Art
Holly Wright Challenges Our Sense of Vanity
At the Fralin Museum of Art, photographer Holly Wright reduces her poet laureate husband to a mouthpiece, and asks her subjects to think upon their own deaths.
Review
Film
The Return Is a Shabby CliffsNotes Version of the Odyssey
Homer’s Odysseus is complicated and playful — a man who has suffered, and is changed. Pasolini’s Odysseus squints, and occasionally flexes.
Art
Artists Find Energy Justice in Grassroots Acts
Energies at the Swiss Institute brings an archival and contemporary lens to questions of energy justice through a sharply curated artist cohort.
Book Review
Why Don’t We Talk About Race in Fairy Tales?
Characters in fairy tales “are white not by chance, but by design,” Kimberly J. Lau writes in a new book.
Film
The Emotional Valences of Brutalism
Historically, cinema has invoked the architectural movement as an easy shorthand for villainy. In The Brutalist, though, it embodies a proletarian dream.
Art
Exposing the Dark Underbelly of the American West
Out of Site focuses on the scientific tools used to map the West’s resource-rich landscape, and how those technologies have become forces of destruction.
Art
Holly Lane’s Elegiac Shrines to the Natural World
The artist evokes a keen awareness of the threats facing the environment by honoring it through opulent, reliquary-style frames and delicate paintings.
Books
An Incomplete History of Griffins in Art
Despite its ambition to expand our definition of the creature to include other winged, hybrid beasts, Griffinology is hemmed in by a European framework.
Art
Street Art Meets Aboriginal Culture in the Work of Reko Rennie
The artist challenges binaristic distinctions between “traditional” Aboriginal and contemporary art through works drawn from his expansive two-decade career.
Film
Werner Herzog’s Anticlimatic Exploration of the Human Brain
The filmmaker seems out of his depth in Theater of Thought, too willing to let his subjects make questionable claims without pushing back or delving deeper.
Art
The Sinister Subtext of Farshid Bazmandegan’s Paintings
The artist’s latest show connects the art industry with geopolitics, urging us to examine our role in a complicated negotiation of denial and strategic ignorance.
Art
Sheila Hicks’s Faith in the Latent Power of Materials
An invigorating survey of mostly recent works by the American artist at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is a feast of rhythmic form and pulsating color.