Anthony Petro’s Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars brings forward a significant counternarrative of the role of religion in American art during the 1980s and 1990s. This period is frequently narrated as the “Culture Wars”: a…
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 mirrored closet doors are part of a collection of architectural salvage. Once obtained, they sit in an already stuffed-full house in upstate New York. During the COVID-19 pandemic their new owner, Antonette Berger, began suffering…
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…