Art
The Never-Ending Cycle of Fear and Desire
Gary Simmons’s art suggests that rather than make progress our culture more often makes elaborate circles over and over again on the ice until the music stops.
Reviews
Art
Mary Ann Peters’s Obscured Memorials to Buried Histories
More context could have resulted in greater connections between viewers and the tantalizing glimpses of profound and difficult human experiences in Peters’s art.
Art
Making Food Into an Art in Muslim-Majority Cultures
Focused on the SWANA region, "The Art of Dining" transforms meals into narrative experiences, showing how food connects people not only to their roots, but also to each another.
Art
Ai Weiwei Knocks Down the Building Blocks of Empire
His toy-brick masterpieces are tributes to anyone terrorized and brutalized by the world’s great powers and their proxies.
Art
Holly Wright Challenges Our Sense of Vanity
At the Fralin Museum of Art, photographer Holly Wright reduces her poet laureate husband to a mouthpiece, and asks her subjects to think upon their own deaths.
Film
The Return Is a Shabby CliffsNotes Version of the Odyssey
Homer’s Odysseus is complicated and playful — a man who has suffered, and is changed. Pasolini’s Odysseus squints, and occasionally flexes.
Art
Artists Find Energy Justice in Grassroots Acts
Energies at the Swiss Institute brings an archival and contemporary lens to questions of energy justice through a sharply curated artist cohort.
Book Review
Why Don’t We Talk About Race in Fairy Tales?
Characters in fairy tales “are white not by chance, but by design,” Kimberly J. Lau writes in a new book.
Film
The Emotional Valences of Brutalism
Historically, cinema has invoked the architectural movement as an easy shorthand for villainy. In The Brutalist, though, it embodies a proletarian dream.
Art
Exposing the Dark Underbelly of the American West
Out of Site focuses on the scientific tools used to map the West’s resource-rich landscape, and how those technologies have become forces of destruction.
Art
Holly Lane’s Elegiac Shrines to the Natural World
The artist evokes a keen awareness of the threats facing the environment by honoring it through opulent, reliquary-style frames and delicate paintings.
Books
An Incomplete History of Griffins in Art
Despite its ambition to expand our definition of the creature to include other winged, hybrid beasts, Griffinology is hemmed in by a European framework.