Books
Chantal Akerman's Painful Final Memoir
Almost four years after her death, My Mother Laughs, the last book by the pioneering director, has been translated into English.
Review
Books
The Layered Nature of Artifice in a Book About a 16th-Century Naturalist
Insect Artifice is divided into two parts: one consisting of an intellectual biography of Joris Hoefnagel, and another, which analyzes Hoefnagel’s seminal work Four Elements, a compendium of the known animal world.
Art
Cut Canvases Give Voice to Women's Bodies
The phonetic title of Cristina Camacho's /ˈvʌlvə/ seems to capture the vulva just before it solidifies into a signifier, renewing its possibilities of meaning production.
Film
An Overlooked Gem from the New Queer Cinema Wave Imagines John Lennon on Holiday
1991's The Hours and Times, recently restored and now available to stream, is part of a tradition of queer films recontextualizing what we think we know about history.
Books
A Chronicle of 100 Contemporary Artists Who Use Textiles
With artists spanning all corners of the globe, Vitamin T is a timely contribution to dismantling the division between art and craft.
Art
Navigating the Overload at the Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale’s official exhibition, May You Live In Interesting Times, presents art that speaks to the present, not in the direct fashion of journalism, but in ways that can challenge existing habits of thought.
Art
Mo Kong Maps a Post-Climate Change Future
Kong’s background as a recent Chinese immigrant and, especially, a former investigative reporter help account for the exhibition’s methods and mood.
Art
A German Artist’s Notes From Underground
Mischa Leinkauf’s images of subterranean urban worlds are formally arresting and packed with metaphorical meaning.
Art
Walt Whitman's Sensuality and Self-Promotion
Whitman’s poetry feels inseparable from his physical presence, his body itself, as does the work of few other poets.
Art
Garry Winogrand in Living Color
If the nostalgic atmosphere of the photographer's black-and-white images threatens to obscure his compositional acuity these Kodachrome slides dispel it handily.
Books
The Unreality of Everyday Life
What makes Ha Seong-nan's Flowers of Mold so powerful is her ability to reveal the almost imperceptible slippage between actual events and the protagonists' perceptions.
Art
Dana Powell and the Pleasures of Restraint
Do not mistake small size of Powell’s paintings for modesty; she wants to draw us in, to make works that can sustain close looking.