Books
Why Are Giorgione’s Paintings So Mysterious, Even Centuries Later?
We know precious little about the painter’s life, and we know even less about his work’s meaning. A new book argues that the artist wanted it that way.
Review
Art
Sea of Surveillance: Christopher Gregory-Rivera Exposes Policing in Puerto Rico
Las Carpetas takes a crucial step in exposing the surveillance of activists. But are pictures of folders the most effective way to tell the stories of people impacted?
Art
Devendra Banhart Exchanges Breath and Rhythm for Pencil and Ink
Banhart’s first solo show in Los Angeles is at turns intimate and grandiose.
Film
Fake It ’Til You Make It: A Documentary Peels Back the Veneer of Online Influencers
The crew of Fake Famous generated followers for aspiring Instagram celebs, demonstrating the artifice of internet success.
Books
From Rum Punch to Curries, This Artists’ Cookbook Is Deliciously Inclusive
The 1Shanthiroad Cookbook does more than stoke nostalgia, hinting at the politics that touch the growing, trading, cooking, and eating of food in India and beyond.
Art
Ragna Bley’s Cerebral, Swirling Abstractions
Equally intuitive and intellectual, Bley’s paintings redirect a time-honored form of abstraction into a more communal, cosmic unknowing.
Art
In Inky Blacks and Earthy Pastels, Reggie Burrows Hodges Crafts Collective Portraits
Dwelling somewhere between abstraction and figuration, Hodges’s impressionistic paintings enact a critique of rugged individualism.
Art
The Getty Revisits Ancient Palmyra, but the Modern City Is Mostly Invisible
Life in Palmyra did not stop in the third century but has gone on more or less continuously at the site for the 1,700 years since.
Art
Patrick Angus’s Honest Images of Gay Life
With their Fauvist hues and Pop-inflected renderings, Angus’s drawings and paintings, made amid the AIDS crisis, intrinsically queer the Western canon.
Art
Six Black Artists Test the Limits of Portraiture
"The Black Index" at UC Irvine pursues knottier narratives of self-representation.
Books
Black Futures, an Anthology Brimming With Life and Radical Imagination
The new book by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham considers an urgent question: “What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?”
Art
Bold Colors and Surreal Compositions Upend the Monotony of Commercial Billboards
A collaboration between We Buy Gold and Orange Barrel Media, Walls for a Cause NYC presents a safer, yet still poignant opportunity for art viewing.