Books
When a Poet Becomes Invisible
Facing her mortality, Mary Ruefle does not ask for pity or sympathy, because death is democratic.
Review
Film
Linda Ronstadt's Passionate Life of Song
Like its subject, the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice builds on familiar elements to make something new and beautiful.
Film
The Best Experimental Shorts at the Toronto International Film Festival
The festival's vaunted Wavelengths section features films about different concepts of performance.
Art
The Vernacular of Space Through Images of the Moon
The Met's exhibition shows us that our cosmos is divided between the pictured and the real, and that the character of the pictorial asserts a powerful influence over our conception of the actual.
Art
The International Spy Museum Seen Through the Eyes of a Human Rights Expert
"This feels like a loss," said Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch while touring the museum, flagging several errors in how curators have presented the history of torture and interrogation.
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.
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In Luigi Ghirri's Colazione sull’Erba, previously unpublished images from the photographer’s archive present a sparsely populated world of placid tranquility.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.