Darryl Pinckney

A Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

November 5, 2020 issue

Amandla Baraka: We Keep Us Safe, June 2020

‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’

If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition?

August 20, 2020 issue

Mr. Carla Blank

April 23, 2020 issue

Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York City, 2019

Escaping Blackness

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s ‘Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race’

Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

March 26, 2020 issue

Letter

Ishmael Reed

Mr. Carla Blank

April 23, 2020 issue

Survivor

A Star Is Born

a film directed by Bradley Cooper

November 22, 2018 issue

Miss Aretha Franklin

She had a voice like no other in gospel, R&B, pop, soul, or funk. Her range was tremendous and her top notes reached toward the canopy of heaven. It was the sheer beauty of her voice, the tone and quality of it, the gift of it, that told us how acquainted with grief Aretha Franklin was.

August 25, 2018

Princess Margaret at her house on the West Indian island of Mustique, April 1976

Ma’am’s Life and Loves

Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret

by Craig Brown

August 16, 2018 issue

The Afro-Pessimist Temptation

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy’

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

June 7, 2018 issue

Count Guido Brandolini and Drue Heinz at a party hosted by Elsa Maxwell, Hotel Danieli, Venice, circa 1959

Drue Heinz (1915–2018)

May 10, 2018 issue

Poster for The Exile (1931), the first sound feature written and directed by Oscar Micheaux, based on his novel The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer

Black Pictures

The pioneers of African-American cinema

Pioneers of African-American Cinema

directed by Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, Spencer Williams, and Oscar Micheaux; curated and including essays by Charles Musser and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart

April 19, 2018 issue

Black Lives Matter

Kara Walker turns against whiteness what white people invented. Those funny faces aren’t so funny anymore.

Kara Walker: Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!

an exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins and Co., New York City, September 7–October 14, 2017

November 9, 2017 issue

Master Class

I’m afraid I don’t find that terribly interesting as an approach, she’d say.

October 12, 2017 issue

An African migrant, Sicily, July 17 2017

The Passport of Whiteness

We did not think the ideal of liberal democracy, the open society, would have to be fought for all over again.

September 20, 2017

The Trickster’s Art

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Under-Song for a Cipher

an exhibition at the New Museum, New York City, May 3–September 3, 2017

Regarding the Figure

an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, April 20–August 6, 2017

Kehinde Wiley: Trickster

an exhibition at the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City, May 6–June 17, 2017

August 17, 2017 issue

Claude McKay, July 1941; photograph by Carl Van Vechten

The Harlem He Knew

Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem

by Claude McKay, edited and with an introduction by Jean-Christophe Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards

June 22, 2017 issue

‘Know Your Rights!’; mural by Nelson Rivas, aka Cekis, Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan. Commissioned in 2009 by the People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability, it has since been painted over. ‘The mural struck me as an act of love for the people who would pass it by,’ Emily Raboteau writes in her essay in The Fire This Time, and ‘as a kind of answer to the question that had been troubling us—how to inform our children about the harassment they might face.’

Catching Up to James Baldwin

‘The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race,’ edited by Jesmyn Ward

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

edited by Jesmyn Ward

May 25, 2017 issue

Robert B. Silvers in his office at The New York Review of Books, early 1980s

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

May 11, 2017 issue

Jharrel Jerome and Ashton Sanders as the teenagers Kevin and Chiron in Moonlight

Moon Over Miami

‘Moonlight,’ a film directed by Barry Jenkins

Moonlight

a film directed by Barry Jenkins

April 20, 2017 issue

Under the Spell of James Baldwin

‘I Am Not Your Negro,’ a documentary film directed by Raoul Peck

I Am Not Your Negro

a documentary film directed by Raoul Peck

March 23, 2017 issue

Kerry James Marshall: School of Beauty, School of Culture, 107 7/8 x 157 7/8 inches, 2012

The Genius of Blackness

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, April 23–September 25, 2016; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12–July 2, 2017

January 19, 2017 issue