Even my escapist fiction-reading wasn’t immune to Moo Deng this week, and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it.
Even my escapist fiction-reading wasn’t immune to Moo Deng this week, and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it. I was sitting on the G train when a delightful overlap took me by surprise: A hippo cited in Producer Isabella Segalovich’s overview of Moo Deng’s predecessors popped up in Elif Shafak’s sprawling epic There Are Rivers In the Sky. The novel follows a single drop of water and a Mesopotamian lamassu sculpture across centuries, and aside from the occasionally saccharine language, the book is a refreshing consideration of an “artifact” from the human vantage points that give it meaning in the first place. As we ease into fall reading here in the office, our contributors were largely preoccupied with new vantage points, too. Critic Alexandra M. Thomas calls a catalog on Elizabeth Catlett, a radical artist who was exiled after the US government deemed her work too political, “a necessary contribution to the rich, global genealogy of radical Black art histories.” Writer Raquel Gutiérrez similarly meditates on the artists who live out their political values in a review of scholar and novelist Yxta Maya Murray’s new book, which takes a magnifying glass to artistic practices rooted in critiques of the law. Read reviews focused on a secret garden at Black Mountain College, the peregrinations of a lost Gauguin, and much more below, plus an excerpt from longtime Hyperallergic contributor Michael Glover’s book of poetry dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. My inner van Gogh enthusiast relished especially in “Cypresses,” in which the poet describes those enthralling post-Impressionist skies as exactly what they are: “thick curdlings of cloud, / Dense and clotty as whipped cream.” — Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor | |
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| | | What started as a catalog essay about van Gogh’s little-known passion for poetry became a suite of poems for the Dutch painter. | Michael Glover |
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| | A new book is an art detective mystery, a behind-the-scenes look at provenance research, a psychological analysis, and a critical commentary on the art market. | Michelle Young |
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| | In the catalog for her Brooklyn Museum show, scholars explore how the Black revolutionary artist lived out her beliefs after her exile from the United States. | Alexandra M. Thomas |
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| | Novelist and scholar Yxta Maya Murray elucidates how the most rigorous critiques of the law often emerge from artistic practice. | Raquel Gutiérrez |
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| | Natalie Dykstra meticulously combs through archival material to fashion a biography of the inimitable, complex arts patron, who ordered her private letters to be destroyed after her death. | Lauren Moya Ford |
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| | A new book centers the voices of those whose hands built the historic school and whose dreams shaped its programs, all of which involved a little-known farm. | Nancy Zastudil |
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| | A small press is publishing innovative narrative works that travel across genres, including autotheory, criticism, experimental poetry, and documentary. | Raquel Gutiérrez |
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MORE ON HYPERALLERGIC | | | | “It’s about people with the courage and perseverance to insist that politicians and media tell the truth,” the artist told Hyperallergic. | Maya Pontone |
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