Art Review
Lorna Simpson’s Black American Sublime
An exhibition at The Met positions Black history in the Romantic tradition, but the large scale of these paintings can undercut their impact.
Lorna Simpson
Art
Off the Record Confronts Our Understanding of Objectivity
A forceful rejection of neutrality, the Guggenheim exhibition unearths the deeply biased natures of media and government systems.
Art
Lorna Simpson's Cut-Up Portraits Evoke the Complexity of Identity
Composed of photographs culled from vintage Ebony magazines, the faces in these collages are reconstructed into new selves.
Art
Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice
Darkening, an exhibition of Lorna Simpson’s glacial paintings, submerges us in an icy desert largely devoid of language and far from human habitation.
Books
Lorna Simpson’s Glowing Collages of Women and Heads of Hair
The artist's collages feature portraits of women cut from advertisements, their tresses painted and collaged into pools of color that spread onto the page like oil spills.
Opinion
Marc Jacobs's Tone-Deaf Appropriation of Dreadlocks
Marc Jacobs committed the most blatant act of cultural appropriation at this month’s New York Fashion Week.
Books
The Politics of Seeing, Being, and Visibility in Photography
It doesn’t seem right to call the latest issue of Aperture — its first issue dedicated to African American lives as represented by the medium of photography — a magazine. It is a powerhouse book; it does so much heavy lifting.
Art
Stumbling upon Serendipity at the Havana Biennial
I have never felt I more fully embodied the role of “cultural tourist” than when I visited the 11th Havana Biennial for its opening week.
Interview
The Black List is A-Listed: An Interview with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders about The Black List: Volume III, his increasingly popular documentary series on the African American It-list, which premiered February 8, 2010, on HBO.