Film
The Tumultuous Journey of Faith Ringgold’s Rikers Mural
Catherine Gund’s Paint Me a Road Out of Here uses the artwork to tell truths about the US carceral system.
Reviews
Art
The Nefarious Power of the Unseen
Invisibility: Powers & Perils raises exciting questions around racial, technological, and ecological invisibility, and leaves us asking for more.
Art
Cosmo Whyte’s Whispering Portals
By blurring the line between individual and collective memory, the works demonstrate the Panafrican ideal that our experiences are part of a shared narrative.
Art
The Iconoclastic Vision of Barkley L. Hendricks
The late artist’s work has always bristled against the boundaries of categorization, and it does so particularly here, in an exhibition centered around Afrofuturism.
Art
Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s Fairytales With No Heroes
The pair tell a grand drama of depravity and degradation, sometimes enacted by official powers like Church and State, other times by rogue players.
Art
Allan Wexler Magnifies the Absurdity of the Everyday
In his first exhibition in nearly a decade, the artist-builder presents sculptures that are alternatively strange, optimistic, and critical.
Book Review
Before Black, There Was Blue
In Black in Blues, Imani Perry reaches to the height of the sky and the depth of the ocean, casting the history of blue as one of both triumph and tragedy, possibility and limitation.
Art
We Are Also the Darkness After the Big Explosion
Nolan Oswald sees the pre- and postcolonial worlds as contemporaneous and interlocking.
Art
Prettiness Is Political for Marie Laurencin
The artist has a point: Why is aesthetic pleasure often relegated to the sidelines of art? Why paint rotting fish when you can paint pretty femmes?
Art
The Wobbly Humanity of Cy Twombly
His works are distinctly earthly endeavors, showcasing the human hand in all its striving.
Art
Covering Up the Present in a Ghost Forest
Artist Serena Chang helps us see that in the act of remembering we’re often uncovering more than our own past.
Film
At Sundance, Films Tackled Sex, Love, Gender, and the Law
Whether it’s catfishing clueless rich guys, catching sex predators on YouTube, or assisting a woman in conceiving a child, questions of legality often have little to do with morality.