Performance

If Frida Kahlo Smoked a Blunt with Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath once got blazed with Frida Kahlo. This is the setting of Musas, which invites us to be a fly on the wall and listen in on these women's conversations as they smoke, eat, play, and work.

News

Peekaboo, the NYPD Is Watching You!

The New York Police Department (NYPD) wants to regain the trust of the New Yorkers it alienated with recent controversies like “Stop-and-Frisk” and the killing of Eric Garner.

Art

The World's Largest Wildlife Sound Archive and the Urgency of Preserving Noise

Digital archives are essential for sharing information and encouraging its preservation, especially for sound.

Art

On a Block in Chicago, a Participatory Project Visualizes Jail Data

CHICAGO — It was a broiling Midwestern day, the kind Chicago is famous for.

Books

The Books that Taught American Women to Camp in the Early 20th Century

Books aimed at women on pitching tents, cooking on campfires, dressing for hikes, and surviving in the wild were published in the United States, as more and more women went out into the woods.

Art

Mark Bradford Maps the Suffering of Bodies

LOS ANGELES — Visitors to Scorched Earth, Mark Bradford’s exhibition at the Hammer Museum, are greeted in the lobby by a map that shows the US population infected with AIDS by state.

Comics

Artists Never Know Their Importance

I know it's not good to romanticize the whole "sad tortured artist" thing …

Opinion

Required Reading

This week, the death of the US dance critic, Black Lives Matter at the Venice Biennale, James Baldwin's FBI file, "Happy Birthday"'s copyright shenanigans, and more.

Opinion

Weekend Words: Currency

China weakened its currency, the renminbi, several days in a row this week, raising fears that the country’s massive economy may be in deep trouble.

Art

Artists of the Dark: “Night Visions: Nocturnes in American Art, 1860–1960”

Nighttime darkness compresses space and alters colors, making ordinary places both more terrifying and more freeing, changing the social dynamic of those who walk in them.

Poetry

The Drama in the Everyday: Bernadette Mayer's Early Poems

I first began reading the works of Bernadette Mayer in 1975 or 1976, contemporaneous with their publications. While I didn’t realize it at the time, Mayer wroten them in her late 20s and early 30s, quite close to my own age.

Art

Failing Better: Erroneous Art at Lisa Cooley

There’s a bit of curatorial sleight-of-hand in I Dropped the Lemon Tart, the summer show at Lisa Cooley on the Lower East Side. The title refers to a real-life mishap in a restaurant kitchen where imminent culinary fiasco turned into a triumph of pluck and invention.