“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it,” writes Zora Neale Hurston in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. I picked up Hurston’s nonfictional dive into the amalgamation of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions in the small Faulkner House Books in New Orleans, another city known for its long held connection … Continue reading
In The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson cites a letter by an “aggrieved” Brigham Young student responding to Brian Evenson’s uber-violent Altmann’s Tongue. The student dramatically exclaimed, “I feel like someone who has eaten something poisonous and is desperate to get rid of it” (94). As Nelson reflects on the unnamed student’s letter: “The imbibing … Continue reading
There is something comforting about seeing proof that someone else feels the same way you do, a tactile representation of emotional exhaustion and bleak pessimism given everything *gestures* going on. Amy Feldman, I feel you. Feldman’s Nerve Reserve at James Cohan Gallery touches upon the artist’s own personal history with anxiety, and the inner turmoil … Continue reading
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me,” purrs Rihanna in her 2010 hit “S&M.” While “S&M” could easily be brushed off as yet another pop star attempting to define her image as “bad,” Rihanna’s evocation of BDSM and the pleasure of whips, chains and the smell of sex goes … Continue reading
“In those early amorphous years of life, when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and everything was Forever,” cites the Indian author Arundhati Roy in her seminal novel The God of Small Things. While memories—things we remember, try to hold onto, or choose to forget—may be the … Continue reading
Last night, presidential prodigal daughter Ivanka Trump posted a tweet that shook the art world to its core, forcing arts lovers to see dots and clutch their collective pearls. “Discovering new spots in D.C.,” Ivanka enthusiastically tweeted with a photograph of herself perched like a princess on seminal artist Yayoi Kusama‘s installation Obliteration Room at the Hirshhorn Museum’s insanely … Continue reading
“It’s almost embarrassing to acknowledge how good things are…There’s something abnormal about it,” reflects Perfume Genius’s Mike Hadreas in an interview with FADER. With the release of his new album this week No Shape, a transcendent ode to romanticism, love and domesticity as redemption, Perfume Genius raises the question: What does utopia sound like? Continue reading
“Often, he runs his hands over the work, tempted as to whether it is flesh or ivory, not admitting it to be ivory. he kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned; and speaks to it; and holds it, and imagines that his fingers press into the limbs, and is afraid lest bruises appear from … Continue reading
How are communities built? How do people sharing similar ideals and worldview unknowingly or purposefully rejoice? Or furthermore, why do we keep hearing the word community more than ever these days? Within the socio-political climate prevalent in the United States, and around the globe, this word no doubt echoes with solidarity and mutual reliance amongst … Continue reading
Betty Tompkins’s solo exhibition Virgins at P.P.O.W. Gallery arrives at an apt time of increasing mainstream attention to whiteness as a distinctive ethnicity. Currently, there lacks critical attention to the whiteness of imagery that Tompkins depicts, instead framing Tompkins’s represented sexual liberation in the context of all women. Continue reading