Art
Ragna Bley’s Cerebral, Swirling Abstractions
Equally intuitive and intellectual, Bley’s paintings redirect a time-honored form of abstraction into a more communal, cosmic unknowing.
Reviews
Art
In Inky Blacks and Earthy Pastels, Reggie Burrows Hodges Crafts Collective Portraits
Dwelling somewhere between abstraction and figuration, Hodges’s impressionistic paintings enact a critique of rugged individualism.
Art
The Getty Revisits Ancient Palmyra, but the Modern City Is Mostly Invisible
Life in Palmyra did not stop in the third century but has gone on more or less continuously at the site for the 1,700 years since.
Art
Patrick Angus’s Honest Images of Gay Life
With their Fauvist hues and Pop-inflected renderings, Angus’s drawings and paintings, made amid the AIDS crisis, intrinsically queer the Western canon.
Art
Six Black Artists Test the Limits of Portraiture
"The Black Index" at UC Irvine pursues knottier narratives of self-representation.
Books
Black Futures, an Anthology Brimming With Life and Radical Imagination
The new book by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham considers an urgent question: “What does it mean to be Black and alive right now?”
Art
Bold Colors and Surreal Compositions Upend the Monotony of Commercial Billboards
A collaboration between We Buy Gold and Orange Barrel Media, Walls for a Cause NYC presents a safer, yet still poignant opportunity for art viewing.
Film
Soundcloud Rappers Ride Out the Apocalypse in the Desert
The fact-and-fiction-bending documentary Crestone is an offbeat look at friendship and creativity.
Art
Clarence Holbrook Carter, an American Surrealist Who Painted Life, Death, and Rebirth
Carter’s paintings gesture toward unknown realms, whether death or nonhuman consciousness.
Film
A Premature Celebration of the Ascension of Black Artists
Black Art, HBO's documentary on Black visual artists, unwittingly demonstrates what a community gives up when it strives toward the mainstream.
Art
The Penetrating Heat of De Por Vida
At Company Gallery, a meditative exhibition dedicated to queer desire invites viewers to sit with tension.
Art
Angel Otero’s Exquisite Domestic Interiors
In The Fortune of Having Been There, Otero’s paintings seduce us with the whole as well as their individual parts.