More on: art

i. Mid-morning Inside the rented van, a stone-gray moth head-butts the windshield, drops stunned in a looping catch, and rises to the same task, intent, not on light—there are other windows, some of them open—but this one light. Now it pauses in a midair hover, its hinged wings wide and minutely scripted in a flowing…

FRED, THEIR BETTA FISH, IS DEAD. Christopher tips scummy water into the wilted tomato on the fire escape and gazes at the red body in his hand. He thinks about tossing Fred into the alley for the neighbor’s tabby before Damien wakes up from his nap, but decides against it. Ruth always strolls up the…

Issue 89 features the work of graffiti and installation artist Mohammed Ali, whose murals appear in cities all over the world, from his native Birmingham to Melbourne, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur. He also performs collaboratively with musicians and poets. In the accompanying essay, George Dardess describes the way Ali sees his work as part of…

I think that I am primarily a storyteller. My function as a visual artist is to create a two-dimensional formal structure that will best contain the story being told. I am always trying to create a sense of space that has somehow been altered or transformed by an event. —James Munce THE LACONIC, SPARTAN PROSE above…

IN LATE FEBRUARY OF 2015, my husband and I left behind the snow and ice of central Indiana to drive ten hours south to the shrubby tree-lined plains just outside Wichita, Kansas—to see a puppet show. Another couple we’d met only the night before accompanied us, a sword maker who operates Cedarlore Forge in New…

Piero della Francesca’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels For half an hour we had the painting mostly to ourselves, and the longer we stood there taking it in together, the more the people drifting around us seemed to disappear. We spoke quietly when we spoke at all, as though trying not to discomfort the…