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A curated selection of writing at the intersection of art, culture, and community, compiled each week by the editors of Storyboard.
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
The New MoMA Is Here. Get Ready for Change.
Two senior curators were still installing the cardinal gallery, the one with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Pablo Picasso’s grand, violent painting of five contorted Catalan prostitutes.
For decades, MoMA’s curators have paired the aggressive “Demoiselles” (1907) with the smaller, perspective-shattering Cubist works he and Georges Braque painted a few years later. Two of them were here, propped against the wall on foam blocks.
Now, though, Picasso had new company, younger, from across the Atlantic. Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and her colleague Anne Umland, a Picasso specialist, were introducing the “Demoiselles” to a large painting of a race riot by the Harlem-born artist Faith Ringgold. Called “American People Series #20: Die” (1967), it shows white and black Americans, blood-spattered, clinging to one another for safety, their faces contorted in a similar manner to Picasso’s damsels.
FROM WALKER READER
New Postcommodity Codex Investigates Land, Systemic Violence, and Minnesota History
In its 2017 Artist Op-Ed, Postcommodity considered the year 2043, when whites in the United States are expected to become a statistical minority, to investigate issues around migration, “nativism,” indigeneity, and linguistics. To mark the collective’s return to the Twin Cities for an October 5 lecture as Public Art St. Paul’s 2019 Distinguished Artists, Walker Reader commissioned its current members, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist, to continue iterating around themes from their essay. The result, presented here for the first time, is a codex, a form of pictographic storytelling with roots in ancient Mayan and Aztec cultures, that investigates the Twin Cities’s past and present in terms of its relationship to migration, violence to the land, and Indigenous sovereignty.
FROM THE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Profits of Order
On most campuses, boards and committees rely on Robert’s Rules as a matter of standard practice. I’ve long had a copy on my bookshelf, as have many department chairs and faculty members active in governance. I’m a big fan but did not know the book’s Civil War history — how Henry Robert lost control of a raucous dispute about local defense in a New Bedford church in 1863 for lack of a how-to-run-a-meeting rulebook. We’ve all been here. Robert was smart enough to realize that a guide for civil debate would be useful after the war as citizens assembled in town halls and lodges to exercise self-government. So he wrote one.
FROM THE NEW YORKER
The Rise of the “Getting Real” Post on Instagram
If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then every perfectly staged Instagram photo must have a mess lurking just out of frame. For a long time, we had to conjure these messes using only our imaginations and a bit of Schadenfreude. Maybe the coiffed mother of the angelic toddler was struggling with potty training or psoriasis. Maybe the fitness influencer broadcasting her daily six-mile run had a private pastry addiction. Whatever the secret, it didn’t need to be spelled out. We, the users, needed only to exercise an iota of empathy or logic to understand that behind every life style was, of course, a complicated life.
FROM THE BELIEVER
Cabramatta
The door to my house locked on both sides. In the same way that you'd need a key to enter the house, you'd need a key to exit. Just as we'd lock up when we left, we'd lock ourselves in when we were home.
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