A Political and Literary Forum
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
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
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
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. The ensuing controversy has obscured not just the diversity of each style, but also the economic forces behind the business of building.
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.
Nicky Nodjoumi is one of Iran’s greatest artists, but his politics have kept him in exile since 1980.
Nicky Nodjoumi, Daniel Penny
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
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
Two new books about machine creativity mostly reveal how little appreciation we still have for the full range of human creativity.
Slavery and the Civil War were central to the development of photography as both a technology and an art.
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