Jennifer Firestone's Story

By Rachael Guynn Wilson

MAR 2020 | Books

What is the difference between a narrative and a story, the poem asks, and also perhaps: Is poetry uniquely positioned to explore this difference?

Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality

By NOEL IGNATIEV

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Field Notes

In a lengthy review in the New Yorker of David W. Blight’s recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,¹ Adam Gopnik calls Douglass “the progenitor of the ‘pragmatic-progressive’ strain in American thought that led to Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.”² Douglass is an attractive figure, and it is easy to understand why he fills the need of American mainstream thought for a Black political hero now that George Washington Carver (the one Black figure in the textbooks when I went to grade school) no longer serves. But the notion of “pragmatic progressive” suggests an alternative tradition, which we might call “impractical revolutionary.” Nat Turner, John Brown, and Malcolm X come to mind as exemplars.

Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium

By Fraser Brough

MAR 2020 | ArtSeen

Here, bodies luxuriate, gorge, writhe, and eat themselves, squirting, smoking, kissing, suffering, even sculpting their own dismembered legs. The great plethora of bodily experience is imagined in all of its infinities, the expressive potential of the human figure as boundless as the ways of painting it.

MELVIN EDWARDS with Choghakate Kazarian

NOV 2019 | Art

A major figure in African-American art, Melvin Edwards (b. 1937) started as a sculptor in the early 1960s in Los Angeles before moving to New York in 1967. Known for the welded steel “Lynch Fragments,” an ongoing series that he started in 1963, Edwards’s work addresses his personal or historical experiences.