Visual Art

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

Magritte’s Prophetic Surrealism

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

  • Jackson Arn

The Captive Photograph

Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned, but ancestors to be cared for.

  • Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Bringing Abolition to the Museum

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

  • Shellyne Rodriguez
  • Billie Anania

Working on Our Primal Scream

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.

  • John Crowley

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.

  • Erika Howsare

Museums and Mourning in COVID-19

Museums rose to the challenge of responding to HIV/AIDS. They can do so again in the face of COVID-19.

  • Jackson Davidow

Sign up for our newsletter

Fashioning a Way Out of Black Pain

Race in the fashion industry.

  • Alexis L. Boylan

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.

  • Jonathan Beecher Field

Remy Charlip’s Postmodernism for Kids

For him, books were instruments—things to do something with.

  • Judith Levine

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.

  • Alexis L. Boylan

Painting the New York Times

An interview with Nicky Nodjoumi—one of Iran’s greatest artists, in exile since 1980.

  • Nicky Nodjoumi
  • Daniel Penny

Elizabeth Hand’s Curious Toys

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.

  • John Crowley
  • Elizabeth Hand

The Historian’s Art

An interview with historian Nell Irvin Painter.

  • Jonathan M. Square
  • Walter Johnson
  • Nell Painter

AI’s Human Problem

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

  • Alexis L. Boylan

The Photographic Is Political

“Do we approach the photograph as spectators, or as citizens of the world?”

Race in Black and White

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

  • Alexis L. Boylan

The Private Edward Gorey

The cult artist and author proves an evasive subject for biography, a fact that would surely have delighted him.

  • John Crowley

Chronicling the Last Days of Old New York

In his acerbic and often hilarious Village Voice column, Gary Indiana documented a cultural world being lost to AIDS and corporate greed.

  • Jeremy Lybarger

The Instagrammable Charm of the Bourgeoisie

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

  • Daniel Penny

Unreliable Witnesses

From scrapbooks to family albums, a new book presents their visual testimonies from Kashmir.

  • Suchitra Vijayan

Stranger Things: The Rise and Fall of UFOs and Life on the Moon

Let's all move to the moon.

  • John Crowley

Home Theater

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

  • Barrett Swanson

Pilgrim’s Progress

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

  • Alan A. Stone

The Look of Disaster

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

  • Elizabeth Hand
trending_flat
Get our newsletter

Vital reading on politics, ideas, and culture to your inbox

A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975

Registered 501(c)(3) organization

Help Us Stay Paywall-Free

Donate

Become a Member

Subscribe