Brooklynrail

Disfigurements | The Brooklyn Rail

HAVE YOU EVER HAD THE EXPERIENCE OF DISAPPEARING INTO SOMETHING MUCH GREATER THAN YOURSELF? I was born into families in exile, so I learned wher…

Teju Cole’s Blind Spot

If Blind Spot, Teju Cole’s most recent book, is an extension of his work on Instagram, it is only because he uses social media towards that rare…

The Ghosts of Italy’s ’68

The Galleria Nazionale, dependent until now on deeply carved historical narratives of 20th century painting and enamored with its canon, has dec…

MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ: Embodied Forms

Casts of dried mud dislodged whole from the body, or mummified fragments: Embodied Forms, the first exhibition dedicated to the work of Polish a…

Outtakes | The Brooklyn Rail

One day while walking down St. Mark’s Place with a friend (a bit stoned) at the age of fifteen or so I heard this wild music coming out of a doo…

Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man

Where to begin? Where else but the words. The first chapter of Slave Old Man, a small but richly layered, obsessive, lyrical novel written after…

Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture

Lichtenstein’s comparisons often target the American dream. Julius Shulman’s Case Study House No. 22 (Los Angeles, Calif.) (1960) was intended t…

Dear Friends and Readers,

Imagine the world without poetry. Imagine a world where language is merely functional and transactional. Imagine a day when mankind is intimidat…

The Brooklyn Rail - Arts, Culture, Critical Perspectives

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and b…