3+ day, 20+ hour ago   (931+ words) Literary translation is a personal and ever-evolving pursuit. No project will be conceived of or approached the same exact way as another. Literary translators are tasked with balancing a faithful translation with demands of art, honoring, and grounding the work…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (708+ words) Historicism’s Modernity: Modernism is History The Brooklyn Rail Among the shibboleths of the orthodox narrative touted by MoMA and American art history textbooks for much of the twentieth century, none has proved more stubborn than this: that modernism and historicism…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (989+ words) Portrait of Malcolm Peacock, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Malcolm Peacock: I think that what I’ve become interested in—and in fact what I was already interested in prior to making Five—is the situation the work is traveling…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (542+ words) The Brooklyn Rail On a corner that formerly housed a gas station in the gentrifying neighborhood of Clinton Hill, a clean white box with massive windows and orange entry points, 272 Greene Avenue, designed by Inès Lamunière of Switzerland and architect…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (179+ words) Willem de Kooning, Untitled (Reclining Figure), ca. 1945. Oil and charcoal on Masonite, 15 × 19 ⅞ inches. © 2026 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Collection of Gene and Sueyun Locks. After immigrating as a stowaway from the Netherlands…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1493+ words) When poet Tom Sleigh’s aging mother asked him to research how she could take her own life, he thought this request would never come to be. Years later, though, he sat by her side with family, friends, and doctors in…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1568+ words) The Brooklyn Rail Contemplating painting should be work. The monks of the Convent of San Marco in Florence spent a sizeable portion of their mature lives sitting in their cells staring at Fra Angelico’s frescoes, praying for the salvation of…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1039+ words) The Brooklyn Rail With the recent return to figuration and ascendance of portraiture in contemporary painting, historical reference has returned as a viable method to convey authenticity and engage with tradition in an unironic manner.Now, artists wade through six…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1135+ words) Weiting Liu (Rail): IX XI is, apparently, a stylized rendering of 9/11. Can we start with your intention behind this stylization? Sean Wilsey: Much of the film is contained in the title. Visually, “IX XI” evokes the Twin Towers, which I…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (698+ words) The Brooklyn Rail The Western art historical canon is a selective construction of the past, one that buries the cultural, technical, and social contributions of marginalized groups in favor of a narrative that privileges a European patriarchal perspective. Revisions to…...