Books
Beguiling Simplicity: The Poetry of Robert Lax
Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read.
Reviews
Art
Silence Like a Sense: Jake Berthot’s Visual Poetics
Before Jake Berthot became a painter, he was ridiculed by high school peers for an unorthodox answer he once gave in class. Berthot’s teacher rescued him by saying that the response he’d given made its own kind of sense because the young man was a poet.
Books
Antithetical Poetics: Recent Books by Joseph Donahue
Among contemporary American poets, Joseph Donahue is an underrecognized master. For years, he has been accumulating a prodigious body of work in which a searching vision and a refinement of craftsmanship combine.
Art
Smeary Smeary Edgar Degas
The first picture that caught me up short was “Factory Smoke” (1877–79), hanging alone on a freestanding wall in the middle of the gallery.
Art
Rendering Rhythm and Bodies in 3D
With bursts of neon cones and discs against a black void, clips from graphic artist MELTMIRROR's newest music video suggest what Kandinsky might've come up with had he been able to experiment with 3D modeling.
Film
At Tribeca Film Festival, Experiencing Submersion, Blindness, and Incarceration in VR
The communal experience of watching a film in theaters is a prime part of moviegoing, but at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, solitary visual consumption is receiving ample attention.
Film
Pensive Short Films About Peculiar and Forgotten Places
The texture and peculiarity of history, place, and the everyday color a ruminative set of short films in this year’s Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Art
At the AIPAD Photography Show, Training Your Eyes to See More
A photographer myself, I go to the Photography Show for the same reason I go to any exhibition: to learn.
Art
The Spectacle of the "Other" in a Grotesque Zoo
SAVANNAH, Georgia — Contrary to his gentle voice and friendly manner, Lavar Munroe’s first U.S. museum exhibition is filled with grotesque half-animal, half-human figures wielding hostile gloves and knives like predators.
Books
After 25 Years, an Influential Epistolary Novel Series Mails Its Last Letter
Griffin Moss, a lonely painter in London, and his mysterious muse Sabine Strohem were first introduced in the 1991 best-seller Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, an epistolary novel composed of extensively illustrated postcards and removable handwritten letters by author and artist
Art
Three Native American Artists Challenge a White Ethnographer’s Legacy
PORTLAND, Ore. — If you type the words “Native American” into Google image search, the majority of the results will be Edward Curtis photographs
Art
A Photographer Who Worked Through the Rise and Fall of Nazi Germany Has Her US Debut
Elisabeth Hase documented Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich and its postwar devastation.