Art
A Tribute to Oscar Wilde in the Prison Where He Was Incarcerated
The art organization Artangel has invited visual artists, writers, and performers to respond to Reading Gaol's most famous inmate, Oscar Wilde.
Reviews
Art
A Step in the Right Direction for the Display of Native American Art
The Newark Museum has rehung its exceptional collection of works by America's indigenous artists, providing more contextualizing information, while also letting objects speak to each other across eras and regions.
Art
Paintings that Stress the Strangeness in Ordinary Surfaces
Corydon Cowansage's works on canvas twist our perspective on such typically drab images as blades of grass and brick surfaces.
Books
The Underappreciated Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
A new book highlights the unheralded contributions of backdrop artists to the history of film.
Art
A Contemporary Take on Rococo Over-Intellectualizes Its Point
Tom Ellis’s detached intellectualizing of the Wallace Collection’s contents and history unfortunately leaves the soul unstirred.
Art
Trying to Believe in Sanford Biggers's Subjective Cosmology
In the Sanford Biggers exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, there is a feeling of being somewhat loose and unsupported in the space.
Performance
A Play Touches on the Power of Touch
The beating heart of My Brother’s a Keeper, performed at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, is an interlude at a bus stop when two characters let go of verbal language.
Art
Ghostly Flowers and Haunting Laughter Light Up a 19th-Century Reservoir
There is no path, map, or cautionary lighting to help you find your winding way through this exhibition.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Pierre Reverdy’s ‘The Song of the Dead’
I daresay Pierre Reverdy is the favorite French poet among American poets. But how well do we really know his work?
Art
The Quick and the Dead
Salvatore Scarpitta’s imagination was wild and full of high jinks. It is one reason why the art world has never known what to do with him.
Art
The Triumph of the Chickens
Like Ralph Ellison, who did not think of the Invisible Man as a protest novel, Kerry James Marshall is interested in the nuances of invisibility, in how much goes unseen, and the many different ways willful blindness manifests itself.
Music
Leonard Cohen R.I.P.
In addition to everything else he was — poet, wordsmith, conceptmaster, religious seeker, suave scruffy ladies’ man, Zen monk, belated concert fixture — he was also a major political songwriter.