Section
Art
-
Extracting Blackness, from the Middle Ages to Today
I could not look at the dismembered Ethiopian leg without feeling the weight of a racial history that has never quite let up.
-
“Why Do We Go On Pretending?”: Theater at the End of the World
The theatre is where we go to remind ourselves that we are all dying together, and to live better for it.
-
How to Lose a Library
On October 31, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack. Since then, what has been lost?
-
There Is No Such Thing as a Good Book: On “The Art of Libromancy”
“I do not think bookselling is an art. I think it is a job.”
-
Escape from Earth: Raquel Forner’s Space Paintings
If the iconic NASA astronaut is a confident (male) neo-colonist, Forner’s Astronauts are infantile, unprotected, vulnerable.
-
Long Cons: The Tragicomedy of Prestige TV
Shows like “The White Lotus” distract us with progressive politics, while stealing our eyeballs for the very people the shows lambaste.
-
Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
-
“We Plot to Undo the World”
Artist Simone Leigh curated a series of intellectual sermons directed by Black women who grieved, strategized, loved, and yearned for community.
-
Andrea Hornick and Timothy Ingold: Designs for the Anthropocene
“We bring our own creativity into what we see—the seams get filled in, smoothed over, by our looking.”
-
The Art We Do Together: “Art Worlds” 40th Anniversary
Howard Becker pointed out that critics, curators, suppliers, and administrators are as important to the creation of art as artists themselves.
-
“The War Conquers You Not Only Physically”: Darya Tsymbalyuk on Plants and Humans in Ukraine
For several years, Darya Tsymbalyuk has been drafting a new history of Ukraine’s Donbas that overturns our assumptions. Rather than focus on the industrialization and war that have dominated the region, she interviews locals and asks them to draw maps of their hometowns, based on their memories and emotional connections. The resulting maps—which emerge in…
-
Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Theater
Even in Shakespeare’s era, theaters literally shielded people from the state. Today’s theaters might talk sanctuary, but rarely practice it.
-
Gordon Syron and the Art of the Invasion
In what ways might art resist a colonial state? Can a painting function as a land rights claim?
-
The Art of Intelligence
Art made by AI subverts our usual understandings of creativity as a uniquely human power.
-
Living with the Future in South Asia
For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
-
Unreal Realism: Chicago’s Avant-Garde Women
Chicago—for women artists of various backgrounds—demanded a new art to advance the struggle for freedom by imagining other possible worlds.
-
“Now Is the Time of Help”: On Claudia Rankine
A new play centers on a Black woman who stops “accommodating white people” and, instead, asks them “about their love affair with my death.”
-
Embracing George?
In painting immigrants, George W. Bush seeks to ingratiate himself with the American public. But his crimes must be remembered.
-
Do the Humanities Need Experts or Skeptics?
Why are Anglophone novels more worthy of attention than Ottoman shadow puppetry or the art of knot-tying? Just what are the humanities for?
-
Public Thinker: Chawne Kimber on Constructing Quilts and Speaking History
“You cannot talk about race without talking about cotton. The materials that I use are desperately important as a layer of meaning in the work that I make.”
-
Freedom’s Stakes
Postwar culture was divided between “freedom” and “totalitarianism.” Or was it?
