Art
UCLA’s MFAs Take On Power Structures
While some of the works lack the finesse of more seasoned veterans, these artists have cultivated firm, incisive critiques of the powers that be.
Reviews
Art
The Quiet Urgency of Barbara Takenaga’s Paintings
Her paintings are searching for materially rooted forms while simultaneously reaching for something unfixed and uncontainable.
Art
Willem de Kooning’s Italy
Paintings from the late 1950s and on prove that de Kooning had sat at the feet of, and learnt much from, such old Italian masters as Titian and Tintoretto.
Art
A Rock and a Fry Pan Walked Into a Gallery
In addition to being some combination of formally delectable, politically astute, and historically poignant, five solo shows currently in Chicago are hilarious.
Books
How Big Cats Once Symbolized France’s Colonialist Ambitions
Myth and Menagerie urges us to view lions as sentient beings and not as timeless, passive objects of representation for 19th-century French artists.
Books
The Scholar Who Rewrote Black Brazilian History
Beatriz Nascimento’s groundbreaking research defied dominant White Brazilian academic narratives, instead emphasizing Black political agency.
Art
A Spanish Artist’s Dreamy Homages to Her Homeland
Undercutting dominant narratives of Spanish modernism, Delhy Tejero was part of a community of artists whose avant-garde work forged a new sense of national identity.
Books
Objects That Tell the History of LGBTQ+ Resistance
Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects serves less as a catalog and more as a continuation of a years-long effort to tell a millennia-long history.
Art
The Sartorial Rivals of Waterloo
The 1st Duke of Wellington was always very particular about the way he turned himself out — as was his nemesis Napoleon, of course.
Film
Film Suggests We Call Indiana Jones What He Is: Grave Robber
Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (2023) resists Hollywood’s compulsion to romanticize the Western archaeologist.
Art
London’s National Portrait Gallery Catches Up to Black Portraiture
The Time is Always Now emphasizes the continuing importance of Black identity, visibility, and recognition in predominantly White society.
Art
A Mid-Century Painter Showed a World Out of Kilter
In the Luigi Zuccheri’s pastoral scenes, a menagerie of oversized creatures, plants, fruits, and vegetables dwarf the humans with whom they share the canvas.