Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

We rely on readers to keep our website open to all. Help sustain a public space for collective reasoning and imagination—make a tax-deductible donation today.

Tag: Visual Art

Browse our essays and reviews on visual art, photography, and architecture.

Jackson Arn
No other artist more perfectly anticipated the banal strangeness of life in the twenty-first century.
Shellyne Rodriguez, Billie Anania

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

John Crowley

Amidst a boys’ club of ’70s-era comics, Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie was unique for its feminist depiction of the political and sexual awakening of young women.

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

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

A draft executive order condemns the modernism of an aesthetic elite in favor of popular neoclassicism.

Alexis L. Boylan
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.
Daniel Penny, Nicky Nodjoumi
Nicky Nodjoumi is one of Iran’s greatest artists, but his politics have kept him in exile since 1980.
Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley
Celebrated novelists John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand discuss Hand’s new novel and the ways that historical fiction can and cannot answer our questions about the past.
Nell Painter, Walter Johnson, Jonathan M. Square
After retiring from Princeton, celebrated historian Nell Irvin Painter decided to go to art school. In this interview with Walter Johnson, she discusses what it’s like to be an old student, and how art lets her tell truths about history that she couldn’t as an academic.
Alexis L. Boylan

Two new books about machine creativity mostly reveal how little appreciation we still have for the full range of human creativity.

Alexis L. Boylan

Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.

Anthony Paletta

Yugoslavia produced a thrilling variety of buildings—frequently departing from the prefabricated monotony of the Eastern Bloc.

John Crowley
The cult artist and author proves an evasive subject for biography, a fact that would surely have delighted him.
Jeremy Lybarger
In his acerbic and often hilarious Village Voice column, Gary Indiana documented a cultural world being lost to AIDS and corporate greed.
Daniel Penny

The modes of perception and living that we attribute to Instagram are rooted in a much older aesthetic of the picturesque.

Suchitra Vijayan

From scrapbooks to family albums, the people of Kashmir have recorded their history in photographs. A new book presents their visual testimonies.

Barrett Swanson

Larry Sultan’s elegiac photography captures the suburban American home. 

Alan A. Stone

Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is lost in its own symbolism.

Elizabeth Hand

Comic books can document the horrors of war better than photos.

Anthony Paletta

Boston’s concrete modernist architecture is unsurpassed and widely despised.

Alan A. Stone

In Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, the crossroads of despair and integrity.

Alan A. Stone

The Wonders subverts the typical female coming-of-age story.

Judith Levine
“Dear Sir, I don’t like the way you crossed me out.”
Alana Shilling-Janoff

University art museums are cheap. They teach. They take risks.

Amy Benson
You can evoke a bird with one, maybe two gestures. One is sufficient—beak or wing, and you’re done. Bird.
Stephen Phelan

Shigeru Ban's humanitarianism is unquestioned, but are his designs too humble to warrant architecture's most coveted prize?

Rose Odengo

OneTouch travels the African continent, showcasing its natural beauty.

Alan A. Stone

If there is a moral limit to artistic license, director Alice Winocour has gone beyond it in Augustine.

Alan A. Stone

Fitzgerald's novel is overrated, but the new film version deserves more credit than it has received.

Elizabeth Alexander

Remembering Ficre Ghebreyesus

(and a slideshow of his paintings)

Alan A. Stone

Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love

Megan Pugh

The Many Partners of Fred Astaire.

Alan A. Stone
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. 
Corinne Segal

What problems arise when governments use art as a substitute for political engagement?

Susie Cagle

The story behind the municipal bankruptcy of Stockton, CA, illustrated.

Alan A. Stone

John Madden, the distinguished British director of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, tells us that his film has the structure of a Shakespearean comedy.

Alan A. Stone
Woody Allen’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
Robin D. G. Kelley

Revolutionary Theater in Palestine

Jana Pickart, Anne Makepeace

An Interview with Anne Makepeace.

John Crowley

It’s strange to think of Katchor’s work as lifelike, but there it is. Its lifelikeness is partly a function of the felt possibility of ongoing randomness inherent in the comic-strip mode.

Alan A. Stone

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Alan A. Stone

If Greenaway correctly diagnosed the aesthetic crisis of modern film, The Tree of Life is the remedy.

"An indispensable pillar of the public sphere."

That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.

"An indispensable pillar of the public sphere."

That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.