Category: Essay

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SURREAL STATES: MEXICO’S NATIONAL FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHERS

By Briá Purdy
An avant garde artistic movement of Mexicanidad emerged, forefronted by artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Although their part in the revolution was hardly recognised, the contributions made by female artists to the movement cannot be undermined. There are two major photographers who were crucial in reconstructing Mexican national identity: Graciela Iturbide and Lola Álvarez Bravo. 

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Advocacy and the Architecture of Barbara Goldberg Neski 1928–2025

By Susan Horowitz
“Barbara Neski was an inspirational figure to so many, and shaped the Hamptons at a special time.” —Paul Goldberger
Initially studying art, art history, and mathematics at Bennington, Barbara Goldberg was inspired to become an architect after viewing Marcel Breuer’s Robinson House. This led her to choose the Bauhaus-oriented Harvard GSD program created by director Walter Gropius, becoming one of its first women graduates in 1952. There, she was especially drawn to the teaching of Buckminster Fuller.

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PHILOSOPHY AND FREEDOM

By Glenn Harcourt
Waller Newell’s new book, Tyranny and Revolution introduces us to a long philosophical discussion initiated in eighteenth-century France by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but for the most part played out in Germany across the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. The author quite successfully draws out the intertextual particularities of this discussion, essentially providing a critical history of what he describes as “The Philosophy of Freedom.” … In some ways, this program was doomed from the start, but it produced some of the most elegant and powerful system building in all of philosophy…

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For Paul Celan

By Ed Schad
As people, later in life, begin to mourn the lives they were never able to live, common laments involve time and undeveloped talents, misplaced priorities, and lack of attention to what could have been the great loves of one’s life. I personally mourn a never achieved facility with languages. … I can only stare at Paul Celan’s poems through the wet glass of translation.

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The Siege of Homs, Syria 2013

By Hadi Abdullah
هادي العبدالله

Tarad and I were covering the battles for the media in those days. The revolutionaries started trying to rid the area of the regime’s suffocating grip by taking control first of the checkpoints that separated different areas of the city, then of those that kept the city shut off from its countryside, which required an enormous military effort. Despite the magnitude of the task, the revolutionaries did it. Then it was the villages’ turn. … The civilians started preparing for the big day, while revolutionaries planned the liberation. They headed north like one big human river, “God be on our side” was their weapon.

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My Body as a Laboratory: Topics in Narrative Space-Medicine

By Carrie Paterson
In 2013, my art-science research practice was nearly derailed by chronic-recurring Epstein-Barr, a post-viral weakening of the immune system that is commonly associated with chronic fatigue, and which has many similar effects on a person as COVID “long hauler” syndrome. But this experience opened a new portal into the potentially deep relationship between somatic art practices and human factors in astronautics.

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Language, Lunacy, and the Literary Provocateur: Life Writing and Schizophrenia

By Claire Phillips

The night before picking up a copy of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esmé Weijun Wang’s essays on the subject of “the full psychotic spectrum” or what are called “the schizophrenias,” I anticipated its themes in a threatening dream related to my mother’s struggle with an illness that went undiagnosed for far too long.