Laura James Paints What America Wants to Forget

Sep 10, 2025

“Make work.” Laura James shared this concise yet powerful mantra with me during a visit to her Bronx studio in West Farms. A poster bearing the phrase hangs on her wall — a nod, she explained, to the influence of Marcus Garvey’s industrious philosophy. James doesn’t...

A Palestinian Artist’s Final Exhibition in His Homeland 

Sep 10, 2025

On November 29, 1947, an exhibition featuring 53 oil paintings by the Palestinian-Lebanese artist Maroun Tomb opened at a Maronite church in Haifa, Palestine. It would be Tomb’s last exhibition in the nation. The show’s opening date also marked the United Nations’s...

Arewà Basit on Her Amy Sherald Portrait and Alchemizing Trans Joy

Sep 9, 2025

In the international queer community, Arewà Basit is known as a dancing, singing don-diva who makes music, performs in drag, and co-leads the Black queer production organization Legacy. These days, she’s also making headlines for being the subject of a “controversial”...

At the Armory Show, First-Time Artists Steal the Spotlight

Sep 6, 2025

Calling Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s solo presentation at the Armory Show a “booth” feels somehow wrong, like a reduction of the all-encompassing sanctum that she and Toronto gallery Patel Brown assembled for the Manhattan art fair. Suspended gently from wooden rods are...

How New Collector Habits Are Shaking Up Art Fair Season

Sep 6, 2025

Eduardo Holgado encounters most of his art on Instagram now, perusing posts from galleries and artists before ever setting foot in a fair. But when it comes time to buy, the collector, who is in his early 30s, still needs to experience the work in person. It’s...

Art on Paper Leaps Off the Page

Sep 6, 2025

As I circled around the dozens of booths along the three wide lanes at Art on Paper on Thursday, September 4, one stood out above the rest. On the bare white walls were Moleskine journals, much like the small ones I use, except these were spread open to Nicolas V...

A Chicago Artist-Run Gallery’s Last Hurrah Before Forced Closure

Sep 5, 2025

CHICAGO — On a recent Saturday night, I sat in a tiny storefront with a dozen or so others. Three dancers moved with glacial slowness not 10 feet in front of us, illuminated by the streetlights outside. Eerie sounds buzzed throughout the space. “Nether,” by Zachary...

How Art Deco Changed American Cinema

Sep 4, 2025

It’s 1925. It’s a new age, all the lines on the economic graphs are going up, and surely no future conflict could ever be as bad as what Europe had just gone through — they didn’t call it “the Great War” for nothing. That spring, the French government inaugurated its...

Decode the Art Fair Lingo With Our Armory Show Bingo Card

Sep 2, 2025

Each year, come September, we all pretend the world isn’t burning and put on our best oversized shirt to work our way through the maze of booths that is New York’s Armory Show. For those of you who want to know where to go and what to see, here’s our...

The Rise of Contemporary Art Puzzles

Sep 2, 2025

When Rami Metal walks through the scores of booths at the Armory Show, he looks not only for attention-grabbing paintings but also those that would make great puzzles. “I try to find things that are more detailed and have more variance of color,” he said. “If you have...

The Artist Whose Fauci Portraits Enraged the White House

Sep 1, 2025

In 2019, Hugo Crosthwaite became the first Latino artist to win the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s (NPG) prestigious triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The Tijuana-born and San Diego-based illustrator received the contest’s grand...

Reclaiming a Whitewashed History of the Great Depression 

Sep 1, 2025

When the United States Department of Agriculture established the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, hoping to provide aid to rural communities affected by the Great Depression, it also implemented a photography project headed by government official Roy...