Art
Looking at the Legacy of Jess in California
An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art positions the artist known as Jess as the center of a creative nexus, bringing together his works with a smattering of California artists.
Review
Performance
The Complicated Staging of Experimental Music in Art Spaces
Veteran musician Onyx Ashanti’s performance prompted larger questions of how personal, cultural works hold value in commodified spaces of leisure, excess and consumption.
Art
Exploring Sexuality and Myth Through Fiber and Other Types of Sculpture
While Mrinalini Mukherjee radically used textiles to negotiate the deep roots of symbolic Indian art and craft, her visual vocabulary sought independence from traditional roles within her culture.
Film
What You Shouldn't Miss at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival
This year, the world's biggest film festival is bringing a new documentary on Merce Cunningham, an adaptation of the art heist novel The Goldfinch, Agnès Varda's final movie, and so much more.
Books
Finding Beauty in the Mundane Landscapes of Northern Italy
In Luigi Ghirri's Colazione sull’Erba, previously unpublished images from the photographer’s archive present a sparsely populated world of placid tranquility.
Books
Artists Who Have Addressed Sexual Trauma Since the 1970s
In Against Our Will, Vivien Green Fryd makes a convincing case for the need to examine artworks through the lens of sexual trauma, a violent reality that unfortunately spans across gender, ethnicity, race, and time.
Film
Two Dance Projects Meld Hungarian and Romani Traditions
The documentary Three Dances and the stage musical Hungarian Nights approach modern Central European culture from vastly different standpoints.
Books
How Victorian Intellectuals Idealized Japan and Its Culture
The undercurrent of the book is the link between Japonisme, aesthetics, and queer culture: Admiring Japan was, in several cases, shorthand for queerness and a dainty homoeroticism.
Art
Subverting the Whiteness of Antiquity
Lily Cox-Richard questions — and successfully subverts — a long-held association between the aesthetic qualities of classical sculptures with physical whiteness.
Music
Megan Thee Stallion, a Hardcore Master of Rap
What makes this music hardcore, a term that has meant many things to many genres, is technical mastery.
Books
Taking Cuteness Seriously
In The Power of Cute Simon May posits that "cute" is a modern-day iteration of the Renaissance archetype of the monstrous.
Books
Finding Oneself in Poetry
The poetry of Ariana Reines outlines a utopian prospect where suffering can be transformed into benevolent light.