What could I possibly say today about Wifredo Lam and the exhibition the MoMA has devoted to him? Little that hasn’t already been uttered—successfully or not—by the hundreds of critics and journalists who have read, interpreted, or merely circled around the curatorship of Christophe Cherix (David Rockefeller Director) and Beverly Adams (Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art).

Evelyn Sosa—the Cuban photographer so many of us admire—has been selected as one of the twelve artists participating in No Vacancy Miami Beach 2025, the juried contemporary art program sponsored by the City of Miami Beach during Art Week. Her inclusion in this competition constitutes a significant institutional endorsement...

A few weeks ago, I visited Snakes and Ladders, the endearing exhibition by Sheida Soleimani at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. What struck me most was the meticulous care with which she constructed the settings that would provide a specific frame for the subjects of her photographs. I had the impression that she did not want to leave anything to chance...

It’s not going to happen, of course, but let us imagine that, suddenly, the Egyptian people —not in an Arab spring but in an Arab autumn— decide that their past is shameful, that all its physical evidence, its traces and monuments, must be erased. They rush with torches along the western bank of the Nile —the shore of the dead: Giza, Saqqara, Luxor, Thebes, Abu Simbel— in a near-telluric frenzy of destruction...

In 1992 I was very hungry. Not appetite—hunger. Cuba was enduring what was possibly the darkest year of what the government called the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” That was how President Fidel Castro named it in his televised addresses. For the weight of his words, for the absolute finality of every decision, he could be considered a pharaoh—and in some way, he was...

Day after day, I browse through a handful of publications that, either in their entirety or in their cultural sections, comment on the most significant events within the visual arts. They form the main source of my modest archives. At times I come across striking images that merely illustrate an article; fortunately, when the magazine is a serious one, the caption provides all the essential data. Yet beyond the excellence of the work itself, it’s worth asking, every so often, whether—as illustration—it’s truly a fitting choice.

No one told me. As, in the distance, we begin to make out the white summits of sixty, and while we hurriedly weigh what still lies ahead, we also start to calibrate what we’ve left behind. We turn hypersensitive, and the weight of transience settles comfortably on our shoulders. No one will lift it off. Imagine we have passed ninety and are left only with memory—if it hasn’t been lost along the way—and the counterweight of our legacy. We watch how the most conspicuous thing, the mark we might call our trace...

I ended the previous piece speaking about what has happened to my country after dismantling practically every vestige of its republican past. The revolutionaries abolished even the privately owned shoe-repair shops. They changed names as charming as “La Cenicienta” to Unit 256 for General Shoe Repair. They stripped them of every sign of identity, every trace of belonging. Where there had once been a prudent owner and two, three, or four cobblers, the space was taken over by a director and a deputy director...

I keep in my files an article The New York Times published on June 11, 2020. You’ll recall those were particularly unsettled months. The paper updated it on the 24th, while the protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis—on May 25, 2020, at the hands of a white police officer—were still echoing. The crime—captured on video and broadcast everywhere—unleashed a global wave of outrage against systemic racism and police violence in the United States.

The greatest library of its age, that of Alexandria, burned intermittently over several centuries. Thousands of scrolls vanished, and with them much of antiquity’s science, philosophy, and literature. The intellectual inheritance of the ancient world was reduced to ash. We cannot rule out deliberate intent in some of those episodes. Long before, a vast portion of Phoenician-Punic art had disappeared in the wars we know as the Punic Wars. Nothing remained of Carthage, a cultural and artistic power of its time.

Not long ago I came across a Facebook post claiming that “sometimes… destroying art is art.” It offered three examples that, to my mind, have little to do with one another. Let’s take them one by one.
On the morning of November 15, 2022, two activists from Letzte Generation (Last Generation Austria) threw a black, oily liquid over Gustav Klimt’s Tod und Leben, on view at Vienna’s Leopold Museum...

The last time I was at the CAC was in late 2017, for Caledonia Curry’s exhibition—better known as Swoon—titled The Canyon: 1999–2017. It was her first museum retrospective. I don’t recall every detail with clarity, but I do retain the certainty that it was a profoundly inspiring experience. Eight years later I return to the CAC for the public opening of What a Revolutionary Must Know, by the Iranian American artist Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990, Indianapolis).

I don’t know Miguel Rodez personally. Nor does the immense—if small—majority who read this blog. It’s possible I crossed paths with him more than once at Miami openings over the last four years. Our relationship is, essentially, a social-media one. For our regular readers, his name will likely be unfamiliar because he arrived in the United States in 1972, a thirteen-year-old adolescent ...

Perhaps it was possible, even then, to sense that Jesus of Western Avenue, inaugurated on October 16, 2021, at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art (College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois), would become Tony Fitzpatrick’s final solo exhibition in his lifetime. The show gathered more than sixty recent works, reaffirming his—almost proverbial—fascination with Chicago’s urban nature and environment, expressed through his unmistakably personal graphic language.

A few weeks ago, a post appeared on my Facebook feed from the Beagle Freedom Project, celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Snoopy — perhaps the most universal of all beagles. Since 2010, the Beagle Freedom Project (BFP) has been rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming animals once used in research laboratories. The initiative was born of people who, for some reason, paid special attention to this breed — probably for its docility and its good-natured temperament.