Books
A Book Traces the Evolution of Smooching for the Camera
People Kissing: A Century of Photographs begins in the Victorian era and traces attitudes about kissing from “chaste” to “performance for the camera.”
Review
Art
In Response to the British Museum, an Exhibition Demonstrates the High Cost of Iraqi Oil
An exhibition at P21 gallery highlights the human consequences of the exploitation of Iraq’s oil reserves, among them, environmental crises, state corruption, and youth unemployment.
Books
A Journalist’s Year of Sunday Interviews with Diego Rivera
Alfredo Cardona Peña's conversations with the loquacious 63-year-old artist are available for the first time in English.
Books
An Outsider’s Lens of 1960s New York
Japanese photographer Sumiharu Watanabe may not have known enough about the US to understand the changes taking place in New York City, but his lens captured them.
Art
An Artist Uses Abstraction to Express the Loss of Her Sisters
Rema Ghuloum's life-affirming response to this loss has been to make paintings whose direct and unapologetic pursuit of beauty feels rare.
Art
The Radical, Gender-Bending Photographs of Ulrike Ottinger
In the German artist and filmmaker's work from the '70s and '80s, Glinda the Good Witch becomes a bearded queen in a shopping mall, and that's just the beginning.
Art
Languages as Bridge in the Work of Siah Armajani
Born in Tehran and having made his home in Minneapolis, historical and familial references abound in this artist's body of work that draws in equal measure from the arts and the sciences.
Books
Jaw-Dropping Books in the Making, from Illustrated Fairytales to Limited Edition Poetry
There are some eye-popping books in Kickstarter's Exquisite Objects initiative.
Books
A Brief History of the Books Depicted in Western Painting
The Art of Reading: An Illustrated History of Books in Paint explores centuries of symbiosis between the visual and literary arts through more than 150 paintings.
Art
An Artist Illuminates Our Need to be Seen and Recognized
The indispensability of recognition is simultaneously made both more urgent and more complicated when you realize, as Yelaine Rodriguez does, that we are mutable, never sufficing to be just one person.
Books
Traveling Through Lush Typographic Jungles
The Canadian designer/letterer/artist Marian Bantjes's book I Wonder is a wildly illuminated manuscript of observational philosophy.
Books
Bringing Back from Obscurity a Jamaican Photographer Who Worked with Duchamp
Enacting a posthumous reassessment, the book Percy Rainford: Duchamp’s “Invisible” Photographer has poignantly rescued the neglected artist Percy Rainford from erasure.