For T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Nicole Rudick considers the numerous visual artists who have drawn inspiration from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. “Invisibility may seem antithetical to visual art,” Rudick writes. “How can an artist render what isn’t there? But plenty of artists have embraced this conceptual challenge.” Gordon Parks, who worked with Ellison in 1952 to interpret the then-new novel into an image series for Life magazine, was the first in this line of artists, which includes Ming Smith, Kerry James Marshall, Hank Willis Thomas, Jack Whitten, Cladia Rawles, and others. Their work is a testament, Rudick writes, to Ellison’s belief that culture can be “a place of limitless freedom, where the artist, writer, poet and musician could express the fullness and complexity of Black life.”
It would appear that Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, has a “go-to superlative construction.” The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple counts instances when Baquet has referred to different Times journalists as “one of the finest journalists of her generation,” and advises “an easy way out” of the predicament: “Just lay it on thicker.”
For Jacobin, Alex Press interviews Sarah Schulman about her new history of ACT UP New York. They talk about the group’s tactics and charisma, and how disagreements within a movement can prove effective. Considering what it takes to get people to commit to a collective aim, Schulman responds: “It was a state of emergency. Life and death are very high stakes. . . . Take the Palestine solidarity movement: that’s a movement that needs to be as effective as it can be. They welcome everybody, including people who are not welcome in other movements. And they’ve changed strategies many times. They’re desperate, and they need change.”
New York Times Book Review editor Elisabeth Egan talks to Clint Smith, whose new book How the Word Is Passed, is based on a road trip the author took in search of stories about slavery in the US. Smith tells Egan, “There are these moments where, as a nonfiction writer, you’re like, Oh, the path has been laid out for me. I just need to follow it. There were a lot of moments like that.”
For Art in America, Jasmine Sanders considers the sketches of artist Aya Brown, who draws essential workers in colored pencil on paper. Brown began meditating on the labor of women in care industries after being hospitalized in early 2020. As Sanders observes, the way these workers were talked about shifted dramatically after the pandemic, “Their exploitation . . . spun into the romantic, nationalistic language of wartime, rife with heroic sacrifice and frontline service. . . . For all the idiosyncratic vibrancy and style of Brown’s series, what I hope remains with viewers is the leeriness of the workers, the trepidation in their posture.”
In the latest episode of “Artists On Writers | Writers On Artists,” musician and artist Claire Chase sits down with anthropologist and author Eduardo Kohn. They discuss the many instruments that produce sound and music, the virtue of play inside of a creative practice, and what it means as artists to face the limits and the possibilities of oneself.