Art
The Baroque Splendor of Christianity Meets East Village Bohemia
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's glittery assemblages point toward both his working-class Catholic upbringing in New Jersey and New York tenement life.
Review
Art
Stark Photos of a Louisiana Prison that Was Once a Slave Plantation
Two photographers document the lives of incarcerated men at Angola, a former slave plantation that is now the largest maximum-security prison farm in the US.
Art
Porous Definitions of Home and Belonging at the Santa Fe SITE Biennial
This year, the biennial has carved a conversation about displacement in the Americas, using art to question whose history we revisit.
Art
Betye Saar Washes the Congenial Veneer Off a Sordid History
Saar's work is a poignant depiction of this nation's fraught history of race relations and gender politics, and this exhibition demonstrates the need for more major retrospectives of her.
Art
B. Wurtz Makes Absurd, Profound Art from Overlooked Stuff
For Wurtz, self-knowledge is not found on a psychoanalyst’s couch or a remote mountaintop, but in the things with which we surround ourselves.
Art
When the Possessions of Departed Loved Ones Become Otherworldly Spirits
At the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Emilia Sandoval grapples with the loss of her mother by creating ghostly echoes of her worldly possessions.
Art
A Follower-Free App Asks You to Photograph Moments You Normally Don’t Share
An app that lingers on the minutiae of your life.
Books
Shedding Light on the Messy Beauty of the Arctic
Artist Nancy Campbell's book The Library of Ice draws parallels between ecological breakdown and the loss of human culture.
Art
How the Museum Is Like a Prison
The Walls Turned Sideways exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston implicates the museum as existing in the same landscape of money and power as the prison.
Books
Dorothea Lasky's Provocative Poems about Motherhood
The poems in Milk combine snarky sense of humor with an edge of semi-bitter self-consciousness.
Art
Melissa Meyer’s Urban Vision
Meyer has turned Pollock’s all-over painting on its head.
Art
Hilma af Klint, Outlier for the Ages
Hilma af Klint reminds us that institutionally approved narratives generally function as touchstones for conformists and the weak-kneed.