Volume 4: Issue 1 Fall 2026 Select articles available free below On the cover: Bonnie Lucas, Untitled, 1978–79 Contents DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS
A painter friend of mine told me recently, upon returning from a trip to the Venice Biennale preview, that she always finds herself escaping the pavilions to go see the “old stuff.” In the Biennale venues, she says she saw few paintings. There was foremost the ballyhoo of lavishly catered
The June Leaf sculpture depicted on this issue’s cover, Shooting from the Heart (1980), lends its title to the Leaf retrospective on view at NYU’s Grey Art Museum through December 13. Photographed here is the artist’s hand by Leaf’s third husband, the Swiss American photographer and documentarian Robert Frank, the
Mercedes Matter, Untitled (Main Landscape), c. 1957, oil on board, 16 × 20 in., Estate of Mercedes Matter, courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery, New York. “A young person studying art today steps into a particularly confusing situation,” wrote Mercedes Matter in 1963. “The extraordinary kaleidoscope of events of the twentieth
Courtesy of the Criterion Channel. Joan Micklin Silver’s romantic comedy Crossing Delancey (1988) opens in a dimly lit bookstore on the Upper East Side. “They want to pull us down and make something clean and tall and obscenely profitable arise out of our ashes,” the bookstore’s owner tells a group
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” So wrote David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A founder of empiricism, Hume argued that miracles are extremely unlikely since, by definition, they subvert our sensory understanding of the world. “It is a miracle, that a dead
JinJin Xu. What Would You Hear If You Could? #8: Against This Earth, We Knock. Site-specific installation. Old pots (collected in JiangYong), coal ashes (collected in JiangYong), resin, mechanical installation, 2024. Photo courtesy of How Art Museum. Since 2017 JinJin Xu’s head has been full of voices. What the voices
Front Cover: Bayan Kiwan. Lesser Legible Love, 2023. Oil on canvas draped in tulle; 44 × 35.8 in. I grew up in many different places, so belonging was always fraught,” says Bayan Kiwan. She hands me a bottle of coconut water. A weak but hopeful December light pours through the
Old Westbury Gardens, Smoggy Afternoon, by the author. The biggest book I own is the Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. It’s all the plays, annotated: 3,600 pages. Lately I’ve used it to prop up my computer, to enable a more flattering angle on Zoom calls. In the fall of 2020, I
Volume 3: Issue 4 Winter 2026 Select articles available free below On the cover: June’s Hand and Sculpture, Mabou, c. 1980, by Robert Frank Contents DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS
