Arts
In a Million Different Pieces
A conversation with poet Rachel Zucker
Before calling up New York City-based poet, teacher, and doula Rachel Zucker, I came across a line from her poem "The …
How to Write in the Human Realm
Notes on Ben Lerner and the politics of poetry
In a video that the MacArthur Foundation produced after awarding Ben Lerner a genius Grant last year, Lerner poses the question, …
Reclaiming Endangered Languages
When language death means culture death
Spanish missionaries were the first Westerners to begin documenting the indigenous languages of the ‘Viceroyalty of New Spain.’ Travelling to newly …
Found in Translation
Jhumpa Lahiri in Italian
Try reading without reading. The first thing your eyes encounter is the appearance of the words, the absurdity of the shapes, …
Forever in Love with Bertha
On Deathly Kitsch at Funtime Junction
Of the many junctions I know and love (and there are many, in this lattice-bound society) very few self-identify as junctions. …
First Vacation to the Sun
march 31st mountain view, california we sprawled ourselves under leaves, hanging caterpillars. listened to quiet voices that guide our eyes through …
Notes on Gay Softcore Camp
When Gay Sex Loses its Politics
The first ‘gay-themed’ feature-length film I watched was Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Like many closeted eighth graders, I had turned …
Gestures in Absence
On the 15 Year Memory of 9/11
A thousand 9/11 stories are the same. Ask any New Yorker who watched the event in real time what they saw …
The Artist Formerly Known As...
Prince has never been a human. As he immortalized in I Would Die 4 U, he was not a woman, he …
Public Space is the Place
Art and Politics in Battery Park City
Wheatfields - A Confrontation, Agnes Denes, 1982 Before the World Financial Center, the glass skyscrapers, the open-air cafes, the high-end boutiques, …
Two Manifestos and a Strongly Worded Suggestion
The Mini Manifesto (It is important for the purposes of this argument that you note the semantic difference between Minimalism and …
Soft Systems
On the East End of London in 1961, theater producer Joan Littlewood was thinking about ways to disrupt theater-going experiences that …
Sin of SimCity
Victory and failure in virtual urban space
To a 15-year old Providence Journal writer named Joseph Braude, it made a lot of sense: invite five of the candidates …
Late Lunch
On the third and fourth floors of an old revival building in the southern tip of Bombay lives an institution so …
Spaces We Might Not Have Inhabited
Fragments on Ambient Media
“This which yields or fills / All space, the ambient air wide interfus’d” –John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) The term ‘ambient …
Black Is the Color
Colorism in Nina Simone's Biopic
Watch the trailer for the upcoming biopic Nina, out April 22, and you might think Zoe Saldana inhabits the role well. …
Disease Is Not the Only Derivative of Her
I have to become everything. The hysteric body is its own capacity to distort and manipulate itself.To bend. Hysteria: a memory …
Donna and the Whitney
Thoughts on Museum Curation
The Whitney Museum in New York was the first museum dedicated solely to the work of living American artists. Eighty-four years …
Cannon Cloth
Thoughts on T-Shirt Guns
Walk into any Goodwill and you can find an anthology of cotton t-shirts that span a certain American experience. There’s Megan’s …
Notes on Mom Books
Elena Ferrante's Visual Aesthetics
When I was in high school, I worked in a small bookstore in Virginia. I mostly helped out, shelving books and …
RISD Confidential
On Foundations and Boundaries
A mythic aura hangs about RISD Foundations year like a thin layer of spray fixative in an art student’s lungs. When …
Return of the Franchise
The Force Awakens to Disney
The triumphant return to Star Wars, the opening crawl, like every preceding Star Wars film, plants us in the thick of …
Documentary Analysis
The PDF, the STL, and the Future of Documentation
In an early effort to digitize their libraries’ vast archive of texts and documents, the archivists and librarians of MIT began …
$HORT-¢HANGED
The Language of the Financial Crisis
Vocabulary Short When someone “shorts” a security, they are betting that it will fall in value at some point after the …
Black Boxes and Black Mirrors
A black box is a unit, a unified system, or a discrete object which takes inputs and produces outputs but whose …
The Failed OG Was a GOP
When Music Taste Turns Political
News outlets have been prying into each bit of Dr. Ben Carson’s autobiography, vetting stories from his childhood in which he …
A Long Reign
The Life and Times of Marie Laveau
Marie Laveau was born a free Creole woman in New Orleans on September 10, 1801. She lived in a quaint house …
The Other Earth
Young Thug and the New Affects of Afrofuturism
In a video posted online this September, French journalist Mouloud Achour (from Clique TV) and rapper Young Thug are sitting on …
Trace, Body, and Care
Into the Performance Archive with Joan Jonas
May was something of an event for American performance art. On the occasion of the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale, …
Just Say No to Bad Art
On Protest and Renoir
Over the course of these past months, protesters have gathered outside of various cultural institutions including the Boston Museum of Fine …
Severed
(Dis)embodied Art
In 2007, Shannon Whisnant, from rural North Carolina, buys a storage locker at auction. Inside the locker, he finds a smoker …
Finding His Way
Maze Artist Anthony Denver Talks Algorithms, Identity Shifts
Anthony Denver designed his first corn maze in 1973, a small family attraction just outside Portland, Oregon. Only in the last …
Photoshop and its Discontents
A Digital Art History
Gradient Tool When a function’s higher values are assigned darker colors, they create an image like the one below, called a …
The Seventh Day
Stories in My Cereal
In 1898, a young doctor from Michigan removed a batch of disfigured granola from his oven. Flat, he observed. His failed …
Freedom for Whom?
Speech Acts and Power at Brown University
October 29, 2013. Ray Kelly, New York City Police Commissioner, arrives at Brown for an honorary lecture. Many of my friends …
Pastoral Fixation
The Rituals and Space of Religion and Superstition
They are honest and well-meaning Christians of unhealthy constitutions, and melancholy tempers, who are so miserably harrass'd; who above all things …
Tired of Art
Robert Smithson,A Heap of Language, 1966 (Wikimedia Commons) In response to the 1970s energy crisis, citizens around the US began collecting …