Opinion
Required Reading
This week, Eid cards, a mysterious "Chicken Church," Cosby and Smithsonian, the best Dutch galleries in the US, an architect talks about the perfect sandcastle, and more.
Weekend
Opinion
Weekend Words: Pope
Last Sunday, Pope Francis wound up his eight-day, three-country tour of Latin America —home to the world’s largest Catholic population — where he called unfettered capitalism “the dung of the devil.”
Music
RuPaul's Electronic Drag Music
RuPaul is a gifted musician whose work gets overlooked by critics partially because of his considerable television presence hosting The RuPaul Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race, partially because of his exclusive appeal to a specialized niche market.
Art
Two Ways of Making a Painting in the 21st Century
Ever since the beginning of this century, when Ruth Root got rid of her references to Philip Guston, she has gotten better and better. In her current show, Ruth Root, at Andrew Kreps, she has kicked out the jams, and the results are unlike anything else being done right now.
Art
Mud Above Sky Below: Love and Death in Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series’
Spring, 1968. All my students were black, and I wasn't. Jacob Lawrence, who was teaching a course down the hall from me at Pratt Institute, was a famous artist and a real teacher; I wasn’t either of those things.
Art
Tokyo, Mon Amour: The City in Photos, as Monster and Muse
In East Asia, sprawling, dynamic, constantly changing Tokyo has a long history as a seductive subject and muse for innovative camera artists, but that tradition and the remarkable, often unexpected images it has produced are still not so widely known in the West outside a relatively small but growin
Art
The Presence of Absence: Three Artists at Brian Morris
Cuts Noon Light is a sleek, smart, strikingly cohesive group show at Brian Morris Gallery featuring the work of three very different artists, Andrew Ginzel, Kara Rooney, and Steel Stillman. At once immediately familiar and decidedly alien, its hybrid objects foreground the unseen, the cryptic, and t
Opinion
Required Reading
This week, the myths of an affordable LA, a church made of trees, gay lit, US sanctions and Iranian artists, decolonizing African art, and more.
Opinion
Weekend Words: Down
This week: the Chinese stock market fell way down, the New York Stock Exchange computer systems went down for nearly four hours, and South Carolina took down the Confederate flag.
Poetry
Late Indulgences: John Ashbery’s Breezeway
A few months ago in the New Yorker, essayist John McPhee recalled an exchange with his editor at Playboy in 1970, Arthur Kretchmer, about whether to remove a certain reference in a draft he’d submitted.
Art
Elmer Bischoff’s Haunting Figurative Paintings
The curator and art historian Susan Landauer met Elmer Bischoff in 1985, while she was a graduate student at Yale, and this encounter helped lead to her first book: The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (1996).
Art
Vantage Points: Three Works at Socrates Sculpture Park
With “Living Pyramid” (2015), Agnes Denes's first large-scale public sculpture in New York City since she planted and harvested an amber field in the Battery Park Landfill (“Wheatfield - A Confrontation," 1982), the artist merges botanicals with her interest in mathematics.