Features
Writing My Own Artistic Origin Story
I didn’t speak until I was almost seven. But just because I was not speaking, did not mean I was not listening.
Excerpts
Books
100 Assignments From Nayland Blake
While these assignments will not turn someone else into me, they will provide the practitioner with a path to the deviations within themselves.
Books
Emily Mason’s Quest for Color and Truth
The late painter was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, but she had none of the hubris of its male artists. For her, painting was not about an experience, it was an experience.
Books
This Is Not the Real Geronimo
Elbridge Ayer Burbank’s haunting paintings of the Apache leader capture a likeness that was only ever real from the vantage point of a White man with a gun, canvas, or camera.
Books
Hitler’s Three-Hour Architectural Tour of Paris
His first and last trip to the city in 1940 was not for military purposes — he left that to his generals — but for his one true love: art.
Books
Van Gogh and the Siren Song of Paris
The artist’s internal revolution erupted in the radical innovations of his years in the city, which seemed to offer refuge from the storms of his life.
Books
The History of Blackness Is Entwined With Blue
Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Duval reveals how racism trains us to see colors in particular and sometimes contradictory ways.
Books
Five Poems for Vincent
What started as a catalog essay about van Gogh’s little-known passion for poetry became a suite of poems for the Dutch painter.
Books
Thomas Cole’s Landscape Painting Through an Indigenous Lens
Unlike European Christian notions regarding human dominion over all of creation, the Haudenosaunee belief is that our relationship with the earth is one of responsibilities.
Books
The Contrived Rivalry Between Two Pioneering French Women Artists
Whenever French 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is mentioned, it’s almost always as a counterpoint to her better-known “rival,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Books
In Art Conservation, There Is No Perfect Solution
Conservator Rosa Lowinger reflects on her time working at LACMA in the 1980s in an excerpt from her new memoir, Dwell Time.
Art
Read an Excerpt of Lucy Lippard’s Newest Book, Stuff: Instead of a Memoir
Lippard muses on her early years in New York City, from discovering a love of art writing to encountering Marcel Duchamp when she worked at MoMA’s library.