Art
Abigail Dudley’s Paintings of the Observed and Imagined
I can think of no other painter who can so effectively pull the viewer into a space where clarity and puzzlement cannot be separated.
Reviews
Books
The Revisions That Make Us Human
Revising Reality argues that the world as we know it is our creative output so our memories cannot help but be continually edited.
Art
Bimbola Akinbola’s Postcards From Grief Island
Though the show is a response to a period of intense personal mourning in the artist’s life, it’s also achingly universal.
Art
Otto Dix’s Visions of War
What Dix conveys so deftly is that terror and trauma are felt, not thought, and art about these experiences fails when it tries to make sense of things.
Books
Trans Actress Candy Darling Gets the Biography She Deserves
Half a century after the Warhol film star’s death, writer and critic Cynthia Carr brings Darling’s life to light in an empathetic, well-researched new book.
Art
A Rewritten History of the Taiwanese-Japanese Sugar Trade
There Is Another Capital Beneath the Waves ruminates on commerce, colonization, and conflict between manipulative forces that fuel the engine of history.
Art
The Fetishistically Fantastic Art of Christina Ramberg
Ramberg was one of the lesser-known — but, to my mind, most exciting — artists often grouped together as the Chicago Imagists.
Books
The Art History of Addiction and Recovery
Scholar and psychotherapist Kikan Massara elucidates and contextualizes the 12-step recovery process through paintings, prints, and other works of art and literature.
Art
Melissa Meyer’s Lush Urban Glyphs
Working with line and color for more than two decades, Meyer has shown that reductive painting need not squeeze out improvisation.
Art
Jonathan Baldock Taps Into the Spirit of Trees
Combining queerness, the natural world, and paganism, Baldock’s expressive, quirky works expand on the very nature of earth-based spirituality.
Art
A Show Asks How We Can Reclaim Our Bodies
Embodiment and its expressions recur as themes in Hand to Mouth, a show that centers artists’ self-determination.
Performance
Social Tensions From Antiquity to the End of the World
The trials of a post-apocalyptic New York and hedonistic Rome become one another’s mirrors and choirs in The Industry’s double opera Comet/Poppea.