Category: articles

I wrote about my late mum and motherhood for one of my favorite journals in the world, Riposte. Read it here.

This summer I spoke with Raphaël Koenig and Camilo Godoy for artpress about the state of the U.S. art field. Read it here.

Biodesign has gained public recognition through its close relationship with exhibition spaces. But as the inequalities that plague the culture industry are broadly exposed, I wrote for Biodesigned about how practitioners face a crisis of conscience. I was also delighted to serve as part of the jury process for the always-amazing Biodesign Challenge this year.… Continue reading Untitled

My favorite place to read or write: Vestoj. Read this longform article Amber and I co-wrote here.

We started a newsletter at Art + Museum Transparency. Find out more here, and sign up!

The Walker Art Center asked Art + Museum Transparency to sum up 2019. Read it here.

I was interviewed by a super smart early-career art historian, Rachel Kubrick, about internships in our field. Read it here.

I wrote about parenting, labor, and the art world for Hyperallergic (article here). I don’t think anything I’ve ever written has prompted so many responses as this article, and I’m working with colleagues on ways to corral this shared energy into new mechanisms for change. Be in touch if you want to join.

Sincere thanks to the brilliant Point Line Projects and Ilana Curtis for this thoughtful interview.

Recent piece for Hyperallergic, “African-American Designers Hidden in Plain Sight.” We see objects like the View-Master and New Breed dashiki, both by Black designers, often in our daily lives and yet find them almost nowhere in the places where we preserve and examine our culture. Read more here. 

Peer reviewed article forthcoming fall 2018 in the academic Journal of Visual Culture. Guns are usually designed with great attention to their aesthetic, ergonomic, and functional component parts. Yet, their contemporary manifestations are considered so culturally and symbolically fraught—especially in the United States—that guns produced in the last century have rarely been presented as industrial objects… Continue reading Untitled

I wrote this article for Hyperallergic in July 2018 outlining a topic that has been percolating in my mind for some years, namely thoughts on why curatorial effort isn’t always acknowledged by museums and the press.

I wrote a review of By the People: Designing a Better America for the Journal of Design History, Volume 31, Issue 2, 25 May 2018, Pages 213–216 https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epy019

I wrote a review of the seminal digital art history resource, SmartHistory, for caa.reviews.

In conjunction with Items: Is Fashion Modern? and the related free online course Fashion as Design, for which I was an instructor (mo.ma/fashionasdesign) I spoke with designer Howard Davis about the New Breed, the Afrocentric boutique he cofounded that operated in the 1960s.

From humble origins as an undergarment, to mass-produced fast-fashion staple, to highly collectible (and highly priced) commodity, the white T-shirt is a quintessential product of twentieth-century modernity and the ultimate sartorial and psychological blank canvas. Read my essay for Google Arts and Culture.

I wrote an essay on authenticity and fashion for the journal Vestoj.

March 2017, Brooklyn Rail: “Fashion is absolutely embedded in this conversation, and in multiple ways—as a marker of time and memory, a maker of status, or vehicle for fantastical escapism, certainly, it helps us mediate, describe, and explain modern life. We think of the decrepit clothes of the stonebreakers painted by Gustave Courbet that—ripped, patched,… Continue reading Untitled

Our discussion ranged from the historical (we’d never heard of early-20th-century “stoutwear” before Lauren schooled us) to the political (what does it mean to call out a certain fashion conversation as “plus size” in a country where the majority of women’s bodies might be described in this way?). We also learned that the concept of plus… Continue reading Untitled

PROJECTED HOMES: AN ARCHAEOLOGY IN EIGHT PARTS. March 2016. Undertaken while a Writer-in-Residence at Recess in NYC, in parallel with Total Effekt: Living Magasine. I. Prison House Architecture, whether domestic or institutional, public or private, has always been in dialogue with the barely articulable recesses of the imagination. We may think of the prison today as a… Continue reading Untitled

Take a look at the newest contemporary design works in MoMA’s collection in a post I authored with Paola Antonelli.  

I co-authored a post on some exciting new acquisitions we made at MoMA!

October 2014. Two reviews for ARTnews. PDFs here and here.

October 2014. I co-authored a reflection on MoMA’s Design and Violence exhibition with senior curator Paola Antonelli. See the full post here.

Post on the Society of Architectural Historians Blog on–you guessed it–Corbu’s legacy. July 2014.

  I reviewed two exhibitions for the summer 2014 issue of ARTnews. PDFs here and here.

I wrote extended collection entries for works by Donald Judd, Catherine Opie, Anthony Caro, Liz Nofziger, Layla Ali, and Chris Taylor as part of the Collections Access Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currier Museum of Art Collections. 2014

Peer-reviewed. Co-authored with Anne Swartz. “Why Digital Art History?” Journal of Visual Resources, Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2014. [PDF]  

Read the full post here. “It’s a show that, on the surface at least, is about things I’m happily distanced from – organized sports, parental rules, teen angst, and curfews – and I was going to write about something completely different this month (ie. something germane to Art 21 and Open Enrollment, something to do… Continue reading Untitled

I wrote on the Lewis chessmen, part of a longer research paper into the medieval beserker and hallucinogenic sight. “Armed to the Teeth: The Lewis Chessmen,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition Blog, December 20, 2011. [PDF]

Beginning in the 1970s and exploding in use recently, curators and artists have claimed the terms “discursive turn” and “pedagogy” to describe elements of their practice within museums.  My interest lies in neither curators, nor contemporary artists per se, but artist-educators. This paper, “Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn,” for the journal ARTWRIT concerns a… Continue reading Untitled

I responded to the symposium “Art Speech” held at MoMA in 2011: “What is “art speech” and how does it function and change across contexts, as art practice, interpretive gesture, vehicle of critique or connoisseurial, canonical voice? Is the spoken word just a lesser afterimage of text or is art speech always more compelling in person? Part… Continue reading Untitled

BOOK REVIEW “Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania by Dianne Suzette Harris,” Book Review, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011), pp. 119-121. Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center. [JSTOR] [PDF]

“Song Dong,” Slashstroke Magazine, 2010.