Looking back to another election year, in 2012 author Randall Miller noted, “The language surrounding immigration, espoused by the [GOP] candidates as well as other jingoist hardliners, has become so vitriolic and so reduced that hyperbole strategically crowds out any sober dialogue that addresses the complexity of the issue.” In the face of those who advocate overtly prejudiced perspectives, today from our archives we bring you[…..]

“New struggles for civil and race rights continue to challenge and mine the unequal fields of representation within American political life.” So writes author Jordan Amirkhani, who explored this exhibition earlier in 2016, and connected these studio portraits from the late 1800s to current images from the Black Lives Matter movement. Today from our archives we consider Black visibility in culture and history. This article was originally published on May[…..]

Today from our archives we bring you a Help Desk column about jealousy and competition—and some good ways of dealing with friends who become frenemies. Got an arts-related issue? Submit your question anonymously here. This article was originally published on November 12, 2012. I am having a rather embarrassing problem with some of my local colleagues in the visual arts. That problem is a general enmity[…..]

This week, the New Museum opened a major exhibition of works by path-breaking multimedia and video artist Pipilotti Rist. As author Elspeth Walker observed in her 2015 review, Rist’s work confounds the divide between the human body, the natural world, and video technologies. Fielding otherworldly experiences made from footage of this world, Rist’s installation likely felt hypnotic to many viewers for a reason—she drew inspiration from[…..]

We are thinking through the origins of democracy and systemic racism and misogyny.

As the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective moves from coast to coast, we’ve got Bruce Conner on our minds. Bruce Conner: It’s All True opened first at the Museum of Modern Art (and closed in early October) and now travels back to Conner’s old stomping grounds in the Bay Area to open on October 29 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ashley Stull Meyers’ 2014 review of[…..]

Fiamma Montezemolo’s The Secret just opened at Kadist SF, and Montezemolo’s solo show has us thinking about books, selves, and Borges. Just as Montezemolo deploys redaction of and extraction from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Anthropologist” to draw us into The Secret, so did Anthony Discenza create what has been described as a Borgesian universe (that leads off with a quotation from Borges) of[…..]