Art
Required Reading
This week, the library of King Ashurbanipal, the new Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice, geographies of fear in antiquity, China's Uighurs, alt-right New York, and more.
Weekend
Books
Dorothea Lasky's Provocative Poems about Motherhood
The poems in Milk combine snarky sense of humor with an edge of semi-bitter self-consciousness.
Art
Melissa Meyer’s Urban Vision
Meyer has turned Pollock’s all-over painting on its head.
Art
Hilma af Klint, Outlier for the Ages
Hilma af Klint reminds us that institutionally approved narratives generally function as touchstones for conformists and the weak-kneed.
Art
The Passion and Inspiration of Creative Couples
Modern Couples explores how creative couples reshaped modern art and redefined ideas of gender and love in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Art
Lee Kang-So's Sensual Semiotics
What is the best way to convey something, especially if the essence of it seems to escape appearance?
Music
The Protest Music We’ve Been Waiting For
New albums from Superchunk, Noname, Blood Orange, and Tune-Yards strike a blow for the resistance.
Art
The Brutalist Invasion of Phyllida Barlow
Barlow’s sculptures may be abstract, but they feel rife with heads, teeth, legs, and orifices of every stripe.
Art
Required Reading
This week, New York Times's Facebook bombshell, a critic’s nightmare, Black Athena revisted, a fake band gets found out, a banned commercial from Iceland, and more.
Books
Ellie Ga’s Empire of Texts
Like Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco, Ga’s theme is a search for a truth that leaves signs everywhere, but remains out of reach.
Books
The Hard-to-Find Chapbooks of Geoffrey Young
Young is one of those poets, it seems, who prefers to do it all himself, how and when he feels like it.
Art
Harriet Korman’s Formal Mastery
Being a torch carrier wasn't Korman's thing.