Susan Tallman

The Empire Gives Back

What does a fair policy of museum repatriation look like? A new book considers the issue in terms of human rights, cultural sovereignty, and stewardship.

The Plunderers’ Dilemma

Museums have been apologizing for the overlap of their ethnology collections with the subjects of colonial occupation, yet many still struggle to articulate a clear mission.

String Theory

Two exhibitions focused on weaving go beyond the functional, the folkloric, and the feminine, tracking fiber’s escape from the connotations of the grid.

The Occupation of Looking

The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.

The Sneaky Sublime

The Chicago artist Christina Ramberg recontextualized things built for another purpose, transforming the unremarkable into funny, stately, and transgressive forms.

How American Eyes Got Modern

The midcentury ideal of art as a departure into the unknown was not the exclusive property of heroic painters. Printmakers made cutting-edge art on a homier scale—and it was affordable.

‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

‘Everything Will Be Alright’

Widely acclaimed as a painter, Kerry James Marshall has long used printmaking as a field of play.

Ed Ruscha Bigger than Actual Size

Sassy, reverent, diffident, disarming: an unprecedented survey of the artist’s career is an enticement into looking at the unremarkable.

Invitation to a Dance

The early prints of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape enlivened the abstract geometries of Concrete Art with the social, improvisational ethos of a new movement.

Feeling Your Way in the Dark

“One of the things that concerns me at the moment (both inside and outside the art world) is our impatience with ambivalence and ambiguity.”

The Perpetual Provocateur

For generations, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints of Roman views defined the popular image of the Eternal City. A profusion of new exhibitions and publications shows why he still speaks to us.

A Tip of the Hat

Feinting Spells

The thesis of an exhibition on the inspiration a subset of Cubism took from trompe l’oeil is convincingly built with objects made across four centuries.

Bring Up the Bodies

In “Exquisite Corpse,” Kerry James Marshall makes enigmatic riffs on the Surrealist game.

Dynamism, Domesticated

The effervescent linocuts of Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power from the interwar years transformed the Futurist fascination with speed, rendering common pleasures in a way that would not be seen again until Pop Art.

The House That Johns Built

What has Jasper Johns done for us lately? As two exhibitions show, pretty much what he did for us in the first place: continually disrupt the mental shorthand that converts complex visual experience into simple mental categories.

The Uses of Portraiture

As three exhibitions show, portraiture can be an argument, a celebration of surfaces, an occasion to play with historical tropes, or a form of resistance on behalf of the normally unpictured.

Knowing How

Taking different approaches, two new books tell the story of how expressions of mind have gained hegemony over manipulations of matter, and what has been damaged in the process.

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?