Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

Sanford Schwartz

Young and in Love

Salman Toor’s absorbing show at the Whitney depicts the pleasures, tensions, and small moments of gay life.

April 8, 2021 issue

Jacqueline Woodson

‘The Tools We Have’: A Photo History of African Women

A new book offers a striking visual history of African women from 1870 to 1970.

January 23, 2021

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

A Vermeer for the IRA

Rose Dugdale, famous for a 1974 art heist, would probably rather be remembered as a heroine of Irish republicanism.

March 11, 2021 issue

Leo Rubinfien

‘My Eyes Are Infamously Greedy’

Japan’s energetic culture of the photobook, from 1912 to today.

February 11, 2021 issue

Emily Raboteau, a conversation with Maaza Mengiste and Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Kamoinge’s Collective Vision

Three writer-photographers discuss the legacy and continuity of the photography workshop founded during the Black Arts Movement’s heyday.

February 6, 2021

Susan Tallman

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?

January 14, 2021 issue

Colin B. Bailey

Suffering, Unfaltering Manet

Even in ill health, the painter continued to shock his audience.

December 3, 2020 issue

Sarah French and David Salle

Rauschenberg in Black and White

The way the artist used images he’d collected in his photographic travels reveals his verve for making drama out of juxtaposition.

December 13, 2020

The Latest

Gary Younge

‘What the Hell Can I Call Myself Except British?’

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series presents Black Britons not as objects but as protagonists, not as heroes but as humans.

April 29, 2021 issue

Cintra Wilson

‘Where the Patriarchy Strikes’: An Interview with Merrill Markoe

The comedian, artist, and graphic novelist looks back on her career as a woman in comedy on the occasion of her tenth book, a graphic novel based on her childhood diaries.

April 4, 2021

Namwali Serpell

The Ecstatic Internet

“Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.”

March 27, 2021

Namwali Serpell

Black Hole

Black pussy is our absent center. It is everywhere and nowhere on the Internet.

March 26, 2021

Hilton Als

The Art of Reggie Burrows Hodges

The painter equates blackness not only with depth of field, but depth of person.

March 22, 2021

Mark O’Connell

Old Midlands Giants

The comedian Stewart Lee’s documentary King Rocker is about a musician who seems impossible to mythologize.

April 8, 2021 issue

An-My Lê and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Examining the American War Machine from Inside and Out

The artist and writer discuss their experience as Vietnamese refugees and how it has influenced their work.

March 6, 2021

Nicole Rudick

The Art of Bea Nettles

A recent show and monograph bring into focus fifty years of her genre-defying photographic work, which adds up to an extraordinary visual autobiography.

February 27, 2021

Larry Wolff

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

March 11, 2021 issue