The Arts Archives - Page 20 of 38

Literature

The Other Black Girl

Two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York book publishing

September 29, 2021 • by Zakiya Dalila Harris

July 23, 2018Wagner Books Midtown Manhattan The first sign was the smell of cocoa butter. When it initially crept around the wall of her cubicle, Nella was too busy filing a stack of pages at her desk, aligning each and every one so that the manuscript was perfectly flush. She was so ...

Literature

What Happens to “Black Woman Number Two” in a White Workplace?

Zakiya Dalila Harris and Zia Jaffrey discuss Harris’s debut novel, The Other Black Girl

September 29, 2021 • by Zakiya Dalila Harris and Zia Jaffrey

In its first week of sale, The Other Black Girl (Atria Books, 2021) made the New York Times best-seller list. A TV adaptation is now underway with Hulu. This success is all the more impressive for a debut novel—one that draws, in part, on material author Zakiya Dalila Harris developed ...

What Happens to “Black Woman Number Two” in a White Workplace?

Capitalism

A Displaced Worker in a World of Goods

What Winslow Homer’s Old Mill teaches us about the world industrialization made

September 28, 2021 • by Steven Stoll

A woman in a red jacket, lunch pail in hand and eyes forward, travels to work. She ascends a ramp leading from a meadow of wildflowers, over a millpond to a small water-powered textile factory. Winslow Homer painted Old Mill in 1871, but its subject looks back fifty years to the first ...

Literature

Meaty Pleasures

“In the whirlwind of hook-ups I saw every afternoon, that stitching together of Thursday after Thursday with love and desire was the essence of continuity.”

September 24, 2021 • by Mónica Lavín and Dorothy Potter Snyder

The following story, “Thursdays,” is excerpted from Meaty Pleasures, a collection of fiction by award-winning Mexican writer Mónica Lavín, translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder and published by Katakana Editores in September 2021. Meaty Pleasures is available for purchase in print or as an e-book. Thursdays I shouldn’t have done it. But I ...

Colonization

A Pencil For Your Land

Ngũgĩ and Achebe on colonial public school

September 20, 2021 • by Casper Andersen

_____ Oppressed people who retaliate are up against the privileged and powerful. Fighting back often places them outside the system. But what happens when the suppressors’ tools are turned on themselves? Can a colonial education—the underhand offer of ‘a pencil for land’—be turned into an emancipatory counter movement? ‘Colonial mimicry’ describes a ...

The Arts

The Radicalism of the Frick Madison

The inequities of America in 2021 play out on the museum’s walls

September 13, 2021 • by Altair Brandon-Salmon

_____ Ingres’s portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) has always surveyed her audience coolly. A hand tucked under her chin, head crooked at an angle, she looks at us with a mixture of curiosity and disdain, as though we were underwhelming members of her Parisian salon. Securely encased in an elaborate gilded ...

Climate & Ecology

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Alexandra Kleeman chats with Helen Schulman about her new book, Something New Under the Sun

September 10, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Helen Schulman

_____ Upon the publication of her new novel, Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman sat down with Helen Schulman, faculty and fiction chair at the Creative Writing program, to talk about Los Angeles, the climate crisis, and writing about the very near future. The interview was presented by the Creative Writing ...

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Literature

Something New Under the Sun

Drought, Hollywood, and corporate corruption in the age of alternative facts

September 10, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman

_____ Excerpted from Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman. Copyright © 2021 by Alexandra Kleeman. Published by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Read an interview between Alexandra Kleeman and novelist Helen Schulman about Something New Under the Sun. _____ Alexandra Kleeman ...

Film & Performing Arts

Faculty TeeVee

In the Netflix series The Chair, Sandra Oh is charged with a Sisyphean task: an English department faculty in decline. Spoiler alerts!

August 20, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ It’s such a setup, and one of Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim’s colleagues knows it. As Dr. Kim settles into her office as the first woman—the first woman of color, no less—to chair the English department at the fictional Pembroke University, a package awaits her. It is a nameplate for her desk which ...

Art & Design

How Charlie Brown Remained A “Good Man”

Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz went to great lengths to avoid political controversy. But as culture became more political, he navigated that challenge with skill and grace

July 21, 2021 • by Blake Scott Ball

_____ Charlie Brown had a hard time choosing sides. This was always part of the humor of his character. It was also one of the many things he hated about himself. On New Year’s Eve 1965 Charlie Brown, the star of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, decided to change: he would be decisive, clear-cut, ...

Art & Design

What Can’t be Contained

A conversation between Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

May 13, 2021 • by Alexandra Délano Alonso and Macushla Robinson

_____ In March of 2020, with the pandemic devastating New York and Queens being declared the “epicenter of the epicenter” it felt impossible to find words to describe the uncertainty, the losses, the distance. Over the coming months, Alexandra Délano Alonso gathered images and fragmentary language to hold what was (and still ...

Art & Design

Thinking Design through Literature

Identity: The cultural politics of things and places

May 5, 2021 • by Susan Yelavich

_____ Where design projects possibilities, literature activates their potential and shows their effects. Brought together in Thinking Design through Literature, they form a new and wider tributary in the thought of things and places. That said, in this excerpt from the chapter on culture, readers will note that the word ‘design’ ...