Image of the cover of A History of Arab Graphic Design

A Kaleidoscopic Overview of Graphic Design from the Arab World

Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès reviews

Condition—Contact—Conversation

Tom Denman on the exhibition UNTITLED: Art on the Conditions of Our Time

Image of male torso and arm holding a woman's head

Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Eikoh Hosoe

Surrealism and the Specter of Death in the 1980s

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

Bodybuilding

Make your own book with poet and artist Anaïs Duplan

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

The first in a series on practice and futures

A Small Matter of Agency

Anthony Gardner reviews two new anthologies

SCAB: Honoring the Memory of Mr. Fred Rouse

Will Wilson and Adam W. McKinney rethink anti-Black terror and photography in a new artists’ project

Toward a Reparative Pedagogy: Art as Trigger, Art as Repair

Hard Lessons on Trauma, Teaching, and Art History

A large-scale installation resembling the Hollywood sign but spelling out “INDIANLAND,” by artist Nicholas Galanin, installed among boulders with desert mountains in the background.

X Marks the Land

Emily Eliza Scott reviews the outdoor exhibition Desert X

Photograph of a screening room with an image on screen of a close up face of a person with a tear falling from one eye, looking directly outward.

A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History

Recent texts in trans studies

Cover image for Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey's exhibition catalog, titled Alice Neel: People Come First

Portraits (and) Matter

Siona Wilson reviews the exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First as well as Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey’s catalog