Art
UCI MFAs Challenge Institutional Display
The inquiries of three recent MFA graduates illuminate what much of the art world, easily seduced by decorative abstraction, misses.
Review
Art
Peeling Back the Layers of Religious Devotion
The artists in Devoted: Religion in Asian American Art offer complex perspectives on religion grounded in their lived experiences.
Art
New York Studio School MFAs Get Serious
The artists in this year’s MFA thesis exhibition have formulated some novel responses to meet the existential dread of this moment.
Art
Ming Smith Moving Through Shadows
From Smith’s art, we glean a picture of an artist transformed by risk, by a willingness to wander toward obscurity.
Art
The Adroit Formalism of Suzanne McClelland
Her paintings become even more visceral when set against her cerebral symbolism.
Art
Elias Rischmawi Preserves Memory Against Erasure
What happens when home traverses miles — when it’s caught in the sway between one’s homeland and the land one makes a home of?
Art
Remedios Varo Thrives at the Edges of Perception
Varo’s drawings crack the cold flawlessness of her paintings, and it’s exciting to see the looser, simpler skeletons underneath the surface.
Art
A Japanese Painter’s Cosmic Love Letters to Hawaiʻi
After moving to Honolulu in his early 70s, the Gen'ichirō Inokuma drew inspiration from the rainbows, night sky, and other natural phenomena of his new home.
Art
Why Are Hiroshige’s Woodblock Prints Still So Moving?
The artist subverts the status system of 19th-century Japan, foreshadowing the impact of modernization and industrialization.
Film
Man Ray’s Beguiling and Bemusing Filmscapes
Man Ray’s Return to Reason film series anticipated the extent to which the motion picture would inform how we curate and call up memory.
Art
The Monstrous Femininity of Maureen St. Vincent
The artist’s aquatic pastels represent women who cannot be domesticated or controlled.
Books
How the Black Meme Turns a Trope Into a Trap
Legacy Russell’s Black Meme argues that owning, replicating, and remediating Black material is a theft rooted in historical frameworks of subordination.