The last time Barry Joule saw his friend Francis Bacon, it was 10 days before the celebrated painter’s death. No one in the art world disputes that. For over a decade before that spring day in 1992, Joule, a Canadian handyman with a rock-star mane, had been one of Bacon’s …
One of the most anticipated events of an overstuffed Mexico City Art Week earlier this month promised to be a surreal collision of architecture, performance art, power, privilege — and horses. Marina Abramovic, the grandmother of performance art, would be presenting her latest works (though she would dispute recognizing them …
The four cavernous wings of Cambodia’s national museum are so packed with objects that visitors need to watch their elbows while strolling among the roughly 1,400 on display. The century-old building in central Phnom Penh is running out of room partly because foreign collectors and institutions have returned about 300 …
Towering bronzes depicting emperors once graced an ancient shrine in a region of what is now Turkey that was once part of Rome’s extended empire. Installed between around A.D. 50 and 250 to venerate imperial power, the statues were later buried by earthquakes only to be discovered and quietly sold …
Before I met the artist Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum to talk about her new survey show, “All Day All Night,” her team sent me a copy of her two-page “access rider.” It contained a list of terms to avoid: Don’t pathologize her by referring to her as …
Hilton Als is best known as a writer. His essay collection “White Girls” was a finalist for a 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his theater criticism at The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer for more than …
After Alice Coltrane’s death in January 2007, the many who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for different reasons. They even called her by different names. To musicians …
Come to the Center for Brooklyn History’s grand Romanesque Revival building in Brooklyn Heights looking for staid portraits of 19th-century burghers, and you’ll find them. But on a recent evening, Mildred Jones, an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was pondering a less expected large-scale oil portrait — of herself. …
Sixteenth-century ornamental timepieces frame a crystal-studded metal bodysuit by Thierry Mugler. Gilded silver reliquaries with sculpted hands stand next to a pair of Hermès gloves. A ceramic hand warmer from Faenza, Italy, that looks like a book is twinned with a Chanel clutch that looks like a book. This is …
‘The Ultimate Improv Show’ Jan. 24-25 at the Bell House, 149 Seventh Street, Brooklyn; thebellhouseny.com. In the late 2000s, you could catch many of today’s top sitcom stars and character actors honing their skills at cheap (or free) improvisational shows in the basement of a Gristedes in Manhattan that the …
