Music
A Talking Heads Album, Forty Years Later
More Songs About Buildings and Food, a concept album about late capitalism, speaks with disarming directness to the current political moment.
Review
Books
Sweet, Gritty, Impossible Naples
The other great centers of the Italian art world – Florence, Rome, and Venice – have modernized; Naples mostly has not.
Books
Cuba at the Cusp
The images that foreshadow the turmoil of the Cuban Revolution jar you back to the precariousness of our times.
Art
Revisiting the Legacy of Women at Black Mountain College
The school's loosely structured pedagogical model allowed women to play vital roles throughout Black Mountain's brief history.
Art
Seeing Ourselves in Sculpture
Richard Nonas's sculptures alert each of us to the specificity of being — in a specific time and a specific place.
Art
Hand-Copying the Constitution and Other Responses to Trump
Oh, What a World! What a World! brings together a diverse range of artists’ reactions to the anxiety gripping the nation.
Art
Mining the Myths and Mysteries of Poison Over the Centuries
An exhibition takes an immersive, highly interactive look at poison as medicine, killer, and literary device.
Film
The Swiss Art Collector Who Helped Expose Chinese Contemporary Art to the World
The Chinese Lives of Uli Sigg traces how Sigg accumulated his massive and influential collection, a record of Chinese contemporary art of the last three decades.
Performance
Where Gayness Goes in the Angels in America Revival
The revival of Tony Kushner’s play offers a lens into gayness in the dimension of history — what is intransigent, what is still promissory, and what is so profoundly disappointing.
Art
The Secret Lives of Discarded Things
Jean Shin: Collections is a great introduction to the artist for those who do not know her work, but encounters the pitfalls of recontextualizing public art within museum settings.
Art
Jack Whitten's Secret Self
For the first time, those who have followed Jack Whitten's career can see two different sides of the artist through two fully developed bodies of work designed for radically different purposes.
Art
Disarming Recreations of Animals and Their Glistening, Decaying Textures
Viewers must overcome their initial shock or repulsion to the visceral subject matter in order to experience the fine details of Erick Swenson's work.