Issues

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2023, 354 pp. To make art in a monstrous world, must we embrace the monstrous? Lauren Elkin’s newest book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, is a meditation on this question. Elkin takes her title from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, in which the narrator, a character named only “the wife,” tells us “My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an art

© Sally Mann. Photo: Rob McKeever, Courtesy Gagosian. In a storied career spanning nearly fifty years, the photographer Sally Mann has known no shortage of either acclaim or controversy. Her latest exhibit at Gagosian, to light, and then return—, shows work as new, serious, and beautiful as anything she ever has made, but it seems to have escaped much attention. The title, a line from Emily Dickinson, suggests an interstitial space between two states, a

Wave Books, October 2023, 88 pp. The writing mind is a haunted house ringing with the voices of the dead. When I told her that I’d never seen the film, Dotti was astounded. It was raining. From beneath the awning, the air was washed with streaky neon and headlights. Dorothea Lasky was dressed brightly, characteristically. She was exhorting me in her particular fashion, an alternating current of insistence and surrender (you have to see it

In 2012, responding to reports of a foul odor, a New York landlord discovered the groundbreaking feminist theorist Shulamith Firestone dead in her apartment. It was estimated her body had been there for a month. Firestone, who lived reclusively, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1980s. Still, it’s hard to ignore the implications: the author of The Dialectic of Sex, that scorching takedown of romantic love, met a tragic spinster’s end. “Do you ever

Graham and Ted Shawn in Shawn’s duet, Malagueña, 1921. Photograph by Albert Witzel. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the New York Public Library. Martha Graham (1894–1991), whose dances—and the evolving technique for how to perform them—dramatically upended what audiences expected from theatrical dancing, did not identify as a choreographer. She was a dancer, even after she retired from the stage in 1970—a priority that affected the construction, content, and tone of her 181 works and determined