Speculations about climate change by an array of artists feel eerily probable, if not already real.
Weekend
Humankind’s History of Betraying Animals
Thalia Field’s poems collage scientific, historical, and philosophical sources to explore speciesism.
Facing Catastrophe With Calm
Joshua Marsh has fashioned a world where a sweet, wise humor in the face of mortality and inescapable change prevails.
Required Reading
This week, how queer sex lives have been reconfigured by the pandemic, dommes are convincing their subs to get vaccinated, carbon offsets are catching fire, and more.
Jon Pylypchuk’s Chorus of Loss
Pylypchuk’s art has always been deeply engaged with the most painful parts of life, those that human beings tend to push aside or deny in order to get by.
An Asian Artist’s Isolation in New York
Yuri Yuan’s sense of isolation is an inescapable feature of her daily life, which she simultaneously examines and holds at bay through the act of painting.
A Photographer Captures the Collective Fatigue of the Welfare State
A persistent feature of Paul Graham’s photographs in Beyond Caring is the way they describe the act of waiting as a common, and alienating, condition of Britain’s welfare system.
Together in Peace and Protest
Not all of the scenes Dianna Settles paints are pleasant, but that seems to be the point: for better or worse, we are undeniably yoked in our collective experience of being human.
In Henry Taylor’s Paintings, the Past Bleeds Into the Present
Taylor’s paintings emphasize that golf and horse racing, though once exclusively activities for privileged white men, depended on the support of men who were almost invariably Black.
The Feminist Power of Beauty
Beauty remains an uncomfortable territory for many contemporary artists, which makes the boldness of Sarah Ann Weber’s aesthetics all the more compelling.
Required Reading
This week, Lucia Hierro’s oversized sculptures of shopping bags, the billionaire obsession with outer space, shutting out comic book artists, Ishmael Reed, bad book tropes, and more.
Alice Neel’s Haunting Portrait of Domestic Abuse
Alice Neel: People Come First yielded a work I had never seen and that I will never unsee.