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NOTES ON VISUAL NARRATIVE
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snapshots

Glory and Ash

April 15th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

On April 26, 1986, I was almost certainly bored out of my mind, sprawled in some corner of my apartment in Havana’s Vedado district. What I remember from those days is fear. A dense, persistent fear. The certainty that I could be swallowed by three years of mandatory military service. I clung to a girl whose face recalled Mariko-san —Yoko Shimada’s, not Anna Sawai’s— and I could not imagine allowing the distance between us...

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Where Is the Moon, Anita?

March 18th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I cannot quite understand how Facebook’s algorithm works. For some reason, it has begun feeding me dozens of images of Ana de Armas. Perhaps because one day I lingered on a photograph of Anya Taylor-Joy; perhaps because I keep an archive—strictly for scientific purposes—of Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe; perhaps, in short, because I paused one second too long over a few of her images.

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Index and Chiromancy

March 17th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

On my way home, on one of the trains at Miami Airport, I took this photograph. A passenger had left a sticker on one of the metal poles inside the carriage. Whoever it was—judging by the code—came from Guayaquil and carried it on their suitcase. The author, it would seem, now lives on these shores.

art review

Brief Treatise on Balls

March 16th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I have developed a faint affection for photography competitions. I go through them with an almost childish curiosity, looking for the good photographs the jury overlooked and the bad ones it chose to reward. In the latest issue of Camera Craft, its sixty-ninth, for March and April of this year, some of the results are published from the competition that The Guild of Photographers organizes annually.

Art News

The Quiet Beauty of the Modest

March 8th, 2026 | By R10

There is, in underwater life, a captivating otherness, and these images from the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition bring it forth with admirable clarity.
The first photograph captures a clownfish parent keeping vigil over the moment when the eggs it had tended so carefully begin to hatch. A scene which, according to the judges, they had never encountered before...

art review

The Landscape as Gratitude in the Work of M. Katherine Hurley

March 7th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Everyone in Cincinnati’s artistic community knows Katherine Hurley. They have for a long time. In my own case, for just under ten years. And we all know her solid career and her exceptional body of work, delicate and subtle as few others.
I have always found it difficult to comment on the genre of landscape. Not because I do not like it, but because, when it reproduces what nature itself has taken millennia of patient execution to achieve...

ART REVIEW

The Day Cirenaica Moreira Put a Price on Her Heart

March 7th, 2026 | By Ahmel Echevarría

Dressed in red, barricaded behind a mask crowned with feathers as red as the dress itself, the visual artist Cirenaica Moreira (Havana, 1969) waited, seated on a stool, for the attendees of the performance—scissors in hand—to cut the hearts fastened to the dry, gilded branches she held.

Art News

Michelangelo and the Weight of Containment

February 21st, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Human genius can be observed in many of its works. Nowhere is it more detectable than in the arts: music, literature, and the visual arts. As a species, seen from above, we are all fairly clever. But some are—or were—truly exceptional. What did they require to rise above the rest? What made them singular, beyond the reasoning most of us share?

Art News

Damien Hirst, the body, and tormented naïveté

February 19th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I have not the faintest idea why The Times, in its February 16 edition, informs us—by a delay so un-British—that Damien Hirst’s Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain has been installed in the Camellia House at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Not only that work: The Watchtower, by Auke de Vries, and Muamba Posy, by Vanessa da Silva, both outdoors in the Country Park.

Art News

The Disconsolate Life of the Shabti

February 19th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, part of University College London (UCL), houses one of the most important collections of Egyptian artefacts in the world. It preserves more than 80,000 objects recovered from excavations conducted between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them are hundreds of shabti, small funerary figures that formed part of the ritual equipment of tombs in ancient Egypt...

art review

Like Jazz Pieces

February 17th, 2026 | By Amalina Bomnin

Anyone who approaches Pedro Abascal’s photography and speaks with the author about the spontaneous nature of his scenes cannot help but think: he’s taking me for a fool. So accustomed have we become to an art of effects—an art frequently structured around spectacle, one that opportunistically deploys “the technological” to shield the fragility of its premises—that it feels like a deception when he claims he neither goes out hunting for images nor resorts to manipulation of any kind to produce photographs of such suggestive force...

Art News

Other Practices, Beyond the Abyssal: The Artistic Labor of Pedro Guevara as Aesthetic Oasis

February 12th, 2026 | By Amalina Bomnin Hernández

The aesthetic and existential possibilities that Pedro Guevara opens through his practices summon us to sustain an attentive gaze toward how we perceive the world in relation to our authentic growth and existential harmony, bearing in mind that his artistic doing never detaches itself from lived practice when establishing its discourse...

Art News

Beauty as Protest: The Pattern & Decoration Movement

February 10th, 2025 | By Miguel Rodez

The Pattern & Decoration (P&D) movement, once dismissed for its embrace of "decorative" arts, is now celebrated for challenging traditional art hierarchies. Explore its legacy and modern-day echoes in Cincinnati, where creative hubs like the Freeport Row Art Alley are contributing to a thriving art scene, with a mural by Esteban Leyva at Liberty and Elm streets.

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Not Everyone Wants to Be Heroic

February 9th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodríguez

For a very long time, the overhandled story of Numantia has occupied a central place in the repertoire of national political rhetoric. It is cited in such a reduced, schematic way that it borders on the grotesque. The citadel stood on a hill slightly over one kilometer above sea level. At its foot lies today the village of Garray, barely sixty meters lower—modern, pragmatic.

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Empires, Resistance, and the Magic Potion

February 9th, 2026 | By Hamlet Fernández

In Sapiens (From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind), the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari advances a disturbing yet lucid idea about the function of empires in history: imperial systems are neither pure evil nor pure progress. They conquer, repress, dominate, and exploit—but they also weave global networks: routes, rules, currencies, lingua francas, infrastructure, commercial circuits, the circulation of technologies and ideas, culture, art, and knowledge.

Art News

Nan Goldin in London: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

February 8th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Forty years ago, the American photographer Nan Goldin published what is now widely regarded as one of the most influential photobooks in contemporary art. That is the view of Jacqui Palumbo—journalist, editor, and producer specializing in art and culture—who covered this event for CNN. Titled The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, the book documents Goldin’s life in New York City’s East Village throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with forays into Chicago, London, and Mexico City.

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