Art and Media Criticism
Recent reflections on art and media.
What’s Surreal about Sixties Surreal? (Mutt Art Review)
A reflection on the Whitney Museum’s exhibit of 1960s artworks and the failure of situating them within the historic avant-garde movement. (Email for .pdf.)
Growing Up Without Glee (Slate)
For a special issue on “Passing” for Slate’s queer Outward blog, I wrote about the significance of queer media and the role of the humanities in my life.
Chipping away at one part of my passing narrative brought the whole facade tumbling down, and media was central to that turning point. I took classes on LGBTQ history and was exposed to Andy Warhol’s polaroids, Félix González-Torres AIDS sculptures, and Jack Smith’s avant-garde film Flaming Creatures.
Starting with radical queer art, at 23 I finally allowed myself to turn back to the show I yearned to watch as a teenager. In doing so, I realized that I could have really used Glee at 14.
Online Museum Essays
MoMA: Claude Cahun
A short biography on Claude Cahun (& Marcel Moore), written for a popular audience on the Museum of Modern Art’s website.
From childhood to death, Cahun treated life and art as grounds for experimentation. Always pushing boundaries—yet adapting to changing, even dangerous circumstances—Cahun celebrated serial masquerade as a person and artist: “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish lifting up all these faces.”
SFMOMA: René Magritte: The Fifth Season
In three essays coinciding with René Magritte: The Fifth Season (2018) at SFMOMA, I wrote about Magritte’s late works. I discuss the origins of two major series installed for the exhibition and the influence of World War II on his experimental wartime styles.
Interviews with Stanford Faculty (Stanford Arts)
For Stanford Arts, I conducted interviews with Alexander Nemerov about Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer (1947) and Peggy Phelan on Andy Warhol’s celebrity images.
