Books
Darrel Ellis's Powerful Investigations of Identity Through Family Photographs
Unlike many of his contemporaries, who centered their own lives and loves in relation to contemporary queer culture and the AIDS epidemic, Ellis looked backward.
Reviews
Art
Politics and Joy Come Together in an Artist's Tribute to Her Murdered Father
Elena Brokaw’s work serves as a reminder of the tangible remains of American foreign interference and state-sanctioned violence in Guatemala — the pieces left over, decades after the collective American conscience has moved on.
Art
How Dürer's Travels Reveal His Voracious Appetite for Art
Albrecht Dürer always wanted to move on, to be somewhere else.
Art
Two Palestinian Artists Challenge Common Occupation Narratives
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme assert that the lived reality of occupation involves a multiplicity of factors that are erased or overlooked by their controlled representations.
Art
A Contemporary Art Survey Highlights the Multiple Identities of the Indian State of Kerala
Lokame Tharavadu explores a variety of artistic perspectives on home, belonging, and the universal spirit of humanity that persists in the midst of a global pandemic.
Film
A Strange Hallucination Plagues Tilda Swinton in Memoria
The newest feature from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a masterpiece of magical realism, and Hyperallergic’s #1 film of 2021.
Art
Jennifer Coates Communes with the Gods of Nighttime Revelry
A thought experiment I sometimes engage in is to ask myself what kind of god would make the world that is being represented in the work I’m seeing.
Art
E. Jane Explores the Diva in Us All
With the altar and the flesh the artist and performer provides the space for viewers to revere our shared icons while making space for the superstars of the future.
Art
Lifelike Painted Statues Reanimate Museum Many Left for Dead
The objects and artists in Gilded Figures are so well chosen and so carefully interpreted that each section challenges divisions and rejects easy tropes.
Film
The Gleeful Blasphemy and Queer Nun Romance of Benedetta
Beneath the explicit sex and violence of the latest film from Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven are thoughtful challenges about gender roles and institutional religion.
Art
Rethinking Kandinsky
The problem with many of Kandinsky’s abstractions is that they don’t offer enough immediate visual information to “crack” his expressive code for color and form.
Books
Painter Edith Schloss Remembers a Life Lived in Art
Schloss’s The Loft Generation creates a mirror-memoir, as literary portraiture doubles as veiled self-portraiture.