The Arts Archives - Public Seminar

Psyche

Read a Book, Knit a Sweater, Feel Good

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement exalts spending time offline, but is its dogma persuasive?

June 17, 2026 • by Rachel Potter

Amateurs, crafters, operators, gatherers, counter-coders, monkey-wrenchers, gamers and players, parents, epimeletes, bards and reciters, spectators and fandoms, and puzzlers: These are the 11 categories that the Friends of Attention collective use to describe the types of people reclaiming powers of concentration offline. All perform what the Friends call “attention activism,” ...

Art & Design

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

On how a Catholic school teacher became a radical proponent of activist art

June 15, 2026 • by Julie Allan

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent, a monograph first published by DelMonico Books in 2013 and now reissued, after a decade out of print, provides a look back at a Catholic school art teacher’s journey to become one of the most visible activist artists of the 1960s and ...

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

Interviews

Writing Rooted in Community

June 11, 2026 • by Colette Estelle and Giada Scodellaro

Writing rarely ever comes from true solitude. That is the sentiment of author Giada Scodellaro, whose debut novel, Ruins, Child (New Directions, 2026) is a hybrid text on proximity, grief, growth, and kinship told through the interweaving stories of a community living in a dilapidated apartment complex. In a recent ...

Labor

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

June 8, 2026 • by Dominick DeJoy

In March last year, several hundred cultural workers gathered at the Place de la Monnaie in Brussels as part of a national strike. They were there because the Belgian federal government was considering whether to limit the Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural ...

Politics

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

June 2, 2026 • by Austin Tannenbaum

I have a friend, let’s call him SJ, who is passionate about social justice. He majored in political science and keeps apace with all the latest goings on domestically and abroad. He parlays this knowledge into a dozen or so savvy Instagram stories per day on topics ranging from, to ...

Interviews

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

May 14, 2026 • by Cleo Levin and Megan Milks

Megan Milks’s portrait-in-essays Mega Milk (Feminist Press, 2026) has a straightforward premise: It’s a book about milk. But beneath the surface, it’s a multi-dimensional look at American dairy and all its associations. This collection is about transness, queerness, whiteness, family, farming, and much more. It takes the staid category of ...

Literature

Some Random Person in Grand Rapids

In Natasha Stagg’s new novel, a woman reflects on the struggle of telling the truth about one particular teenage summer

May 13, 2026 • by Katie Pruden

The author Natasha Stagg has been described by Bookforum as a “cool person in downtown New York who writes about the same.” Her first novel, Surveys (2016), and her two essay collections, Sleeveless (2019) and Artless (2023), deal with a perception-obsessed internet culture. But her latest novel, Grand Rapids (Semiotexte, ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

May 12, 2026 • by Rida Chaudhry and Areeb Zuaiter

A decade ago, filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter was glued to her screen watching the 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza when a different kind of video interrupted her feed: smiling young men laughing between backflips as bombs darkened the sky behind them. The Nablus-born documentarian was partly curious and partly enamored with ...

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

Film & Performing Arts

Think Happy Thoughts

An excerpt from The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World

May 11, 2026 • by Vicky Osterweil

In the wake of the animator’s strike, Walt’s reflexive conservatism turned into a frothing anti-communism. But while his politics grew more unhinged and hateful, his creative output turned definitively toward the production of nostalgia. Song of the South’s reenvisioning of plantation childhood was one particularly egregious example, as was Peter ...

Film & Performing Arts

Choreographing the Handshake of Capitalism

In Making Movement Modern, Whitney E. Laemmli explores the dizzying story of Labanotation, a movement visualization system that promised the key to self-understanding

May 7, 2026 • by Madeleine Adams

Have you ever watched a video of yourself and wondered, “Why do my hands look so stiff when I gesture?” or “Geez, my walk is really galumphing!” And then, inevitably, “Would my life be different if I only knew how to move?” To this last question, the adherents of the ...

Choreographing the Handshake of Capitalism

Film & Performing Arts

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

What Heated Rivalry tells us about queer acceptability

May 5, 2026 • by Tanmay Pandya

Over a phone call a few weeks ago, a childhood friend told me she had found among her possessions a long-forgotten, black-and-gold diary that had once belonged to me—that had now, so many years later, mysteriously appeared in her custody. Curious to hear its contents, I asked her to recite ...

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

Art & Design

The Avant-Garde Intersection of Léon-Paul Fargue and Marie Monnier

Translating the “great nocturnal butterflies in broad daylight” of one modernist recognizing another

May 4, 2026 • by Chris Holdaway

Translator’s Note In May 1927, an exhibition of images embroidered in silk thread opened at La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Sixth Arrondissement, the bookshop and salon that Breton once called “the most attractive hub of ideas of the time.” The artworks were the creations of Marie Monnier (1894–1976) ...

The Arts

Read a Book, Knit a Sweater, Feel Good

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement exalts spending time offline, but is its dogma persuasive?

The Good Word According to Sister Corita Kent

On how a Catholic school teacher became a radical proponent of activist art

Writing Rooted in Community

The Artist Status as Managed Retreat

On the Artist Status in Belgium and the underlying issues caused by defunding cultural labor

Capital’s Long War on Civic Society

In Hyperpolitics, Anton Jäger documents neoliberalism’s erosion of the public sphere

What’s Fresh, White, and Read All Over?

Megan Milks covers everything milky in their new book, Mega Milk

Some Random Person in Grand Rapids

In Natasha Stagg’s new novel, a woman reflects on the struggle of telling the truth about one particular teenage summer

The Defiant Spirit of Palestinian Parkour

A conversation with filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter on her documentary Yalla Parkour and making art amid genocide

Think Happy Thoughts

An excerpt from The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World

Choreographing the Handshake of Capitalism

In Making Movement Modern, Whitney E. Laemmli explores the dizzying story of Labanotation, a movement visualization system that promised the key to self-understanding

Everyone Loves the Straight-Passing Gay Man

What Heated Rivalry tells us about queer acceptability

The Avant-Garde Intersection of Léon-Paul Fargue and Marie Monnier

Translating the “great nocturnal butterflies in broad daylight” of one modernist recognizing another

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