Invitation to a Dance

The early prints of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape enlivened the abstract geometries of Concrete Art with the social, improvisational ethos of a new movement.

May 24, 2023

House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary. 

May 25, 2023

The Gilder Age

The architecture of the American Museum of Natural History’s new addition is as oppressively weighty as its exhibitions are spellbinding. 

May 22, 2023

Name the Lost!

A memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery for New Yorkers who have died of Covid-19 is intended to be ephemeral.

May 21, 2023

A Sea of Forms

In his exuberantly colored, idiosyncratic paintings, Bob Thompson at once drew on the medium’s past and pushed its vanguard.

May 20, 2023

What Is Wildness?

Wildness, a name we give to living nature, is intangible, maybe even ineffable, but it’s not imaginary—it’s biological.

May 16, 2023

‘A Wakeup Call from Hell’

By striking for safe staffing levels, New York City nurses joined a wave of labor unrest that has swept the health care industry in response to Covid-19.

March 1, 2023

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Eric Adams’s involuntary hospitalization plan was the culmination of a year spent demonizing those on the lowest rung of New York City’s ladder.

January 18, 2023

‘My High-Income Earners’

Eric Adams’s austere fiscal policy seems designed to reassure the wealthy that they will not have to pay their share of New York’s bills. 

December 20, 2022

New York’s Rusty Political Machine

New York’s unique red wave revealed the structural weakness of the state’s Democratic party—and above all its current committee chair. 

November 24, 2022

The Art of Pleasing

It was the charm Margot Fonteyn radiated, the lovability, that made her so cherished by audiences for more than four decades.

December 2, 2004 issue

Secrets of Nijinsky

Nijinsky’s famous diary was the record of his thoughts as he began to go insane. To my knowledge, it is the only sustained written account, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis.

January 14, 1999 issue

Star

When it came to hissing Lola Montez would develop the hide of a rhinoceros.

June 20, 1996 issue

Bad Housekeeping

Isadora Duncan’s vocabulary resounds with such period words as Woman, Beauty, Truth, Art, Glorious Vision. In spirit she was far more a pre-Raphaelite than a Marxist.

December 18, 1969 issue

The Lost World of the Jazz Club

It was an era when this milieu of popular music seemed to herald a now-distant promise of what American life might be.

December 23, 2020

An Interview with Archie Shepp

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically.

September 29, 2020

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

The World of Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor developed an exceptional finger dexterity, and a complete mastery of his attacks and releases. As the pianist Craig Taborn told me, “fingers don’t do that naturally.”

May 16, 2018

The Grandest Duke

Of many artists it can be said that deep cultural currents can be read through their work; much rarer are those who, like Ellington, transformed those currents by their work.

October 28, 2010 issue

Some Like It Hot

For jazz to go so far, it needed impresarios and entrepreneurs committed to a cause. And it required public relaxation of an apartheid far stronger than we can now imagine.

April 13, 1989 issue

Cuban Hit Parade

Buena Vista Social Club may come nearest to being the perfect popular music record since Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

January 14, 1999 issue

Dizzy in the Daylight

Jazz Festival is a thick book of black-and-white photographs by Jim Marshall, one of the best-known American rock photographers, who first became famous by taking pictures of jazz musicians.

December 4, 2016

The New Organizers

“It’s a strange moment: there is simultaneously extreme wealth and skyrocketing real estate prices and rents but also austerity for anything in the public sphere (other than the police).”

May 27, 2023

The Art of Feminine Injury and Excess

“I’m clearly invested in recovering forms of labor that, precisely because they have historically been performed by women, aren’t readily legible as work.”

May 20, 2023

Writing into Silence

“What happens when, through education and the resulting social mobility, the writer comes to incarnate power over others—like the person they once were?”

May 13, 2023