Books
On the Origin of Emoji
A new book published by Prestel explores the history of emoji and its rise as a global communication phenomenon.
Review
Art
From Stitched Symbols to Painted Shadows, Connecting Two Artists’ Surreal Sensibilities
Two multicolored rocks, placed side by side, cast long shadows that lie flat before bending at the walls they intersect, as shadows typically do. But that’s all that’s typical.
Books
Remixing the Resistant Voices of Black Musical Performance in the US
It’s easy to forget what an oddly heterogeneous and restless book is W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.
Books
The Art Deco Lighter, from Smoking's Era of Toxic Glamor
The Art Deco style of the 1920s and '30s pervaded design, from the Chrysler Building in Manhattan to the Grand Rex in Paris, but it wasn't always on such a large scale.
Art
Flowers of Evil and the Macabre Literary Imagination of Symbolism
Symbolist artists — including Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Delville, and Odilon Redon — were united less by style than by their shared intention of illustrating invisible aspects of human experience.
Art
Paint Flows Over a Rockaway Ruin Like Hurricane Waves
One of the most remarkable places accessible to the public in New York City is the ruins of the Fort Tilden military base on the Rockaway Peninsula, where huge batteries with now-empty heavy gun turrets open to the beach.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Henry Miller's ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’
At some point in my teens I read a number of books by Henry Miller — though not as many as I read, at around the same time, by Hermann Hesse, despite the fact that Hesse’s books, in contrast to Miller’s, were not reputed to convey much information about sex.
Art
Summer Carousing and Revelry
It must be summer. There are group shows galore all over Manhattan. This is when you get to discover new artists, get enthusiastic, become disenchanted, fall in love, fall out of love, all of the above, and none of the above, in one day, and still have time to sit back and read a book of poems in th
Art
All The World’s Bigger than a Stage
There is the artist’s artist, and there is June Leaf.
Art
The Space Between: A Profile of Cammisa Buerhaus
In the summer of 2015, at a backyard party in Bushwick, a lone woman – Cammisa Buerhaus – performed a confident set of songs with distorted electronic accompaniment.
Art
From Flint with Love, Art of the African Diaspora
Unlike many notable private art collections that serve the public good only after they have been donated to a museum (or turned into museums of their own), the Mott-Warsh Collection was conceived to fulfill a larger social purpose.
Art
A Sculptor Conjures the Fall (or Rise) of the Rebel Angels
APT, France — The South African artist Wim Botha is a sculptor's sculptor.