Books
How Ghosts Became Transparent, and Other Spectral Evolutions
The Ghost: A Cultural History by Susan Owens explores the evolution of the ghost in British art and literature, from Hamlet's father to Marley's ghost.
Review
Art
The Seamless Weaving of Fine Arts with Crafts
Anissa Mack uses the county craft fair as inspiration, context, and content.
Art
The Artist Who Preserved the Vanishing Technology of Knots
Thou Shalt Knot at the New Bedford Whaling Museum celebrates the legacy of Clifford W. Ashley, artist and author of the most influential book on knots.
Art
Walker Evans's Eye on the City
While Walker Evans may be best known for his photographs from small towns across the US during the Great Depression, an exhibition at SFMOMA shows him also as a longtime New Yorker fascinated with the particulars of urban life.
Books
Working at the Threshold of Prose
Renee Gladman investigates the moments when writing crosses over into another mode of expression.
Art
Nina Chanel Abney Paints on the Edge of Violence
Abney locates much of her work on the recognition that abuse and violence are an integral part of the everyday consciousness of people of color.
Art
Laura Owens and the Death of the Auteur
Owens’s mid-career works feel completely sterile, mainstream, and middlebrow — with just enough insider info to flatter the viewer who knows something about Roland Barthes.
Books
The Making of a Modernist in the First-Ever Biography of Alexander Calder
Jed Perl makes the case that Calder was both an avant-gardist and a populist.
Art
The Violent Forms of Alexander Calder And Cady Noland
The dialogue among four works — two by each artist — suggests a dissonant string quartet as each piece asserts its distinctive timbre and range.
Art
Lisa Sigal’s Cardboard Utopia
In Sigal’s work, seemingly solid things fall apart, dissolve or otherwise evanesce, and fugitive forms gain substance.
Art
Judith Bernstein's Horror Show
There may be no artist in America better equipped to express the perversity of the Trump administration than Bernstein.
Performance
A Performance Digs Into the Family History on a Found 1950s Wire Recorder
Say Something Bunny! is a live documentary that excavates the found audio of a 1950s family, and considers what makes these mundane moments compelling.