A conversation with Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu, the founders of Look at Art. Get Paid., a program that pays people who wouldn’t otherwise visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and the institution.
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 inInterview
One Museum’s Complicated Attempt to Repatriate a “Benin Bronze”
The RISD Museum has held this Benin bronze head in its collection for 80 years. “No one would have given it up unless under duress,” the curators say. But tracing its provenance and repatriating it is no simple matter.
Posted inOpinion
Rethinking the “Bigger Is Better” Museum Model
Current museum expansions are hung up on the concept of size. Instead, could we rethink the “grow or die” museum mentality of the 1990s and 2000s?
Posted inArt
An Animated Teaching Tool That Breaks Down How Criticism and Ideology Work
“(Some of) The Mechanics of Critique” is an instructional video by Lisi Raskin that unpacks how Enlightenment Era philosophies and epistemologies affect how we engage with the world around us.
Posted inArt
Inside the Studios of Four Artists at the Eyebeam Residency Program
Here’s what I learned from an intimate studio visit where these artists showed me their process, vision, and the goals fueling their work.
Posted inArt
Curators Reveal Their Favorite Wall Colors for Showing Art
Nine curators share their favorite wall colors — a decision that constructs a sensibility for an exhibition, echoing around the artworks on view.
Posted inArt
The Narrowing of Museum Imagination
This is the first article in a series by Laura Raicovich, the recipient of Hyperallergic’s inaugural Journalism Fellowship for Curators, made possible by Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. Today, she connects Anand Giridharadas’s latest book on philanthropy and late-capitalism with useful questions about how cultural institutions function today.