Over the last three years, many of the news items I’ve recorded in paint have seemed funny, surreal, or even unbelievable—but some were disturbingly sad: for example, Kids-in-Cages. Because of resolute news people and a few inquiring members of Congress, it was exposed that our government was imprisoning hundreds, even thousands, of families at . . .
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For years I earned my living as an illustrator, my work appeared in print with a story attached, words; so when I stopped illustrating and returned to fine art, it was natural for me to include words in that as well. But nothing political. Until Trump got elected. At that point I . . .
Read MoreWith less than a thousand words (in her recent preface to a New York magazine photographic portfolio by Mark Peterson, with additional reporting by James D. Walsh), Claudia Rankine has offered what is, for her, a typically eloquent and essential assessment of the state of our nation. She begins with Dylann Storm . . .
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The ongoing crisis in Chile has brought the country to a standstill, unsettling the daily lives of all citizens. However, it has done more than just that. Mass protests have a way of altering the personhood of everyone involved in ways previously unimagined. Over the last week, thirty days after the eruption . . .
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One hundred and one years since the end of the First World War, militarism still pervades American culture, and our collective amnesia about our own history puts the world at great risk. In 1973, the year American forces pulled out of Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about the end of WWI: “It was . . .
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Art: “Examination of a Witch,” Thompkins H. Matteson, 1853, detail. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Perhaps I stayed up too late. Perhaps I didn’t need to go downstairs right at midnight to look up the Witch of Hadley (my little town—the farming community between Amherst and Northampton, home to prime farmland, big . . .
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(Hamburg, Germany. Early estimates report over 50,000 protesters today, participating in the Global Climate Strike.) In a recent, as yet unpublished work, the Italian writer and activist Erri De Luca salutes the youth of today and welcomes the rise and return of a generation of activists: “Today’s youth know the risks they . . .
Read MoreYep. Though I probably should avoid mixed mammaliaphors, I do think I’ve belled that cat. Skunks have a certain well-earned reputation; it’s not one they earn by making friends. Few—at least outside their immediate families, which tend to be small—can stand to be around them for long. One wonders how they ever . . .
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Extending “World Wide Welcome” Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,With conquering limbs astride from land to land;Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall standA mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her nameMother of Exiles. From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor . . .
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“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” Fran Lebowitz I want to tell the story of a T-shirt. Not material history—not the story of its cotton, possibly Egyptian, of the history of child labor in the Nile basin, or of recent efforts . . .
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