Art & Design Archives - Public Seminar

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 ...

Becca Rothfeld’s Essays in Praise of Excess

Art & Design

HE 2 SHE: Artist Pippa Garner Hacks Her Gender

The neo-conceptual oracle of West Coast transhumanism gets her New York minute

April 15, 2024 • by Abby Merrick

Pippa Garner is a fabulous, mercurial artist with an extrasensory attunement to cultural shifts, a habit of self-mythologization, and a taste for absurdity. ...

HE 2 SHE: Artist Pippa Garner Hacks Her Gender

Art & Design

Patience, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its latest issue

November 1, 2023 • by Social Research

The Fall 2023 issue of Social Research explores the meaning of patience, offers new insights into suffering, forbearance, divine authority, human queueing behavior, delayed gratification, savings behavior, and more....