Essay Lars Krutak on Indigenous Tattoo Traditions May 05, 2025 Transporting readers through history, anthropologist Lars Krutak explores the art and customs of tattooing across numerous ancestral lands, including Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, the Arctic, Oceania, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. Read More
Podcast Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life April 30, 2025 Stephen J. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo鈥檚 words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. Read More
Essay Race and American sculpture December 12, 2024 As monuments representing painful histories are dislodged from their pedestals, it is impossible to obfuscate the relationship between sculpture, race, and power in the United States. Read More
Podcast Fragmentary Forms December 10, 2024 While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Read More
Essay Collage beyond modernism November 24, 2024 What happens when we try and trace a history of collage back across time and space? Read More
Essay Monuments on fire October 23, 2024 In October 2023, one monument met its end for the sake of another. A bronze equestrian statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee that had stood in Charlottesville, Virginia since 1924 was sent to the furnace to be melted down, piece by piece, and formed into uniform rectangular ingots. The developing afterlife of the Lee statue is part of another history鈥攐ne that transcends the American context and dates back centuries earlier. Read More
Essay Narrative images, sacred places September 30, 2024 Close inspection of a "kalamkari" shows the work is exemplary of early modern temple paintings, which in form and subject mirror the concentric enclosing walls of the Hindu temple. Read More
Reading List Read with Pride June 03, 2024 Celebrate Pride throughout the year with this diverse collection of books exploring LGBTQ+ issues and perspectives. Read More
Essay The eloquence of color charts May 13, 2024 Researching color sampling meant reconstructing entire worlds from scraps of fabric or daubs of paint. Read More
Essay When is an apple not an apple? February 09, 2024 When it comes time to use images to support a written report, a presentation, or a publication, oftentimes people find themselves stumped. The early years of education introduce students to the building blocks of verbal literacy, but very few of us are taught the ways in which images communicate their magic. Read More
Interview Robin Schuldenfrei on Objects in Exile January 30, 2024 Robin Schuldenfrei reveals how the process of migration was crucial to the development of modernism. Read More
Essay The artist Mina Loy: Modernist constellation June 26, 2023 Not since Marcel Duchamp curated Mina Loy鈥檚 last one-person exhibition in New York at the Bodley Gallery in 1959 has the latter artist risen above the obscuring cloud of mystery and notoriety that set to her heels in 1914. Read More
Essay Roni Horn鈥檚 reflections on Iceland June 07, 2023 I returned to Iceland with migratory insistence and regularity. The necessity of it was part of me. Iceland was the only place I went without cause, just to be there. Read More
Podcast When Eero Met His Match May 04, 2023 Aline B. Louchheim (1914鈥�1972) was an art critic on assignment for the聽New York Times聽in 1953 when she first met the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. She would become his wife and the driving force behind his rise to critical prominence.聽 Read More
Essay Tracing the global travels of Isabella Stewart Gardner April 12, 2023 To describe the fairy-tale effect of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum鈥檚 spellbinding interior is to verge upon the clich茅鈥攁nd yet, the historical bridge between its enchanting atmosphere and the global travels of the museum鈥檚 founder and namesake is a complicated one that needs restoration. Read More
