Art
In Rome, a Street Named Propaganda
The street with Francesco Borromini’s marvelous façade is called Via di Propaganda; learning its history reveals the complex relationship between art and indoctrination.
Sunday Edition
News
Propaganda: 📣 From Screed to Screen📱
This edition, we look at the origins of the term propaganda, some 20th-century incarnations, and how propaganda is playing out during the 2020 US election.
Art
A New Language: Duro Olowu and the Becoming of Black Britain
At a party in a vacant house full of young people, the reggae pounding and ganja smoke thick in the air, Gates was struck by the joylessness of the revels. The mood was brittle. Faces were set hard. Nobody laughed or even spoke.
Art
Praying for Life
Sahelian forms of artistry are a manifestation, or a visual translation, of an overarching ontology. Its plastic language can be understood as the language of a philosophy of the force of life.
Art
Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?
This essay is an account of truly learning to see what is and is not present in these objects.
Art
From Marking Time: An Excerpt
The book and exhibition center prisons in contemporary art and culture and the robust world of art-making inside US prisons.
Art
Jeffrey Gibson: Culture, Materials, Identity and Trade
Over the last decade Jeffrey Gibson has moved from creating lyrical, abstracted acrylic landscape paintings with beaded and sculpted paint elements to a dizzingly multi-varied practice, which interfaces with the rubrics of fashion, gender, and ethnicity.
Art
Hip-Hop’s Afrofuturistic Hive Mind
Basquiat’s oeuvre can now be said to constitute a Black male wall of fame, one exploding with markers of the fraught conquests, Pyrrhic victories, and traumatic vicissitudes of Black male being-and-nothingness in America.
Art
Notes on Living a Translated Life
From the John Singer Sargent frontal nude painting of McKeller in Boston’s MFA, I’d imagined Thomas as tall and slender. Looking more closely, I can see that even 100 years ago a body like Thomas’s was not accidental.
Art
Sunday Edition, Catalogue Essays: 🗿 From Broken Noses to Hip-Hop’s Afrofuturism 🔮
A selection of some extraordinary essays found in art museum exhibition catalogues across the United States.
Art
Sorry/Not Sorry: How Viewers Express Judgment by Touching the Art
Anyone who deliberately damages art in a museum is regarded as under a delusion, either due to mental illness or a failure to perceive the nature of what they’re doing. But in reality, people touch art all of the time.
Art
Mea Culpa
There are things that I have failed to clue into that continue to make me wince when I think of them. Things that force me to ask “How could I have missed my cues so completely?”