Charis Caputo
Charis Caputo is the senior editor of LIBER. She lives in Queens, New York.
- The Matter of the Patter
Courtesy of the Criterion Channel. Joan Micklin Silver’s romantic comedy Crossing Delancey (1988) opens in a dimly lit bookstore on the Upper East Side. “They want to pull us down and make something clean and tall and obscenely profitable arise out of our ashes,” the bookstore’s owner tells a group
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 3
SUMMER 2025
- Jesus Christ!
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” So wrote David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A founder of empiricism, Hume argued that miracles are extremely unlikely since, by definition, they subvert our sensory understanding of the world. “It is a miracle, that a dead
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 3
SUMMER 2025
- Interview
JinJin Xu. What Would You Hear If You Could? #8: Against This Earth, We Knock. Site-specific installation. Old pots (collected in JiangYong), coal ashes (collected in JiangYong), resin, mechanical installation, 2024. Photo courtesy of How Art Museum. Since 2017 JinJin Xu’s head has been full of voices. What the voices
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 2
WINTER 2025
Front Cover: Bayan Kiwan. Lesser Legible Love, 2023. Oil on canvas draped in tulle; 44 × 35.8 in. I grew up in many different places, so belonging was always fraught,” says Bayan Kiwan. She hands me a bottle of coconut water. A weak but hopeful December light pours through the
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024
- Crit
Old Westbury Gardens, Smoggy Afternoon, by the author. The biggest book I own is the Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. It’s all the plays, annotated: 3,600 pages. Lately I’ve used it to prop up my computer, to enable a more flattering angle on Zoom calls. In the fall of 2020, I
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024
Donna the chimp. Photo by Victoria Horner. Donna is a biologically female chimpanzee who exhibits many traits associated with her male counterparts; she likes to wrestle, walks with a “swagger,” and can erect her body hair. In Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, Frans de Waal describes Donna
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 4
FALL 2022
On the cover: “Audre” Elise Peterson’s digital collages are casually electrifying. “Audre,” on the cover, evokes Lorde’s distinct feminism by juxtaposing cozy intimacy and radical commitments. The last page of LIBER features Grace Jones circa 1985 perfectly balanced within Matisse’s La Danse (1909), effortlessly central. A writer, children’s book illustrator,
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 1
MARCH/APRIL 2022
“March for Women’s Lives — Washington D.C.” Twenty years ago, the US Supreme Court was poised to consider Planned Parenthood of Southeastern PA v. Casey, and abortion rights advocates feared that the newly minted conservative majority would endorse a slew of restrictions (like parental consent and waiting periods) or even
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 2
MAY/JUNE 2022
FRONT COVER: Cecily Brown. All Is Vanity (after Gilbert), 2006. Monotype; 47 1/4 × 36 7/8 in. Private collection, courtesy Two Palms, New York. © Cecily Brown. LATELY WHEN I look in the mirror, I see death. Or rather, I see the signs of creeping middle age—the widening part of
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 2
SUMMER 2023
On the cover: Machine Dazzle, Times Square, 2008 By Eileen Keane Machine Dazzle (née Matthew Flower, b. 1972) is performance artist and self-taught costume designer known for his wild inventions and for whom street is stage. Elissa Auther, who curated Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle, on view through February 2023
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 5
WINTER 2022