Books
Reader’s Diary: Jaimy Gordon’s 'Lord of Misrule'
Jaimy Gordon passed through my field of vision some time in the early 1980s.
Books
Books
Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker Tell the Real Life Stories of Fabulous Females
In the tradition of Lives of the Saints and, even more pointedly, Laura (Riding) Jackson’s Lives of Wives, visual artist Susan Bee and book artist Johanna Drucker have created a wonderful new “picture” book, Fabulas Feminae or fables of women.
Books
The Origins of Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal in a One-Legged Chair
When the TWA Flight Center opened in 1962 at New York's JFK Airport, its swooping form seemed to embody flight itself, with its two white wings rising from the tarmac.
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Supercharged Sex and Corporate Control in a Queer Erotic Novel
In My Wet Hot Drone Summer, anti-surveillance activists defeating corporate overlords is strangely sexy.
Books
America’s Secret Societies: A New Book Probes Their Art and Mysteries
What is more titillating — knowing that someone is guarding a delicious secret you might never be invited to share, or being charged with protecting some precious confidence of your own?
Books
The Kimono, Examined: A New Book and a Definitive Collection
In the West, is there any garment more elegant than a tuxedo, one that makes its wearer, no matter what size or age, almost always look (and feel) great? In the East — specifically, in Japan — the kimono may be a similar, inestimable costume.
Books
Quiet Drawings from a Life Lost in Mental Institutions
In one of the drawings discovered in a well-worn album, fished out of the trash in 1970 by a teenager in Springfield, Missouri, a wide-eyed woman points to a bouquet of flowers below the words "ECTLECTRC PENCIL."
Books
The Rose-Washed Past: Ron Haviv’s 'Lost Rolls'
I’ve long been fascinated by the various filters for Instagram and other digital camera apps whose names are simply years: 1969, 1972, 1977.
Books
An Eccentric Visual History of Our Most Basic Shapes
In the 1960s, Italian artist Bruno Munari explored the visual history of the square, circle, and triangle in three books, which Princeton Architectural Press recently compiled.
Books
“Exactly as It Was”: Ellsworth Kelly’s Basic Training
When art world luminary, Ellsworth Kelly, died in December at the age of 92, his obituaries described him as an artist who rejected the very idea of art as self-expression.
Books
The Humble Art of Decorated Paper
In April of 1789, a few months before the storming of the Bastille, the paper factory of Jean-Baptiste Réveillon in Paris was taken over by labor protestors, who commandeered the machines to print paper in red, white, and blue.
Books
A Post-Apocalyptic Graphic Novel by a "Disappeared" Argentinian Writer
It’s as if Oesterheld was telegraphing in The Eternaut the horrors that would befall him at the hands of his own repellent government.