Podcast Africa’s Buildings April 29, 2026 Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities. Read More
Interview Roland Betancourt on Disneyland and the Rise of Automation April 23, 2026 Roland Betancourt traces how Disneyland became a proving ground for automation at the very moment the American public was most anxious about its consequences. Read More
Interview Leslie Umberger on Grandma Moses March 24, 2026 Leslie Umberger is coauthor (along with Randall R. Griffey) of Grandma Moses: A Good Day's Work, a major reexamination of the life, art, and legacy of a self-taught American master. Read More
Reading List ¿ìɫֱ²¥ to read during Women’s History Month March 02, 2026 Explore books by and about women who have pushed boundaries, effected change, redefined roles, or who have complicated our understanding of what it means to be powerful. Read More
Essay Clash of Titians February 24, 2026 Titian and Michelangelo were already famous by the time they first met in 1529, and they were extravagantly famous by the time they met again in Rome in 1546. They did not need to compete, but they did—sometimes admiring and emulating, sometimes criticizing and correcting. Read More
Podcast Wound Man December 02, 2025 The Wound Man—a medical diagram depicting a figure fantastically pierced by weapons and ravaged by injuries and diseases—was reproduced widely across the medieval and early modern globe. Jack Hartnell charts the emergence and endurance of this striking image, used as a visual guide to the treatment of many ailments. Read More
Essay Architecture’s forgotten figures October 10, 2025 Like any other subject, the history of modernist architecture has its favored heroes and plotlines, but also important figures who drop out of sight despite their contemporary successes. Ella Briggs is one of them. Read More
Reading List Read with Pride June 01, 2025 Celebrate Pride throughout the year with this diverse collection of books exploring LGBTQ+ issues and perspectives. Read More
Interview Lars Krutak on Indigenous Tattoo Traditions May 05, 2025 Transporting readers through history, anthropologist Lars Krutak explores the art and customs of tattooing across numerous ancestral lands, including Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, the Arctic, Oceania, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Siberia. Read More
Podcast Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life April 30, 2025 Stephen J. Campbell examines the strangeness of Leonardo’s words and works, and the distinctive premodern world of artisans and thinkers from which he emerged. Far from being a solitary genius living ahead of his time, Leonardo inhabited a vibrant network of artistic, technological, and literary exchange. Read More
Essay Race and American sculpture December 12, 2024 As monuments representing painful histories are dislodged from their pedestals, it is impossible to obfuscate the relationship between sculpture, race, and power in the United States. Read More
Podcast Fragmentary Forms December 10, 2024 While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Read More
Essay Collage beyond modernism November 24, 2024 What happens when we try and trace a history of collage back across time and space? Read More
Essay Monuments on fire October 23, 2024 In October 2023, one monument met its end for the sake of another. A bronze equestrian statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee that had stood in Charlottesville, Virginia since 1924 was sent to the furnace to be melted down, piece by piece, and formed into uniform rectangular ingots. The developing afterlife of the Lee statue is part of another history—one that transcends the American context and dates back centuries earlier. Read More
Essay Narrative images, sacred places September 30, 2024 Close inspection of a "kalamkari" shows the work is exemplary of early modern temple paintings, which in form and subject mirror the concentric enclosing walls of the Hindu temple. Read More