Laurie Anderson Isn’t Playing Games

Laurie Anderson playing Puppet Motel, her 1994 game (photo Nora Claire Miller/Hyperallergic) In 1995, American musician and artist Laurie Anderson created a CD-ROM computer game called Puppet Motel in collaboration with artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Thirty years later, I...

Is Political Protest a Collaborative Art Form? 

The 2010s might be remembered as the era of protest, with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations against economic inequality and corporate greed in New York City and the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong being two prime examples. When the Gezi Park protests...

A Diné Weaver’s Sacred Looms

For over four decades, artist DY Begay expanded the expressive range of Diné (Navajo) weaving, transforming the form into a language that is entirely her own. She is a Diné Asdzą́ą́ (Navajo woman), born to the Tótsohnii (Big Water) clan and born for the Táchii’nii...

Take a Musical Trip Through Sixties Surrealism

Linda Lomahaftewa, “Untitled Woman’s Faces” (c. 1960s), oil on canvas (photo Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic) “’White Rabbit?’ That’s such an obvious Jefferson Airplane choice! I would have picked ‘Two Heads.’” Those were my first thoughts when I...

Larry Bell’s Art Through the Looking Glass 

TAOS, New Mexico — “Have a good time,” Larry Bell tells me. He’s left me alone to look at one of his Light Knot works, a prismatic organic contortion made of thin sheets of polyester coated with aluminum and silicon monoxide. The piece is suspended from the ceiling...

Larry Bell’s Art Through the Looking Glass 

TAOS, New Mexico — “Have a good time,” Larry Bell tells me. He’s left me alone to look at one of his Light Knot works, a prismatic organic contortion made of thin sheets of polyester coated with aluminum and silicon monoxide. The piece is suspended from the ceiling...

Alison Saar’s Artistic Revolution 

Alison Saar has been making art her whole life. “I say it was kind of like my first language,” she tells Hyperallergic. Raised by artists Richard and Betye Saar, she and her sisters “were always making and drawing things, probably even before we were speaking much...

Arewà Basit on Her Amy Sherald Portrait and Alchemizing Trans Joy

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”...

Photographs That Depict Dementia With Dignity

In photographer Alicia Vera’s portrait of her mother, Concepcion, she gazes skyward, her expression somewhere between curious and awestruck. The image has enough stylistic mottling and grain to obscure any sort of background, but Concepcion is clear: broad cheekbones,...

The Artist Freeing Museums’ Captive Instruments

Satch Hoyt (undated) (photo by and courtesy Gabriel Schimmeroth) HAMBURG, Germany — “Ok, stop the cameras,” the head conservator commanded from the belly of the storage department. “I want to hear what these instruments sound like without Satch wearing the...

A Photographer Brings New York City’s Water System to the Surface

New York City is defined in many ways by its iconic infrastructure, from our parks to the soaring towers of the Brooklyn and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridges, and even the controversial roadways of Robert Moses, which displaced many communities of color, leaving a legacy we...

Lament: mourning ecologies after extreme wildfires

Australia, Greece, Canada, Spain, Siberia, Portugal, Italy, France, the Amazon, California, etc. Videos of wildfires have been appearing on our screens repeatedly and mercilessly, as we are moving deeper into a terrifying world of extreme weather events driven by the...