It’s a story about power, leverage, and fear during the first Trump administration, and also about the potential for solidarity and love in the second.
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
Captivating Highlights From the 2022 Venice Biennale
Writer and curator Laura Raicovich shares her favorite works from the exhibition and moments of elevation during her Campari-fueled trip to Venice.
Posted inInterview
A New Census Wants to Hear From You: What Future Do You Want for the Art World?
The Art & Society Census, a new project launched by the Brooklyn Public Library, hopes to take stock of changes in culture.
Posted inArt
Gauging the Possibilities of Impermanence at the New MoMA
MoMA’s recent expansion embodies the tension between the ways in which cultural spaces can offer visitors comfortable narratives and on the other, how they can suggest the potential for radical inclusiveness by iteration, reinvention, and reinstallation.
Posted inArt
Hans Haacke’s Sharp Metaphors and Maps of Power
Exposing systems of injustice and how they operate is Haacke’s great skill. At the New Museum, the artist draws the connections, and we follow along, wondering what our role is in this circuit.
Posted inArt
Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Sculptures Echo the Precariousness of Place
Cruzvillegas’s forms embody the precariousness and hope, if not the danger, of contemporary notions of borders, and the forces at work that make them porous or impenetrable.
Posted inArt
The Pioneering Painted Sculptures of Melvin Edwards
Edwards’s sculptures, on display at Alexander Grey Associates in New York, establish him as a master of his various crafts with with an acute sense of rhythm and movement.
Posted inArt
Jeffrey Gibson’s Artistic Remixes, From Song Lyrics to Indigenous Craft
Gibson’s ongoing explorations of identity and art history have produced a dizzying range of forms over the course of his career.
Posted inArt
LaToya Ruby Frazier Looks Beyond Blue-Collar Stereotypes
In The Last Cruze, the artist hones in on the vast inequities that persist in US society, as well as the tender relationships that enable survival and persistence in spite of them.
Posted inArt
Centering the Equator in Global Conversations About Art
With its focus on art from Indonesia and Southeast Asia, this year’s edition of the Biennale Jogja offers a fresh take on discussions of centers and peripheries.
Posted inArt
Janine Antoni Traces the Passage of Time in a Cemetery’s Catacombs
The artist’s new commission leaves much to contemplate simultaneously — mortality, desire, and the ways in which absence and longing are such a fundamental part of life.
Posted inArt
Why Libraries Have a Public Spirit That Most Museums Lack
A broad swath of society seems to feel more welcome in a public library rather than a museum. I examined the Brooklyn Public Library as a model of heightened engagement through collective knowledge creation.