Exhibiting Nature’s Nation

By Alan C. Braddock

JUNE 2019 | Critics Page

Featuring more than 100 works of art from 70 museums, Nature’s Nation explores three centuries of creative activity by diverse makers in a range of media.

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By Alissa Quart

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Poetry

Alissa Quart is the author of two poetry books Monetized (Miami University Press, 2015) and Thoughts and Prayers (OR Books, 2019) and her poetry has appeared in Granta, The Nation, the London Review of Books, Teen Vogue, NPR and LitHub, among many other publications. Her four non-fiction books include Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018) and Branded. She is executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Oda Jaune: Beyond Gravity

By Nikita Dmitriev

DEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen

The life of Bulgarian painter Michaela Danowska, better known by her pseudonym Oda Jaune, might have formed the basis of a novel by Proust, Sartre, or Nabokov. Coming to Germany in order to study painting 20 years ago, a beautiful high school graduate from a post-communist Balkan nation falls in love with her eminent professor—artist Jörg Immendorff—and has a daughter with him. Soon after, the professor dies prematurely, and the young widow moves to Paris, becoming a darling of the city’s bohème. Told this way, however, the story misses a crucial point: Oda Jaune is not just a stock femme fatale, but also an accomplished neo-classical painter in her own right.

The Eyes of Another: “Tokyo Stories” at the Japan Society

By Jaime Grijalba

NOV 2019 | Film

Inked in 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco specified the compensations and conditions Japan had to comply with following its defeat in World War II, essentially marking the nation’s first steps toward regaining sovereignty, but it also affected the cultural landscape of the country.