Art
Required Reading
This week, Schultz controversy at the Whitney Biennial continues, Tom Finkelpearl writes about the impact of the NEA, British actors playing American role, new emojis, and more.
Weekend
Art
Weekend Words: Tomb
"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment."
Interview
She Makes the Dirty Work Look Like a Degas
"I was in a coven for two years in the ‘90s. Well, everybody was in a coven in the ‘90s."
Music
Syd’s Pleasure Principle
Syd’s murmurs, exclamations, coos, and exhalations are layered with care and irrepressible delight — all so quietly you could blink and miss it all.
Art
Romare Bearden’s Fevered Dream
Derived from memory, Bearden’s bayou is at once real and mythic, the Black counterpart to William Faulkner’s apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County.
Art
Jeff Donaldson’s Celebration of an Alternative History
Donaldson wanted to replace the history of demeaning stereotypes of Black people that had been presented by white, mainstream culture. By connecting his work to Africa and developing a powerful transnational view, he aimed to develop an alternative history rooted in struggle.
Art
Watching and Waiting
Until 16 months ago, when Donald Trump said he was running for the Presidency, I never was a political person.
Books
Timothy Hyman's Alternative View of Figurative Painting in Art History
Most of the artists in Hyman’s book, the author claims, are generally excluded from most survey courses and textbooks. Their presence here offers a sharp rebuke to the narrowing of creative possibilities and the disparagement of painting as a vehicle for the expression of modern life and consciousne
Art
Enrique Martínez Celaya's "The First Kierkegaard"
Kierkegaard has been a constant source of inspiration for the Cuban-born painter Enrique Martínez Celaya, one of a number of philosophers and writers whose work he has studied, absorbed, and responded to.
Art
In Carlo Zinelli and Eugen Gabritschevsky’s Art, the Life Spirit Endures
Diving into the American Folk Art Museum’s two new exhibitions, it’s quite likely that your head will spin — for all the right reasons — in the presence of some very potent expressions from two unsinkable human spirits.
Art
Field Report on an Artist and Her Pigs
In her project This Little Piggy, Elaine Tin Nyo is forcing an engagement with the wages of survival against the desire for pleasure, and our unwillingness to tease them apart.
Art
Required Reading
This week, imaging the world's longest building, the Oxford comma wins, Grabner on Gibson, We Are All Merkel, artist tattoos MAGA around his anus, and more.