Art
The Monstrous Femininity of Maureen St. Vincent
The artist’s aquatic pastels represent women who cannot be domesticated or controlled.
Reviews
Books
How the Black Meme Turns a Trope Into a Trap
Legacy Russell’s Black Meme argues that owning, replicating, and remediating Black material is a theft rooted in historical frameworks of subordination.
Art
In Weaving Abstraction, Textiles Travel Through Space and Time
The Met show pays tribute to the designs and technical innovations of long-ago weavers and the 20th-century artists who took inspiration from them.
Art
The Musical Science of Melvin Way’s Enigmatic Art
Way’s drawings are not messages to be decoded but instead are renderings of our yearning to comprehend.
Art
The Critique-Profiteering Work of MSCHF
Combining the provocative spirit of internet trolling, clickbait scamming, and MTV’s Punk’d, the collective satirizes consumerism while making bank.
Film
A Japanese Reality Show’s Dark Legacy
Livestreaming, confessional monologues, and subjects’ willingness to let mass audiences surveil them all started here.
Art
The Alienated Aesthetics of USC’s Student Exhibition
Across multiple media, USC art students’ works paired meditations on discomfort, isolation, and technology with an impressive aesthetic rigor.
Art
Pratt MFA Photographers Turn Landscapes into Critiques of Power
The students put their own spins on landscape photography to coax out questions of race, power, sexuality, and sustainability.
Art
Lauren Lee McCarthy Swaps Stories of Saliva and Surveillance
Bodily Autonomy takes advantage of humor and hyperbole to demonstrate a very real world in which biosurveillance is prevalent overtly and covertly.
Art
Yinka Shonibare’s Patterns of Decolonization
In a gallery such as Serpentine, defined by both Britishness and blue-chip status in the art world, how much can categories be suspended?
Books
The Anti-Spectacle of the Black Avant-Garde
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s Millennial Style considers the political utility of Black abstraction and related forms to refute false narratives of progress.
Art
Ecological Crisis Echoes Through the Church of San Lorenzo
Restor(y)ing Oceania provides a powerful sense of the devastation faced by Pacific Islanders — and the ecosystems that may soon be lost.