Book Review
Beverly Buchanan at the Raw Edge of Art
Instead of leaving the South behind, the polymath artist carried it into her writings, zines, paintings, and “shack sculptures” that echo the architecture of her childhood.
Books
Interview
Layli Long Soldier’s Poetic Lifeblood
I spoke to the poet, who is my longtime friend and colleague, about her new book, the threads connecting poetry and visual art, and how Lakota philosophy suffuses her work.
Book Review
The War on Art Is Repeating Itself
As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression.
Guide
12 Must-Read Books on Textiles and Fiber Art
Titles on contemporary Diné weavers, Black American quilting in California, the Bayeux Tapestry, artists including Cecilia Vicuña and Olga de Amaral, and more.
Book Review
John Berger in His Own Bruised Time
The late novelist and art critic asked Tom Overton to wait to write his biography until after his death. The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so.
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.
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.