Art
Revisiting Botticelli’s Evocative “Mystic Nativity”
The painting re-emerged in the 1800s after centuries of obscurity, revealing a complex composition rife with symbolism and subtle premonitions.
Editor's Picks
Opinion
The Canonization of St. Luigi
The authorities inadvertently transformed a perp walk photo of the accused killer of a healthcare CEO into a Renaissance painting of the arrest of Christ.
Book Review
Why Don’t We Talk About Race in Fairy Tales?
Characters in fairy tales “are white not by chance, but by design,” Kimberly J. Lau writes in a new book.
Interview
Sarah Lewis on Ways of Seeing Race in America
“When it comes to the unspeakable facts in the history of America, it's largely the artists who've been willing to show us what others would not,” the art historian said in an interview with Hyperallergic.
Opinion
Nativity Scenes Have Never Been Neutral
To criticize the Vatican’s nativity with a now-removed Jesus in a keffiyeh would be to dismiss the artistic history of crèches centering marginalized people.
Opinion
The Banal Evil of Atrocity Photography
In the dark genre of self-reported atrocity photography, governments take pictures of their crimes and file them away in an act of simultaneous remembering and forgetting.
Interview
Orhan Pamuk’s Secret Paintings of Time
Poet Kaveh Akbar speaks with the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist about his book of journal entries and paintings, authors who also make art, and the delight of writing fiction.
Interview
William Kentridge Sees the Universe in a Pot of Coffee
The artist tells Hyperallergic about how the isolation of COVID-19 led to a streaming series set wholly within the bounds of his studio.
Interview
Ron Norsworthy’s Revolution of Queer Black Male Self-Love
Norsworthy and I sat down to discuss his recent works, which wield the Ancient Greek myth of Narcissus to examine the power of beauty, who defines it, and how we can reclaim it.
News
Van Gogh's “Irises” Were Never Supposed to Be Blue
A new exhibition chronicles how a paintings conservator and chemist solved a color mystery in one of the painter’s most beloved works.
Opinion
The Gestural Feminism of Iranian Women
The student who stripped her clothes to protest the country’s oppressive dress code fits into an evolving movement of body-based feminist activism.
Art
The Larger-Than-Life Art of Tamara de Lempicka
Marrying synthetic Cubism with 16th-century Italian Mannerism and the sensuality of Jean-Dominique Ingres, the artist's work and life seem made for the silver screen.