October 7, 2021 • View in browser

Good morning. ⛅ Today, our obsession with hell, Indigenous artists are fundraising for a billboard project across Turtle Island (North America), and reviews of Frans Hals in London, Thomas Nozkowski in New York, and Hung Liu in San Francisco.

— Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief

Why the Hell We Are Obsessed with Hell

Hell Hath No Fury provides fundamental clues as to why it seems that we cannot escape reincarnations of hell in either Dante or on Netflix. | Sarah E. Bond

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WHAT'S HAPPENING

A rendering of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s billboard, titled "Future Ancestral Technologies"
(courtesy the artist and LANDBACK.Art)

The NDN Collective is raising funds for LANDBACK.Art, a nationwide billboard initiative in support of land restitution.

Unidentified protesters splatter blood-red paint across the controversial Roosevelt monument at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC.

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Join a Community of Radical Thinkers and Makers at Cranbrook Academy of Art

Apply by January 15, 2021 for priority consideration for one of 10 full-tuition fellowships. Learn more.

LATEST IN ART

The Democracy of Abstraction

Thomas Nozkowski believed that each person’s experience of the everyday was fundamentally unique and set out to honor that in his work. | John Yau

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The Wellin Museum of Art Presents Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine

Through four newly designed “instruments,” Oppenheimer explores how individual and communal actions shape the spaces we inhabit. Learn more.

A Final Show Honors the Legacy of a Bay Area Art Legend

Hung Liu, an artist who “defied the stereotype that’s thrust on Asian women.” | Emily Wilson

Searching for Frans Hals’s “Laughing Cavalier”

So many of us have seen this painting too often in reproduction, without perhaps ever having really seen it at all. | Michael Glover

ALSO ON HYPERALLERGIC

Film Reels Dredged from the Sea Become an Eerie Meditation on Mortality

Bill Morrison’s new documentary The Village Detective: A Song Cycle is an eerie meditation on mortality made from forgotten parts of cinema history. | Dan Schindel

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Kludge, Curated by Laurie Anderson, Arrives at Joe’s Pub This October

The lineup, which changes every evening, includes Anne Carson, Arto Lindsay, Lafcadio Cass, and Rubin Kodheli. Learn more.

Robert Vas Dias’s Words Explore the Fact of Things

In a hybrid text combining criticism and poems, Robert Vas Dias explores the paradoxes of still life painting. | Burt Kimmelman

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IN MEMORIAM

George Ferencz (1947–2021)
Experimental and off-Broadway director; former resident director of LaMaMa (Deadline)

Richard H. Kirk (1956–2021)
Industrial musician (BBC)

Jonathan Mirsky (1932–2021)
Journalist and historian (Washington Post)

Bennie Pete (1976–2021)
Co-founder of a New Orleans brass band (New York Times)

George Wein (1925–2021)
Founder of Newport Jazz Festival (NPR)

Marie Wilcox (1933–2021)
Created the first complete dictionary of the Wukchumni language (New York Times)

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