Art
A Surreal Landscape Transforms the Garbage Scattered in Beirut’s Streets
This is an imaginary landscape crafted by humans, but the urban dweller will recognize it as scarily quotidian.
Review
Film
How MASS MoCA Transformed a Struggling Mill Town Into an Art Hub
Worlds collide in a new Meryl Streep-narrated documentary that traces the evolution of Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Books
César Aira’s Memoir Responds to an Existentialist Crisis
Whatever might be truth or fiction in Birthday is used in service of the book’s main question: What has been the purpose of the author's life?
Art
Radical Women Artists Prove Medea Never Dies
The exhibition, The Medea Insurrection, comes across not as an apology but a cumulative roar against the curtain of silence and opacity that renders invisible the works and lives of women artists everywhere.
Books
A Book Attempts to Solve the Joys and Mysteries of Puzzles
Oftentimes it feels as though art satisfies itself by “raising the question” or “complicating ideas” about a subject. Puzzles, by contrast, hold an inherent promise of resolution.
Art
A Photographer's Portrait of Addiction and Recovery
Jeffrey Stockbridge's images reinsert those with opioid addictions into public discourses, picking up where mass media has failed.
Art
Knitted Works of Endangered Animals that Inspire Warmth and Empathy
Fiber artist Ruth Marshall, who used to work at the Bronx Zoo, uses a comforting medium to build interest in wildlife conservation.
Art
Botticelli Through a Graphic Novelist’s Eye
For Botticelli: Heroines + Heroes, the painter, cartoonist, and graphic novelist Karl Stevens was called in to provide interpretive drawings of the Renaissance master's paintings.
Books
How Frederic Tuten Became a Writer
Each chapter of Tuten's memoir precisely details a specific moment of realization, however wayward and, at times, harrowing.
Art
The Rediscovery of Robert Duran
A new show provides a glimpse of Duran's restless, astute nature and his willingness to explore different formal possibilities.
Art
Sean Scully’s Figurative Leap
“Someone recently asked me how I navigate the space between my abstract and figurative paintings, which I often paint side by side. I said I jump.”
Art
Navigating the Slippage Between Reality and Illusion
The architectonics of Leslie Wayne’s structures exude impermanence and a poetic expression of loss.