Art & Design Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Art for the Front Lines

An interview with activist-artist Susan Simensky Bietila

September 25, 2026 • by Julie Allan and Susan Simensky Bietila

A large heron flew over the shore of Lake Michigan at dusk, with cardboard wings spanning sixteen feet—the width of the four activists who held up the puppet’s structural rods. Its wings flapped up and down in the wind. In 2016, demonstrators carried the heron as they marched to celebrate ...

Art & Design

Thinking Technology: New Humans at the New Museum

An exhibition on being human amidst unsettling (and unsettled) technological change

July 15, 2026 • by Yazan Ashqar

The current artificial intelligence boom has birthed an ocean of concerns and considerations about the role of technologies in shaping humanity and its place in the future. The exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which inaugurated the New Museum’s recent reopening in late March, makes clear: These questions might ...

Thinking Technology: New Humans at the New Museum

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

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

Art & Design

The Gaza Biennale

A global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists

March 3, 2026 • by Nate Masso

The walls of Recess, a quiet Brooklyn studio space, held more than art this winter—they held testimony. The Gaza Biennale is a global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists working under a genocidal siege that places creative expression at the forefront of collective witnessing. Presented worldwide across decentralized partner sites, last ...

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Art & Design

Imperfect Images

Sohrab Hura on slowing down time in a survey show at MoMA PS1

October 2, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves and Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura began his career in film and photography documenting social issues across India and has been a full-time member of Magnum Photos since 2020. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include publishing, drawing, and writing in an ongoing investigation into the relationship between the personal and the ...

Art & Design

A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

An excerpt from Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

September 1, 2025 • by Karen Underhill

The small body of prose by Galician Jewish writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz that was published between 1934 and 1938 has entered into, transformed, and enriched Polish, Jewish, and Central European modernisms, stretching the boundaries of how each of these bodies of modern literature is understood. It has also ...

A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

Art & Design

Rethinking Empathy

A review of Imperfect Solidarities by Aruna D’Souza

March 4, 2025 • by Elide Vincenti

A deceptively simple question animates Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), a short new book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza: “What would it mean if our politics were based not on our ability to empathize with people whose experiences are distant from our own, but on our willingness ...

Art & Design

In Search of the Sublime … Underground

How far can art carry us through New York City’s broken subway system?

February 26, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

Weekday mornings, as I walk to the 36th Street subway stop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I quicken my pace, anxious that if I miss the train, I’ll be late for work; worried that if it’s too crowded, I won’t get a seat on the 40-minute commute that lies ahead. As ...

Art & Design

Where the Avant-Garde Went to Grow

Behind the scenes of Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923

November 26, 2024 • by Michael Inman and Mary Karmelek

We have really rich, deep collections of materials related to Greenwich Village, especially dealing with this period of the Village's history. When the wider public thinks of Bohemias or avant-garde settings, especially from that time period, the early twentieth century, their thoughts might gravitate towards Paris in the 1920s, or ...

Art & Design

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

A celebrated young critic hungry for more than our contemporary culture typically offers

October 17, 2024 • by Emma Minor

Like William Blake, Becca Rothfeld believes that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” A widely praised young critic (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Prize for Criticism and the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism), Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The ...