Film
A Celebration of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Stories
The BlackStar Film Festival consistently resists forces that try to define culture in majoritarian terms.
Review
Books
The Evolving Designs of US Voting Ballots
This Is What Democracy Looked Like by Alicia Yin Cheng is the first book of its kind to look at the history of ballot design.
Film
Nudity in the US Film Industry, and How it Has (and Hasn’t) Evolved
The documentary Skin spurs the viewer to think about what kind of bodies are usually naked in movies.
Books
How Latinx Artists Were Shut Out Of Art History
Arlene Dávila’s Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, Politics considers the plights of Latinx artists through the lens of race and class disparities in both North and South America.
Film
What Happens When a Thousand Teenage Boys Form Their Own Government
For the new documentary Boys State, directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine use a long-running youth program to examine US democracy. The result is is both comedy and horror.
Film
Relic Joins the New Era of “Mommy Horror”
Relic delves into a darkness beyond filial caregiving, approaching the mother figure as the first, and last, monster, her house a veritable womb for distinctly female trauma.
Books
How Words Cast Their Spell on a Poet
Geoffrey O'Brien explores language's magic — part sound, part sense, part bodily sensation.
Art
Rediscovering Leslie Kerr's Pop Abstraction
Kerr was an abstract artist with a vulgar sense of humor.
Art
Warren Isensee’s Breakthrough
Isensee has gone from being a dutiful geometric abstractionist to defining his own trajectory, and gaining a verifiable freedom for himself.
Film
The Art of the At-Home Concert
Under quarantine, everyone from Justin Bieber to Dua Lipa has had to adjust to conveying intimacy to online audiences.
Art
Basking in Derek Jarman’s Private Utopia
A recreation of the cottage where Jarman spent his final days, an exhibition at the Garden Museum creates a response to HIV that is at once personal and political, shining a light on wider issues of institutional homophobia.
Film
Video Essays That Address Race, Inequality, and the Movement for Black Lives
Curator Cydnii Wilde Harris highlights some of her favorite works in the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist.