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Tag: Visual Art

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

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

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

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

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

Shellyne Rodriguez, Billie Anania

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

Jackson Davidow

Race in the fashion industry.

Alexis L. Boylan

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

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.

Judith Levine

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

Anthony Paletta
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
Nicky Nodjoumi is one of Iran’s greatest artists, but his politics have kept him in exile since 1980.
Daniel Penny, Nicky Nodjoumi
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.
Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley

An interview with historian Nell Irvin Painter.

Nell Painter, Walter Johnson, Jonathan M. Square

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.

Alexis L. Boylan

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

Anthony Paletta

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

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

Daniel Penny

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

Suchitra Vijayan

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

Barrett Swanson

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