This essay is a rare glimpse into the alternative publications of East Germany in the 1980s. Through an overview of the magazines of the period, and a close reading of various images, advertisements, and visual poetry within them, this essay underscores the vibrancy of the underground print scene in the last decade of the GDR.
The Indian artist Sudhir Patwardhan is chiefly a painter in the realist tradition moving between images of the city, inhabitants, and milieu.
In this sardonic text, acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed bitingly describes the conditions of filmmaking under the Ba’athist regime in Syria. Under strict control of the National Film Association that was founded in 1963, only one film was produced every year in the country.
Bauhaus’ active members constituted an international network that included architects and artists from several countries in Central Europe, among them the former Czechoslovakia. The Czech and Slovak connections to the Bauhaus can be studied from various perspectives, and this essay focuses on the role of print periodicals in this history.
Paz Errázuriz’s photographic oeuvre coincided with that of a group of artists working in the late 1970s and ’80s in Chile who dedicated themselves to an “aesthetic of the margins”.
In 2018, on the eve of the Bauhaus centenary, the exhibition BAUHAUS ↔ VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels in The Museum of Modern Art Library explored the intersecting parallels of these two sites of radical experimentation. Its selection of ephemera, publications, and correspondence highlights the extensive circulation of ideas and people between the two institutions. The video here features Anna Bokov’s presentation at a “post presents” event organized in relation to the exhibition on October 17, 2018.
MoMA librarian Jennifer Tobias takes a recent trip to the Paper Conservation Lab as a jumping off point to explore the ins and outs of mechanical reproduction in the 1920s. Specifically, she takes a close look at a series of images in a set of avant-garde Czech magazines, to explore questions around how photographs were shared for publication across the country, and abroad.
In this essay, Michaëla de Lacaze engages in a close reading of Happy Bicentennial (1976), one of the most radical pieces of mail art created by artist and poet Clemente Padín during the Uruguayan authoritarian regime of the 1970s.
Andra Silapētere introduces two key figures of the Hell’s Kitchen group of Latvian exile artists in New York. The work of the group will be featured in an exhibition at James Gallery of the CUNY Graduate Center as part of a series of exhibitions on Latvian emigrant artistic communities, Portable Landscapes, organized by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.
American textile designer Joel Robinson remains an enigmatic figure despite his inclusion in MoMA’s collection. Robinson’s story, in many ways, mirrors the story of so many others featured in the’Good Design’ series, whose promising careers never gained the traction that such a recognition might reward.
This text is a reimagined transcription of a series of conversations between Prabha Sahasrabudhe and Indira Gandhi that took place in 1960 at the Westbury Hotel in New York City.The reason for their meetings was to discuss bringing an adaptation of MoMA’s Children’s Art Carnival to India.
Desde finales de los noventa, la obra de Regina José Galindo se ha caracterizado por denunciar distintas formas de opresión y violencia en la sociedad contemporánea. Uno de los temas recurrentes en su trayectoria artística ha sido el de las movilizaciones migratorias y el desplazamiento de centroamericanos como resultado de las guerras civiles que tuvieron lugar en Guatemala y otros países de la región en la década de los setenta.
