Africa Rising
Although Sub-Saharan Africa holds 60% of the world’s not-yet-cultivated arable land, food scarcity is a top concern, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis.
Retelling the Story of American Music
Dvořák practiced what he preached, and the result was (in the view of many) the finest work of American classical music ever written.
A Trans-Atlantic Migration
Bois and his colleagues at October changed, for a few decades, the way that art historians dealing with modernism in America worked.
Time-Traveling with Line
The question of line depth and how it changes the viewer’s perception play out especially in the exhibition’s white gesso and clay reliefs.
Redemption is Possible
Ruth is about all those components of a nation: family, clan, townsmen, the interaction of citizens and foreigners, and all of these acting in relationship to the law, or to God’s words. “It is a prosaic story of ordinary life… whose raison d’être is to enact the sanctification of everyday life in the home, on the land, and with one’s neighbors.”
The Apples of Cézanne
If you’re to understand Cezanne’s marginal artworld status, which remained important through most of his lifetime, then it’s important to consider a claim that will surprise most present day viewers. To most early critics and even to many fellow late nineteenth-century artists, he seemed simply to be an incompetent painter. And, in context, that judgment wasn’t crazy.
God’s Friends
Sigrid Undset, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, is without question one of Norway’s most famous and influential novelists.
A State of Speechless Wonder and Awe
For Adams, beauty is “a synonym for coherence and structure underlying life… beauty is the overriding demonstration of pattern that one observes.”
A Love For All Humanity
Hildegard Bechtler’s minimalist sets, centered around a revolving circular platform and high, unadorned walls, never distracted from the importance of the text and provided the opportunity for the nuns to be the center of attention. Her postmodern, industrial design felt vacant and made the cloistered nature of the convent palpable.
Two Great Frenchmen in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Genre fantasies, which were popular in the seventeenth century, played a significant role in the process by which two French-born men who worked in Rome became identified as French painters.
The Authentic Warhol?
Can one write an effective biography when its subject eradicated himself from much of his artwork (even, ironically, in his self-portraits), intentionally misled friends and reporters, and left behind an archive that is as vast as it is confounding?
Looking at Roman Wall Paintings in Oklahoma
Roman wall paintings, executed in the fresco technique, are among the most vivid artifacts from the ancient world.
A Journey on the Way of Bach
Moller situates Bachian counterpoint between the Renaissance, with its emphasis on harmony (who listens to Palestrina for the tunes?), and the modern popular musical era, with its apotheosis of melody (who listens to Elvis for the harmony?).
To Like, Or Not To Like?
For over ten years, media theorist Jonathan Gray has pushed beyond studies of fandom, the gathering of likers around their favorite programming, to explore the realm of what he terms dislike.
Not Furnishing Factual Answers
Robert Trammell is an avatar of the Dallas underground.
Revelation Without Resolution
What is most appealing about O’Connor’s work is that, in it, she is not afraid to look into the unknown and let it remain unknown—to give it revelation without resolution.
The Power of Place and Time
What could be more of a California archetype, a California life, perhaps even a California cliché, Haven argues, than a mid-century émigré coming to a place that is held up as a place, a state of mind, of constant reinvention?
