Section
Art
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Use and Reuse: Dancing Again with Robert Rauschenberg
“Looking at the Rauschenberg archives was a revelation to me. I’ve never handled a silkscreen, and physics and geometry weren’t my best subjects in high school, but even I could see how ‘Set and Reset’ could be recreated because of the Rauschenberg studio’s meticulous records management.”
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“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.”
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Embracing George?
In painting immigrants, George W. Bush seeks to ingratiate himself with the American public. But his crimes must be remembered.
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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?
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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.”
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Freedom’s Stakes
Postwar culture was divided between “freedom” and “totalitarianism.” Or was it?
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Quilting: An Archive of Hand, Eye, and Soul
Once, Black women employed textile arts both as a mutual aid network, and as a safe space to envision a Southern Black liberated life.
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Build Culture, Build Community, Break Fascism
On both sides of the border, artivistas—art activists—infuse their creative and political work with minority struggle and solidarity.
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You Are Never Alone at the Museum
What do we see when looking at art from the perspective of the infrastructures that sustain it?
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Museums as Monuments to White Supremacy
Millions of items looted from Africa during the colonial era remain housed in private collections and museums around the world.
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Unruly Objects
By making familiar objects strange, two new books of poetry reveal the limits of overly simple critique.
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“Somewhere in This Brain”: Memories of Segregation, Soul Music & “Macbeth” with Al Bell
“A song was written through me, and I say that because I didn’t write it. The words were given to me.”[none-for-homepage]
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Minimal Success
In art, it is often said, less is more. The same may also be true for criticism.
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Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
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Mend Your Ways
An exhibition of Japanese textiles celebrates repaired clothing: flipping salvage into sustainability, and damage into beauty.
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B-Sides: Brecht Evens’s “The Making Of”
How could any Belgian graphic novel escape Tintin’s shadow? Enter Brecht Evens’s The Making Of.
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Patricia Banks on Supporting African American Museums
Studies of museum patronage mostly focus on social class. That’s not the whole story.
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Fascism’s Cultural Behemoth
Milan 1919: Fascism was founded as a movement almost exactly a century ago, by journalist and agitator Benito Mussolini along with a gaggle of World War I …
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What Did We See in Color TV?
For those seeking to break up with their phones, or just decrease their screen time, tech ethicist Tristan Harris recommends starting with a quick technological fix …
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The Book of Faces
I’m not actually sure if I should call Jessica Helfand’s Face: A Visual Odyssey a book. I mean, it looks like a book. It has text, divided into sentences, paragraphs, and sections. It’s on pages …
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Design with Disability
The “Accessible Icon” by Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren began as design activism: the artists defaced existing disability access symbols with red and orange vinyl stickers. Today, their so-called “active wheelchair” logo has been adopted as the new standard by institutions and cities around the world. This clean, “accurate” image greeted visitors to the Access…
