In Brief
San Francisco Will Raise Maya Angelou Sculpture
Only two of the city's 87 public sculptures depict historical women. The Angelou monument will help begin to shift that balance.
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Required Reading
This week, Sam Gilliam, art as an asset class, John Waters at Mary Oliver's bookshop, Ai Weiwei on Hong Kong protest, the radical black history of techno music.
Books
David Bezmozgis's Strangers in a Strange Land
Nostalgia and despair form the emotional undercurrent of these stories about the afterlife of an immigrant childhood.
Books
Lyn Hejinian Imagines Life on Mars
The poet challenges assumptions about how thinking is a form of language.
Art
Brice Marden's Intuitive Formalism
Each work in Marden's series Cold Mountain Studies is the trace of a transient intention, and their variety is potentially infinite.
Art
Imagining the Western Other in 19th-Century Japanese Prints
Images of Americans in these prints tell us a great deal about the local culture as it met the West. They tell us, specifically, about what many Japanese feared, and desired, from the encounter of cultures.
Art
The Trouble with Renoir’s Nudes
Renoir: The Body, The Senses makes some attempts, vain in my opinion, to present Renoir as a politically progressive artist, even a closet feminist.
Art
The Disturbing Greatness of Hyman Bloom
Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock considered Hyman Bloom to be America’s first Abstract Expressionist, a label, it should be pointed out, that the artist himself rejected.
Art
In Praise of Painting's Ambiguity, Part 2
Despite all the changes that Jasper Johns’s art has undergone since the mid-1950s, he has repeatedly returned to the theme of brokenness.
Art
The Future of Conceptual, Immersive Art Hasn't Quite Arrived
The Gray Area Festival's attractions like Inferno and the ISM Hexadome drew upon images of hell and Thom Yorke to illustrate its vision of audience-participatory art, but the festival itself demonstrated that technology alone is not enough.
Art
The Repetitions and Surprising Connections Created by the Late Kevin Mullins
The retrospective at Wichita State University's Ulrich Museum of Art is full of the narrative clues the late artist left behind.
In Brief
James Turrell Skyspace Reopens at MoMA PS1 After 6-Month Closure
The artist requested that the museum close the installation in January after construction on a neighboring luxury condo encroached on the work's view.