A photograph of a detail of a sculpture composed of repurposed objects. The photograph shows one of these objects, a marble bust of a young girl, on whose face and chest the artist has written “‘Portrait of a Young Girl’ by Thomas Ball, who also sculpted the Emancipation Memorial. Known as the Freedman’s Memorial, it was paid for by formerly enslaved people and depicts Lincoln ‘freeing’ a kneeling, enslaved African American person while holding the Emancipation Proclamation. Ball initially hired a Black model but fired him because of ‘the unpleasantness of being obliged to conduct him through our apartment.’ Ball then used himself as a model but was eventually persuaded by the commission to work from a photograph of a formerly enslaved Black man named Archer Alexander. In a dedication speech for the memorial, Frederick Douglass said: ‘Truth compels me to admit… Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.’ Douglass noted that Lincoln was motivated more to save the Union than to free slaves and that he ‘strangely told us that we were the cause of the war.’ In December 2020 the Boston Art Commission voted unanimously to remove the city’s copy of the statue after a public debate determined it reinforced a racist and paternalistic view of Black people.”

Monuments as Monsters: Michael Rakowitz and Erin L. Thompson in Conversation

Smashing statues

Feminist Interview Project: Christine Sun Kim in Conversation with Tabitha Jacques

The first in a series on practice and futures

How has the past year's quarantine affected your professional life?

The Quarantine Question

AJO readers respond to the pandemic in words, sound, and images

A gender-nonconforming person, standing, and a nonbinary person (the artist), sitting with one leg outstretched, are on a rooftop in Mexico City. A bike held up by the gender-nonconforming person balances on the wall of the rooftop.

Transiting in Anti-Patriarchal Worlds: The Queer Photography of Fernando Fuentes

Brian Whitener on the art of collective transformation

Color photograph with a frontal view of an abstract ceramic portrait head that appears to be made from a long coil of clay. The outline of two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two ears are affixed to its surface. The object is a monochromatic black with a slight sheen to the glaze.

The Weight of Matter: Ebitenyefa Baralaye and Glenn Adamson in Conversation

How the materiality of clay mirrors the body

A Fred Eversley sculpture in the form of a green concave lens.

The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally

Fred Eversley traces his prolific career from scientific engineer to Light and Space sculptor

Color photograph of forty clay pots arranged in a circle. A woman dressed in black sits in the middle of the circle. In her left hand, she holds a broken clay pot.

Going Backward to Move Forward: Karen Tei Yamashita in Conversation with Boreth Ly on Traces of Trauma

Two scholars discuss the place of personal history in the field

Detail of a book spread from Imaginary Explosions, page 35. Above black-and-white graphic of mountain topography, text reads, “This distance I arranged so you would not have so far to fall to Earth.”

Fault Lines and Fractures: A Conversation about Imaginary Explosions

Is there life after annihilation?

An art installation constructed of vertical metal studs and mic stands, intertwined with black electrical cables

Barricades of Silence: Nikita Gale in Conversation with Jesús Fuenmayor

Exploring space, sound, and radical silence in installation art

Stanford Express Care nurse Anna Chico, her head and body hidden behind layers of protective gear, wears a smiling portrait affixed over her heart so that people arriving at the COVID-19 testing clinic can see an image of her face

Facing Social Practice: Mary Beth Heffernan in conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson

The PPE Portrait Project builds trust between patients and health-care workers during COVID-19

exterior of three tiered metal cladding with Washington monument

Just Being

Art historians Risham Majeed and Blake Bradford offer a proxy visit to three still-new sites dedicated to African American history

In Tehran: A Conversation with Iranian Gallerists

This roundtable conversation among Iranian gallerists, available in English and in Persian, explores the politics and particularities of gallery ownership in Tehran