Julian Lucas

After years of neglect, art institutions are coming around to games. Can they master the controls?

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

How a Literary Scandal Inspired a Mischievous New African Novel

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…

“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…

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…

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.

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

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

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