Art
Interactive Installations Prod Visitors Out of Their Comfort Zones
speechless: different by design is unrelenting in its demands that visitors interact with the exhibitions.
Review
Art
The History of a Printmaking Workshop for Women Artists, From Elaine de Kooning to Faith Ringgold
From 1984 to 2012, printmaker and professor Nancy Campbell ran the Mount Holyoke College Printmaking Workshop, where women artists like Kiki Smith and Vija Celmins produced remarkable prints.
Art
The Many Afterlives and Expressions of the African Diaspora
To commemorate the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first slave ships in the United States, a recent exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum explores Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic."
Art
The Raucous and Frenetic Energy of Nam June Paik
As a recent retrospective at Tate Modern demonstrates, even fitted with decades-old circuitry, Nam June Paik’s work still pulses with energy, breakneck and experimental.
Music
Big Thief's Haunting Musical Dreamworld
The Brooklyn folk-rock band’s two 2019 albums invent an imagined environment with its own internal logic, a densely wooded forest with strange, benevolent creatures lurking in the shadows.
Books
A Daily Commute Frames an Author's Reflections
Over the course of her graphic memoir, Commute, Erin Williams acknowledges the lives of people she encounters in her day, but she maintains a steady gaze on herself.
Art
Jessica Dismorr Is Getting Her Due, 80 Years Too Late
There is much to praise about Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries, and there is not a little to regret.
Art
The Endlessly Inventive Jörg Immendorff
Imagine Gustave Courbet’s materialism joined to Max Beckmann’s aggressive color, with a dash of Caspar David Friedrich’s visionary panoramas thrown in.
Art
The Unsparing Pages of Francis Bacon
Almost 30 years after his death, the unabated edginess of Bacon’s paintings, and the dark literary sources informing them, put the lie to our self-mythologizing.
Art
The Pursuit of Art, 2019
MoMA’s recognition of modernism’s multiverse, alongside artist-led drives for greater transparency on the part of museums and their boards, brought a twinge of optimism to the close of the year.
Books
This Be the Verse 2019
John Yau and Albert Mobilio select a few of their favorite poetry books from the past year.
Books
A Tantalizing, If Flawed Reinterpretation of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”
In her new book, Suzanne Preston Blier seduces the reader with a reinterpretation of the painting, based on sources she claims no Picasso scholars have addressed before.