Books
The Design Nostalgia of Japan's Train Station Stamps
Railroad Station Stamp Designs captures the scope and evolution of these unique tokens, capturing the uniqueness of place through single small pictures.
Review
Books
The Men Behind MoMA’s Taste for Modernist Design
Long before it became a cultural juggernaut, MoMA was helmed by a young intellectual named Alfred H. Barr Jr. who, from 1929 to 1934, worked in close collaboration with architect Philip Johnson to make the museum an influential platform for modernism.
Art
In San Francisco, Closing the Gap Between Art and Tech
SAN FRANCISCO — In an exhibition on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, nine Bay Area artists play with robotics, sculpture, lights, sound, video, and digital technologies to alternately engage, critique, and embrace our present-day entanglement with the digital world.
Books
Gruesome and Surreal Surgical Illustrations from the 15th–19th Centuries
In 1811, nearly four decades before the advent of anesthesia, the English novelist Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer.
Art
Whether Gotham or Metropolis, New York Is the City of Superheroes
Superhero stories mesh easily with New York, whether it's the new Jessica Jones series, which follows its super-strong private investigator around a noir Manhattan, or the first appearance of Batman, in 1939, soaring over the city.
Art
Alec Soth's Case Studies of America
LONDON — A British science museum feels like a strange place for a photography exhibition about 21st-century America.
Art
Art as a Learning Process: The Legacy of Black Mountain College
BOSTON — Founded in 1933 by the classicist John Andrew Rice, Black Mountain College was a shoestring operation deep in the heart of the rural American South that opened as the Great Depression began and another World War loomed just over the horizon.
Books
Why Japan's Futuristic Micro-Homes Are So Popular
Like in many of the world's most densely populated nations, real estate in Japan is tough to come by.
Art
A Rare Encounter with an Aaron Douglas Painting that References Slavery’s Past
Lavender and gold silhouettes of soldiers on horseback, waves, and a kneeling figure overlap on the flat plane of Aaron Douglas's "Let My People Go" (1935–39).
Art
Mastery and Missteps in Matisse’s Books
The Morgan Library & Museum’s current exhibition Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts demonstrates the artist’s well-deserved reputation of having produced some of the most prominent livres d’artistes.
Art
Clyfford Still's Radical Repetitions
DENVER — The Clyfford Still Museum's current exhibition, Repeat/Recreate, has been on the institution’s wish list for nearly 10 years, since well before it even opened.
Books
A Book of Art and Essays Explores Psychedelics as a Spiritual Technology
The intersections between Eastern philosophy and psychedelic drugs are explored in Zig Zag Zen, a newly expanded edition of an anthology of essays, interviews, and artwork.