Required Reading
This week: Nancy Spero’s pro-choice art, Valentina Di Liscia on “Casa Cueva,” Brooklyn’s smallest museum, Jamaica Kincaid’s eyebrows, Israeli cuisine and Palestinian erasure, and more.
Next great listen unlocked: Senior Editor Valentina Di Liscia was recently a guest on the Atlas Obscura podcast to discuss the controversy around the destruction of the kaleidoscopic "Casa Cueva," one of the last works by architect Juan O'Gorman (who also designed the studios of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera), by fellow Mexican artist Helen Escobedo. Tune in to her brilliant narration of this contentious chapter in art history wherever you get your podcasts.
Just off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Carroll Gardens is a small but mighty museum dedicated entirely to a single painting. Sculptor Elliott Arkin established the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art right in the lobby of his building, staging exhibitions with often absurd connections to the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, now perhaps best known for its sale to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for a preposterous $450.3 million. Gothamist's Hannah Frishberg reports:
Where once there were coats, umbrellas, and his daughter’s bicycle, there is now the Salvator Mundi Museum of Art, currently featuring an exhibition on orbs, inspired by the crystal sphere in the painting. It’s the second show of the year, and Arkin has lost track of how many shows there’ve been in total.
“We had a show called Salvator Barbie. I had a show based on Dianne Modestini, who was the woman who restored the painting,” Arkin rattled off while climbing the stairs to his apartment, hidden behind a secret door in the museum, currently adorned with various orbs and placards about them. “And then I had an exhibition about the beetles that ate Renaissance paintings back in the day.”
Jamaica Kincaid, author of groundbreaking works of postcolonial literature, was also shaving her eyebrows before it was cool. For Harper's Bazaar, historian and journalist Kaitlyn Greenidge asked Kincaid about summoning the courage to define her own style and artistic identity as a young writer (and her unpopular distaste for romance novels):
What was the inspiration for shaving off your eyebrows?
I don’t remember. I think I just wanted to be different. I wanted to write in a certain way. I wanted to say things like the Diana Ross piece. I thought it was all part of the same effort to say something that I really thought. This is how I really thought. And in fact, part of the reason I don’t really read it is because I can’t believe I let people know what I was really thinking. I still have a problem today writing. The idea of telling people, “This is what I really think about my garden, about colonialism.”
I just like thinking to myself.
One insidious element of Palestinian cultural erasure, especially common in New York City, comes in the form of the "Israeli" restaurant. Miss Ada, Cafe Mogador, and other crowd-pleasers started as Israeli-owned restaurants absorbing Southwest Asian and North African dishes, obscuring their origins in the process. New York Magazine's Madeline Leung Coleman writes for Grubstreet for the publication's massive Habibi City edition:
There had been Israeli chefs in the city for nearly all of Israel’s existence. There had been Syrian and Lebanese chefs here even longer. With few exceptions, however, most Arab, Iranian, or North African restaurants were assigned their role: cheap, quick, outer-borough. The food they made was relegated to halal carts outside your office and blandly exotic midtown dinner spots, mezze platters on Atlantic Avenue and grill houses in Bay Ridge. Some of these places served excellent food. But they tended to submerge their origins in euphemisms: They called their food “Oriental,” then “Mediterranean.” The New Israeli chefs cruised free of post-9/11 baggage, happy to announce their connections to Israel and talk about the Tel Aviv food scene. Unhindered by the stereotypes that dogged other Middle Eastern food, the promoters of New Israeli cuisine gave themselves permission to be expensive.
There's something uniquely painful about the death of a language, a living tapestry of memory, culture, and belonging. Over a century after the Ottoman Empire murdered 1.5 million people in the Armenian Genocide, Western Armenian language speakers are still working to revitalize it. Translator Lori Yeghiayan Friedman, whose grandparents survived the genocide, writes in her deeply personal essay for the Rumpus:
A poster of the alphabet, all thirty-six of its curvy letters, hangs on my wall. It is beautifully framed with double matting. I bought an even bigger poster when I visited the Republic of Armenia twenty years ago. It’s still rolled up and in a tube. I vow to frame that one too; the letters forever preserved, under glass, never to fade, the gorgeous swirls printed in deep, middle ages-looking colors, inky and fresh, always. I will remember him, Mesrob Mashdots, the alphabet’s inventor, and honor him and his role in preventing our extinction.
My girl Mina Le is here to say: Free us from the clip-art book cover!
If you haven't yet been sucked into the transphobic discourse about Drew Afualo, save yourself the trouble. Author Meghan L. Dowling explains why transness allows for broader, truer definitions of womanhood:
@meghanldowling the point is that womanhood is too often defined by men and that’s bad. duh #erfightmaster @Drew Afualo #greenscreen ♬ original sound - Meghan L. Dowling
Deana Burke has spent a year documenting the sources generative AI draws from, and once again, the slop machine loses:
@wetclaude just so we all have the information
♬ original sound - Deana Burke
@doxiedaily I’m always left smitten by boys in uniform. I think it’s the little paws peeking out beneath their tunics that really get me every time. Please tell me I’m not the only one who finds it utterly irresistible. On Duty — from my Iconic Dogs of London series. This portrait was far too much fun to create with the ever-fabulous Monty, Barney, Benji and Ozzie of @the_daxie_trouble The limited edition print is now available through my online store, ready to bring a little royal charm to your walls. 🤍 What catches you most… the paws or the hats? 🫣 💂🏼💂🏾💂🏿💂🏽 @canonuk #liveforthestory ♬ original sound - DoxieDaily
If this isn't me in 60 years, something will have gone terribly wrong:
@kesharijaisi0 Watch your 👄 .#badie #slay #quee ♬ Watch your mouth - Female Rap
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
