In the interregnum of this socially distanced spring, reading Hal Foster’s What Comes After Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle felt like a whirlwind tour through a period that had suddenly become historical, much faster than its author could have anticipated. Out from Verso Books today, the volume assembles eighteen short texts […] Continue reading
Watercolor pencils are the perfect hybrid of drawing and painting. They allow artists to draw with a dry pencil and use water, before or after, for a variety of shimmering watercolor effects. The core of a watercolor pencil is composed of pigment with a water-soluble binder. It acts like a colored pencil but is activated […] Continue reading
Biologist and author Merlin Sheldrake is using a particularly self-referential marketing strategy for his new book Entangled Life. In a recent Instagram post, Sheldrake announced the mycelium-based project’s release with an image of the text literally bursting with fungi. “Here it is being devoured by Pleurotus, or oyster mushrooms. Pleurotus can digest many things, from crude oil to used cigarette butts, and is also delicious. Now Pleurotus has eaten Entangled Life, I can eat the Pleurotus, and so eat my words,” he writes. More Continue reading
Peer inside Shanghai’s St. Nicholas, an Orthodox church from 1932, and you won’t see pews or traditional iconography. Thanks to architectural firm Wutopia Lab, the renovated building now serves as a shrine to verse. Titled “Church in Church,” the 388 square-meter structure holds Sinan Books Poetry Store, which boasts more than 1,000 volumes written in multiple languages. They’re displayed on steel shelves weighing 45 tons that contrast the ornate facades, high archways, and ceiling-bound frescoes of the original architecture. More Continue reading
In a comic reversal of the usual roles, it’s the parents hiding the porn from their children in Circus of Books, the new Netflix documentary by artist, musician, and filmmaker Rachel Mason. Continue reading
Made You Look seeks to find out who’s to blame in a notorious affair that brought down the country’s oldest gallery. Continue reading
Eleanor Taylor My work centres around atmospheric landscapes that are both real and imagined. Constructed from old holiday snaps, frozen cinematic frames, observation and fragments of memory hazily pieced together. I am interested in the fuzzy area between what is real and what is not – between waking and sleeping. I live by the sea … Continued Continue reading
Curators from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other international institutions weighed in. Continue reading
Toronto-based designer Ben Johnston plays with color, shadow, and perspective to create typography that appears three-dimensional in his site-specific murals. He’s a self-taught designer, spending time in the agency world of South Africa before moving back to his home country of Canada to pursue a freelance career focusing on branding and typography.
Johnston happened upon mural painting when a friend asked him to create a piece for the entranceway of a new office building. More Continue reading
Blake Gopnik’s 900-plus-page book offers an in-depth look at the artist. Continue reading
Sure, you can spend your time during quarantine reading a dozen books or scrubbing your cabinets, but what about learning to beatbox from a world champion? Vocal percussionist Butterscotch recently released a 13-step tutorial that guides novices through various beatboxing techniques, from the basic baseline and snare—or what she calls Boots and Cats—all the way to singing and live looping. And for those who have a hard time keeping a beat, the musician even outlines a breathing technique that makes it easier to stay steady. More Continue reading
You have questions. The former Venice Biennale curator has answers. Continue reading
See five of the best medieval art accounts on Instagram. Continue reading
She was one of the core members of the Hairy Who group during the 1960s. Continue reading
A club-hopping bon vivant and a curator discuss an exhibition whose future is for now unclear. Continue reading
H/er art and music pushed against modern sexual and social mores, often with a good dose of shock value. Continue reading
The works were consigned from the collection of fellow artist and O’Keeffe confidante Juan Hamilton. Continue reading
Tomohiro Yasui is best known as the creator of the paper robot wrestlers called kami-robo, but that’s not the only medium his imagination has conquered. Using wire and cheap rubber duckies, squirting frogs, and plastic hammers, the Japanese artist builds posable action figures that deserve their own Saturday morning cartoons and comic books.
Having spent the past 35 years designing paper robots and plastic toys, Yasui is an expert when it comes to humanoid anatomy in dynamic poses. More Continue reading
Packed within a 6,000-square-foot space on Chicago’s south side is a fictional universe teeming with pinned up newspaper clippings, towers of retro electronics, and tons of vintage advertising from McDonald’s to Vienna Hot Dogs. It’s the world of Hebru Brantley’s iconic characters, Lil Mama and Flyboy, whose enlarged head rests on the floor in one room of the immersive installation, titled Nevermore Park. Moving through the pathways lined with plastic toys and paint-spattered pallets, visitors pass a downed spaceship and a brick wall of street art, elements that structure Brantley’s narrative for the surreal environment. More Continue reading
Mimicking Connect the Dots puzzles, a new pair of flipbooks released by Flipboku reveals jumping characters and spinning geometric shapes. Created by the animation studio Zumbakamera, Dots & Lines is made of up two books by the same name—Dots features animations, while Lines unveils optical illusions—that utilize the technique of the classic game to create six different sequences that span the entirety of the book, depending on thumb placement. More Continue reading
