The Arts Archives - Page 5 of 36

Fashion

At Parsons, Getting Dressed Is Extra Homework

“What should I wear?”

March 10, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre

In my first semester at Parsons School of Design, I sat in the library, dazedly looking around at other students’ outfits. I noticed someone wearing a denim beret with a long-sleeved white shirt that had images of bones, forming a skeleton laid on their back. They wore a long black ...

At Parsons, Getting Dressed Is Extra Homework

Activism

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

Chris Gilbert’s Commune or Nothing! places Venezuela’s communal movement as a key moment of working-class self-emancipation

March 6, 2025 • by Gant Roberson

In the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero (herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children's bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode ...

How Venezuelans Reclaimed Their Communes

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 ...

Middle East & North Africa

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

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 ...

Literature

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Under the author’s microscope, the affectations of the literati come into focus

February 20, 2025 • by Madeleine Adams

It’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books, 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best. The novel, originally published in 1978, is the ...

Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence

Literature

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Isn’t So Funny

And maybe that’s the point

February 12, 2025 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa

I was prepared to laugh my way through Danzy Senna’s sixth novel, Colored Television (Riverhead, 2024), after reading review after review touting the book as a comedy. In this period of intense political and social divisiveness and strife, I hoped a fun satire (I like ridicule!) about a biracial (I’m ...

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Isn’t So Funny

Literature

When Is It Time to Leave?

In her new novel, Overstaying, Ariane Koch plays with the comforts of home

January 30, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

The places we’ve lived are sites of memory, places we can revisit time and again without using a door. I’ve often gone back and visited the home I grew up in, though I haven’t set foot inside since my family left it three decades ago. Instead, I can feel the ...

Interviews

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

An interview about After David

January 23, 2025 • by Hannah McIntyre and Catherine Texier

An older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it's looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome. In After David (ITNA Press, 2024), Catherine Texier explores these themes ...

The Powerful Convergence of Past, Present, and Future in Catherine Texier’s Latest Novel

Gender

The Blessings of K-Pop

What could be more divine than a real human who inspires and comforts without ever having to meet you?

January 23, 2025 • by Abha Deshmukh

As a child, I engaged in religious rituals out of obligation. Over time, the black thread tied around my ankle came off, the excitement of choosing a clay Ganesh and decorating its shrine slowly dulled, the prayers that I had spent hundreds of hours memorizing evaporated from my memory, and ...

Kinships

The Witches of El Paso

An excerpt from a new novel on the supernatural power of family

December 11, 2024 • by Luis Jaramillo

On the bridge to Juárez, Marta peers down at the Rio Grande trickling along its concrete ditch. The air is heavy with diesel exhaust. People walk across the bridge carrying bright blue and red plastic bags, pushing granny carts toward El Paso. Marta thinks back to when she was a girl, ...

Body & Mind

The Fashion for Baiting, Brainwashing, and Bullying

How does Brandy Melville continue to tap into the most desperate impulses of being a teenage girl?

December 10, 2024 • by Hannah McIntyre

“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville. The ...