipkin has made public their “Big Artist Opportunities List” — a collection of over 400 opportunities for artists across the globe.
Posted inFilm
How Humans Betray the Environment and One Another Throughout History
Some of the best films at the Montreal International Documentary Festival explored themes of wasted potential and the relationship between humanity and the planet.
Posted inArt
Basking in Sam Gilliam’s Endless Iterations
The artist — still brilliant and brimming with artistic talent — will celebrate his 86th birthday on November 30.
Posted inNews
Week in Review: MOCA Employees Unionize; Thieves Steal $1.1 Billion Worth of 18th-century Jewels
Also, protests about women’s rights take center stage in Mexico, a 3D-scanned bust of Nefertiti has entered the public domain, and more.
