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Visual art

Arts in Society

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.

Jackson Davidow

Arts in Society

The Woman Erased from Bauhaus History

Lucia Moholy helped create the visual language of the Bauhaus, but when she fled the Nazis her work was stolen by Walter Gropius.

Elizabeth Hoover

Arts in Society

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.

Alexis L. Boylan

Race

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

Arts in Society

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.

Judith Levine

Arts in Society, Politics

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.

Anthony Paletta

Arts in Society

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

Arts in Society

Painting the New York Times

Nicky Nodjoumi is one of Iran’s greatest artists, but his politics have kept him in exile since 1980.

Nicky Nodjoumi, Daniel Penny

Arts in Society

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

Arts in Society

The Historian’s Art

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.

Jonathan M. Square, Walter Johnson, Nell Painter

Arts in Society

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

Arts in Society

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

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