How could any Belgian graphic novel escape Tintin’s shadow? Enter Brecht Evens’s The Making Of.
Tag: Art
Watching the End Times from the Good Place
Television responded to our cultural—and planetary—existential crisis with The Good Place.
Patricia Banks on Supporting African American Museums
Studies of museum patronage mostly focus on social class. That's not the whole story.
Public Thinker: Jenny Price on Refusing to Save the Planet
“First: Why are we not making more progress? Second: Why do so many people hate environmentalists?”
B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath ...
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 ...
Raise Your Needles: In Defence of Public Knitting
It was a triumph bagging the last table on the busy rooftop bar, especially so late ...
Public Thinker: Frances Negrón-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor ...
“There Are Black People in the Future”: An Interview with Artist Alisha B. Wormsley
I think I make art because it’s what I’ve always done. It’s how I communicate my dreams. It’s how I stay alive, or rather it’s how I live ...
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 ...
Writing for a Global Audience: An Interview with Poet Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed is one of the most significant literary figures of our time. He has ...
Resistance without Rhetoric
There’s a common belief that moments of public agony are good for poetry. Political turmoil, so this wishful thinking goes, galvanizes an otherwise private art and ...
“Kingdom of Dolls”: Sonneberg, Germany
In her mid-19th-century children’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, Julie Gouraud warns her readers not to unstitch their dolls looking for origins and inner workings ...
A Manifesto for the World as One Finds It
Animals have been disappearing for the past two centuries: first from our everyday lives, in the era of urbanization and industrialization, and then, as the sixth ...
Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art ...
The Breaks of History
Ralph Ellison once suggested that “living with music” provides us with “an orientation in time.” Music, in other words, helps us locate and anchor ourselves within a history that exceeds us. Living ...
What I Learned on Medieval Twitter
Most of the people I follow on Twitter are medievalists, even though I’m not a medievalist myself. Far from it: my research focuses on the 20th and 21st ...
Dancing through Dark Times
What can dance contribute to the contemporary politics of resistance? If politics is about movement—uprising, oppression, resistance, setback, advance ...
Public Thinker: Jo Livingstone on the Critic’s Voice
As a graduate student, Jo Livingstone realized early that an ...
You Can Call It “The Cuban”: Miami, Florida
The fall of 2018 in Miami saw the grand opening of an institution you would’ve thought the city already had. The ...