Arts

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Landscapes of the Imagination

Jesse Murry’s abstract seascapes enabled him to explore the inner world of the mind while infusing his art with his life as a gay Black man.

December 2, 2021 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

‘Who Designs Your Race?’

At a time when Latino identity is in flux, El Museo del Barrio’s triennial embraces its fragmented nature.

October 21, 2021 issue

Jed Perl

Colors in Conversation

Joan Mitchell was a Romantic whose paintings join nature and feelings with an operatic lyricism.

November 4, 2021 issue

Tim Page

Playing Together

In the late 1980s, when composers and audiences moved in deeply divided circles, Bang on a Can’s commitment to diverse programming began to break down the divisions within contemporary music.

November 18, 2021 issue

Susan Tallman

The Uses of Portraiture

As three exhibitions show, portraiture can be an argument, a celebration of surfaces, an occasion to play with historical tropes, or a form of resistance on behalf of the normally unpictured.

October 7, 2021 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Designs for Living

Svetlana Kana Radević’s architecture adapted modernism to the peculiarities of history and politics in Communist Yugoslavia.

September 23, 2021 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Daydream Kingdoms

Susan Te Kahurangi King’s art presents a visual, psychological, and expressive upside-down world.

July 22, 2021 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

May 13, 2021 issue

The Latest

Ben Lerner

Force of Gravity

Steffani Jemison’s videos activate questions of visibility and knowability, of the relation between exterior and interior, with an astonishing economy of means.

December 16, 2021 issue

Lorrie Moore

The Tender Trap

We ask marriage to provide personal growth plus affectionate companionship, sexual appreciation, and spiritual renewal. Can it sustain that expectation?

December 16, 2021 issue

James Quandt

Body Awareness

The mercurial Austrian artist Maria Lassnig made extreme, unsparing paintings that attempt to translate corporeal sensations and ephemeral perceptions onto the canvas, but her films reveal a gentler side of her work.

December 16, 2021 issue

Coco Fusco

Whose Art Thrives in Cuba?

Art and dance were battlegrounds for the struggle to define the meaning of the revolution.

December 16, 2021 issue

Greil Marcus

A Ride on the Velvet Underground

Revolving around Lou Reed and John Cale, Todd Haynes’s documentary on the avant-garde rock band is itself an art project in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

November 18, 2021

Martin Filler

A Garden City in Queens

After nearly a century Sunnyside Gardens remains a model of how to create and sustain affordable urban housing.

November 18, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

November 4, 2021 issue

Adam Shatz

Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’

The studio version has long been recognized as the jazz saxophonist’s masterwork. But a recently unearthed live recording is nothing short of a revelation.

October 7, 2021

Matthew Aucoin

The More Fraught the Better

Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life.

October 21, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

October 21, 2021 issue