Julian Lucas

As the Trump Administration tries to rescue symbols of the Lost Cause, an exhibition in Los Angeles, led by Kara Walker, finds meaning in their desecration.

In 1989, Sir Tim revolutionized the online world. Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again.

A timely exhibition dissects the emergence of modern ideas about gender and sexuality—and the backlash against them.

A seventy-million-dollar renovation beautifully presents the museum’s non-Western art—even if doubts remain about whether all of it belongs in New York.

MOMA pays tribute to a restlessly innovative artist whose life’s work was to give abstraction soul.

The reporter’s casually piercing, coolly amused Profile of Derek Walcott introduced me to a man whose poetry I had read and whose behavior I hadn’t expected.

Simpson’s wryly evasive photos, films, collages—and now paintings—peel back the layers of our looking.

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

A global network of maritime archeologists is excavating slave shipwrecks—and reconnecting Black communities to the deep.

The French Senegalese director passed on big-budget Hollywood projects before making her latest film—a fantastical documentary about art restitution.

For decades, the novelist has found humor in the ever-changing ways that biracial people are questioned, fetishized, or ignored in America.

With their deranged portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, the actor and writer emerges from the “gay shadows” in a hysterical farce.

The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall.

UNESCO is best known for its prestigious list of World Heritage sites. But its most interesting endeavor might be a survey of humanity’s cultural practices. For two decades, the U.N. agency has been cataloguing the world’s intangible heritage, a label that it has applied to everything from truffle hunting to capoeira. There are more than seven hundred “elements” on the I.C.H. lists—kaleidoscopically arrayed in an interactive tool on UNESCO’s Web site—and browsing them can feel a bit like wanderi…

“My mom was there,” he told me recently. “My kindergarten teacher was there. My brother and sister were there.” He closed his eyes and laughed into his steepled hands. The happening was part of an experimental-art festival in his home town of Washington, D.C., and took place in a former bathroom at a shuttered school. His mother had caught word of it online, and by the time he recognized her voice among the dozen or so spectators it was too late to stop the show. Jacobs-Jenkins spent the next ha…

Cole’s work makes an art—and a necessary virtue—of close looking. Across his fiction, photography, and criticism, he combines forensic rigor with a flâneur’s faith in style and sensibility, aligning aestheticism and ethical vigilance. “Open City” (2011), his début novel, won acclaim for its portrayal of post-9/11 New York, whose buried histories of violence and displacement resurface in the course of a medical student’s wanderings. In Cole’s essays, tranquil Vermeers reveal traces of empire—silv…

How a Literary Scandal Inspired a Mischievous New African Novel

Maya Binyam’s sphinxlike début, about an exile returning home, punctures the demands we make of immigrants and their stories.

A visionary novelist and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life, he’s taken American letters to uncharted realms.

The members of ADG7, a shamanic folk band, explain how they recovered after an airline lost their costumes and all their instruments.