Los Angeles is the kind of place that drives people—artists, writers, filmmakers—not just to understand it but to reckon with it, to publicly parse its ungraspable multiplicity. Such is the task handed to the rotating curators of the Hammer…
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Aaron Cobbett’s analog camera immortalized queer nightlife in Manhattan’s East Village through fabulous photo shoots that both rivaled contemporary fashion editorials and rejected the fashion world’s unattainable beauty ideals. Most…
In 2008, the publishing giant Penguin Random House launched their Penguin Clothbound Classics (PCC) series, featuring attractively bound copies of the English literary canon. The books are affordable collectibles with a clear aesthetic formula: linen hardcovers,…
I first noted its edges out of my peripheral vision five days before Christmas. Twoish days later, I took in some of its luminescent glow from across San Vicente Boulevard, the sounds of queer excess and…
Eric Schmaltz’s latest poetry collection I CONFESS (2026) documents the poet’s experience of undergoing a lie detector test. At once intrigued and unnerved by this extractive method of truth production, Schmaltz set out to explore its poetic possibilities.…
The break-up letter—in all its melodramatic glory— is not only a stinging force of creative inspiration (Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms may have never been penned if not for World War II nurse Agnes von Kurowsky’s…
Displacement, Paul Liam observes in a review-essay, is a central aesthetic in the poetics of diasporic writers, either subconsciously or not, in such a way that the exiled writer is constantly questioning their “belongingness to a…
During my visit to Jana Sterbak’s retrospective on opening night, I did not immediately recognize the famed “meat dress,” Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987). The flank steak from which the piece was stitched…
2025 Annual Exhibition, The Campus341 NY-217, Claverack, NYJune 28 — October 26, 2025 A soft light washes along the old school corridor. The air feels slightly cool, carrying the faint scent of tile and paint. It is…
