Graphic designer and activist Josh MacPhee’s third edition of Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels unlocks a whole world of political storytelling.
Laura Raicovich
Laura Raicovich is a New York City-based writer and curator known for her critical work on cultural institutions and dedication to more equitable cultural production. Her recent book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, was published by Verso Books and is being translated into Italian, Arabic, French, Polish, and Portuguese. In 2023, with a collective of artists, musicians, and culture workers, Raicovich opened The Francis Kite Club, a public social club in NYC’s East Village. She served as editor and curator of Protodispatch, a digital publication featuring artists’ takes on the local and global conditions that make their work necessary; she initiated the forum with Mari Spirito and Protocinema in 2022. In 2020, Raicovich co-founded Urban Front, a transcontinental consultancy addressing the challenges facing cities through a progressive cultural and activist lens. Prior to these projects, Raicovich served as Director of the Queens Museum and Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, and the Tremaine Curatorial Fellow for Journalism at Hyperallergic. She is the author and editor of several books, and lectures internationally and continues to work on projects that explore art, freedom of speech, and equity.
Posted inArt
The Defiant Spirit of Wangechi Mutu’s Caryatids at the Metropolitan Museum
In reflecting on Mutu’s recent commission for the Met’s façade one morning, I realized that her sculptures make space for excellences and joys that dominant Eurocentric histories have ignored and excluded.
Posted inPerformance
What Properly Addressing the Migrant Crisis Might Look Like
Artist Alicia Grullon performs the role of a UN representative for refugees to address the migration crisis at the southern US border.
Posted inArt
Diary Entries From a Feminist Curator’s Encounters With Picasso
A steadfast feminist in a male-dominated art world, Joanna Drew was among a handful of individuals who shaped contemporary visual art in Great Britain post-World War II.
Posted inArt
The Most Downloaded Artworks From the Getty and Met Museum
Both the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have created online databases that bring thousands of artworks to screens across the globe. Here’s what most folks download.
Posted inBooks
A Former Museum of Modern Art Director’s Meticulous Eye for Detail
As a non-specialist Rene d’Harnoncourt had a rare ability to engage deeply with objects across time, cultural specificity, and form.
Posted inInterview
How to Curate a Yearlong, Three-Part Exhibition
Curators Jaishri Abichandani and Natasha Becker unpack Perilous Bodies, Radical Love, and the upcoming Utopian Imagination exhibitions — three exhibitions that formed one series for the Ford Foundation Gallery’s inaugural year.
Posted inArt
In Hong Kong, Protestors Are Using Zines to Get Their Messages Out
The speed with which the Hong Kong demonstrators’ informative zines have been distributed, collected, and even exhibited internationally is remarkable. We spoke with ZineCoop, one of the groups behind the effort, to discuss why they are so powerful.
Posted inArt
An Artist Designs a Handbook to Help Migrants Survive
If art and culture can go beyond symbolic power and occupy both poetic and utilitarian registers, Mladen Miljanović succeeds with his Didactic Wall exhibition.
Posted inArt
A Cookbook That Relishes the Impure and Adulterated
The Bastard Cookbook is more than a collection of recipes; it is a form of resistance against nationalism and xenophobia — and an homage to co-creation rather than assimilation
Posted inBooks
What Happened When Fred Wilson Dug Beneath a Museum’s Floorboards
The book Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson published in 1994 has particular insights that go beyond institutional critique and into our individual complicities that are crucial to consider now.
Posted inFilm
Negotiating and Understanding the Threats to Inuit Life in Canada
The video art of Isuma, the first international media organization created by and for Indigenous peoples, highlights the contemporary and historical impasses they are forced to navigate.