A Photographic History of Queer Intimacy

Aug 13, 2025

LOS ANGELES — A circa 1848 daguerrotype featuring a nude lesbian couple engaging in foreplay meets Matías Sauter Morera’s AI-assisted fictional portrait of what he terms a “pegamacho,” a rural heterosexual Costa Rican man known to have discreet sexual encounters with...

Chinese Bronzes Blur the Line Between Original and Copy

Aug 13, 2025

Four thousand years ago, the Bronze Age in China began. Over the next centuries, as the region around the Yellow River became the seat of military and political power, bronze sculptures were created for graves and rituals; as weapons and money; and to emphasize the...

The Artists Who Made a “Sculpto-Pictorama” of Manhattan

Aug 12, 2025

With a fiscal crisis looming, subways and roadways deteriorating, and crime rates on the rise, mid-1970s New York City tangoed with turbulence. In 1975, bristling against budget cuts that threatened city workers’ jobs, a group of police officers distributed “survival...

Casa Susanna Is a Glimpse Into a Midcentury Refuge for Trans Women

Aug 12, 2025

Anytime the word “discover” is used without irony these days, it’s worth pausing to consider why something is being framed that way. When I visited Casa Susanna at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was noticeable there in the first sentence of the exhibition’s...

The Asian Modernists of Paris

Aug 11, 2025

SINGAPORE — It was the good ol’ days — années folles, the “crazy years,” a moveable feast. In good weather, amid the crowd of tables at the Dome Cafe or on the streets of Montparnasse, that stomping ground of the School of Paris, one was likely to run into...

The 21C Museum Hotel Is a 24-Hour Art Exhibition

Aug 8, 2025

CINCINNATI, Ohio — When art collectors and preservationists Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson decided to open a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2006, the intent was to help revitalize the city by bringing contemporary art to an unconventional context and audience....

Helena Metaferia Takes Back the Museum

Aug 8, 2025

NEWARK — Helina Metaferia’s deep engagement with pan-African and African-American aesthetics, as well as the visual language of protest, reverberates throughout her solo exhibition When Civilizations Heal. The culmination of the Ethiopian-American artist’s...

A Moving Encounter With the Art of Bernard Williams

Aug 7, 2025

CHICAGO — Nearly every summer in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, some genuinely dumb public art is trotted out for the entertainment of visitors and residents alike. Sometimes it’s life-size fiberglass cows, other times giant butterflies. The most dreadful ones...

José María Velasco Lovingly Captured a Changing Mexico

Aug 7, 2025

LONDON — The National Gallery hasn’t loudly trumpeted its decade-long strategy to introduce British audiences to art beyond Europe. Instead, it diligently rectifies this art-historical narrow-mindedness by covering major overlooked bases, such as with recent...

The Visual Language of the Nuclear Age

Aug 6, 2025

On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb on the populous city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing a quarter of a million people. Eighty years — almost to the day — since the devastation wreaked by that first nuclear weapon, Fallout: Atoms for War &...

For EJ Hill, Art Is an Act of Faith

Aug 6, 2025

There’s something about seeing a neon sign in daylight: The usual associations with seedy nightlife or unbridled consumerism are swept away by an otherworldly glow of light upon light. It can feel almost religious in the right context. That glow illuminates parts of...

Who Are Museums Really For? And Can We Change Our Minds?

Aug 5, 2025

The cinematic journey in Binnigula’sa’ (Ancient Zapotec People) (2024) begins in the Mexican countryside. Modern civilization — signified by concrete, metal, and powerlines — peeks through the green landscape to reveal a more rigid world of roads,...