Tag: Visual Art

Jack Parlett

The Democratic Potential of Cruising

Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.

Jackson Arn

Magritte’s Prophetic Surrealism

No other artist more perfectly anticipated the banal strangeness of life in the twenty-first century.

Shellyne Rodriguez, Billie Anania

Bringing Abolition to the Museum

Artist-activist Shellyne Rodriguez speaks with Billie Anania about museum labor practices and how Strike MoMA imagines a future of art for the people.

Erika Howsare

Poetry in the Critical Zone

In a new book of lyric essays, poet Cole Swensen answers a call issued by theorists Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel: to reimagine the globe in terms of the fragile surface ecosystems that support all life.

Jackson Davidow

Museums and Mourning in COVID-19

The history of 1989’s first annual Day Without Art reveals how museums rose to the challenge of responding to HIV/AIDS, and may offer guidance for how they can do so again in the face of COVID-19.

Alexis L. Boylan

Fashioning a Way Out of Black Pain

A new memoir by long-time Vogue editor André Leon Talley paints a grim picture of a fashion industry in which people of color have few opportunities beyond serving the ambitions of white designers, editors, and executives.

Jonathan Beecher Field

Some Statues Are Like Barbed Wire

Activists fighting to remove statues of slavers and colonizers understand better than most how public memorials can be a form of violence.

Judith Levine

Remy Charlip’s Postmodernism for Kids

The artist exploded the idea of what a book can be. For him, it was not a thing, but an instrument—something to do something with.

Anthony Paletta

Trump’s Culture Wars Come to Architecture

A draft executive order condemns the modernism of an aesthetic elite in favor of popular neoclassicism. The ensuing controversy has obscured not just the diversity of each style, but also the economic forces behind the business of building.

Alexis L. Boylan

Hyman Bloom’s Messy Bodies

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ retrospective of Hyman Bloom offers visitors the chance to engage with work that exemplifies how art can foster justice-minded, ethical looking.

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