Contributors

For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams and The Colony

by Lisa Zeiger “All I can see is the frame.” –Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring […]

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (ended 1 November 2020) Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, November 20, 2020–February 7, 2021; the Seattle Art Museum, February 25–May 23, 2021; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., June 26–September 19, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Elizabeth […]

Lettering The Yet Known: The Arcane Calligraphs of David D. Oquendo

by Lisa Zeiger “I dream of a new alphabet.” — Marcel Broodthaers, 1974 When considering the merit of a work of art, should the biography of its maker matter? Should we train the tentacles of personality upon the armature of art? When I first saw images of David D. Oquendo’s calligraphic paintings on Instagram (@monkpuppy) I had no ideas […]

Hauntings in the Imagination: New Books on Bluesman Robert Johnson

by Greil Marcus Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow. Chicago Review, 326 pp., $20.05 Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson by Annye C. Anderson, with Preston Lauterbach, and with a foreword by Elijah Wald. Hachette, 203 pp., $24.99 Love in Vain: Robert Johnson, 1911–1938 by […]

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (through 31 January 2021) Reviewed by Anna Shapiro NYRB The Whitney’s show, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place […]

Salman Toor’s How Will I Know and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC: Salmon Toor: How Will I Know (through 4 April 2021) and Vida Americana: Mexican Artists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (through 31 January 2021) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx In two rooms on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum, a scattering of miniature brown men frolic around the […]

Photography as Bildungsroman: On Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland, Black Garden and Departure Lounge

by Allyn Gaestel I lent Jason Eskenazi’s photo books to a friend of mine to look at after dinner. I had been carrying them in my suitcase for eight months. It was the night before a residency where I planned to finally cohere the fragments of this essay into a text. In the morning my friend […]

Envisioning a Gilded Vengence in Mark Steven Greenfield’s Black Madonna

at William Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (through 28 November) Reviewed by Lita Barrie Mark Steven Greenfield’s powerful exhibition of Black Madonna paintings, currently on view at William Turner Gallery, is perfectly timed to coincide with the election of the first woman of color, Kamala Harris, to be our next Vice President; while the exhibition notably […]

From Trauma to Transcendence in The Naked Mind

at Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 12) Reviewed by Genie Davis Curated by Georganne Deen, the group show at Track 16 Gallery is perhaps the ultimate exhibition for pandemic times. Titled The Naked Mind, the show features the art of eleven artists including Deen, Liz Young, Eve Wood, Cathy Ward, Samantha Harrison, Christine Wertheim, Laurie Steelink, Rhonda Saboff / Parker Pine, and Lara […]

Excellence and Thrilling Abundance in LA Louver’s 45 at 45

at LA Louver, Los Angeles (through 16 January 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood 45 at 45, currently on view at LA Louver in Venice, is an exhibition of epic proportions, not only because of the sheer number of artists included but also because it signifies and celebrates four-and-a-half decades of LA Louver’s luminous and expansive vision. […]

Stalking Memory to Spy Out One’s Self in Patrick Modiano’s Invisible Ink

Reviewed by John Biscello Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano Yale University Press, 176 pp., $24.00 If there is a suitcase, forged documentation, café-life and tons of mileage accumulated tramping the streets of Paris, it’s a pretty safe guess that you are inside a Patrick Modiano novel. The French writer, whose Nobel Prize in 2014 launched […]

Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

at the Scuderie del Quirinale Reviewed by Ingrid D. Rowland Raffaello 1520–1483 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi, with Francesco P. Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Farinella Skira 543 pp., €46.00 (paper) (in Italian; an English translation will be published in October 2020) The New York Review of Books Like the artist […]

Don DeLillo’s Engrossing Yet Oddly Frictionless New Novella, The Silence

Reviewed by Dwight Garner The Silence by Don DeLillo Scribner, 128pp., has $19.22 NY Times Don DeLillo’s slim new novel, The Silence, is a pristine disaster novel with apocalyptic overtones. It’s a Stephen King novel scored by Philip Glass instead of Chuck Berry. A plane from Paris to Newark crash-lands. Two of the main characters […]

Dismantling One of the Great Encyclopedic Museums in the Country: The Regrettable LACMA Redesign

by Joseph Giovannini NYRB Online “This is a hostile takeover of the museum, and if the design succeeds in hijacking the institution, Los Angeles will be living for a long time with a wanton act of architecture, and the bitter memory of a very expensive betrayal of the public trust.” —Joseph Giovannini There are two […]

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner Palo Alto on Impulse! Pitchfork Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, […]

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

Interview by Accra Shepp NYRB My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the […]

Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest

By Amethyst Ganaway Food & Wine We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —Amethyst Ganaway Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and […]

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1”

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

by Lisette García and Barrett Martin excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women by Lisette García, Ph. D available November 20th Sunyata Books “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.” –Angela Davis Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her […]

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

Reviewed by Bill McKibben Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99 The New York Review of Books So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, […]

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20 If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our […]

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