Arts & Culture
Maxo Vanka’s Radical Gaze
If a focus on workers tied Vanka with New Deal artists, he diverged by drawing on Catholic spirituality and forcefully critiquing capitalism.
St. Louis Brick by Brick
To understand the history of St. Louis’s bricks is to unearth systems of power, economy, dispossession, decline, and manifest destiny; the storybook decorative brickwork we see today becomes a tale as complex—and as sinister—as American history itself.
Unlocking the Gateway to the West
My city has also not been particularly adept at acknowledging its sins, past or present, let alone attempting to atone for them.
A Love Supreme
Artists and activists continue to organize as Keith LaMar’s November execution date draws near.
Reweaving the Stories of Our Public Art
How does public art limit (or extend) what we can know about the past, present, or future? How can art support us in telling a new story, a shared story about who we are?
The Secrets of a “Homeless Influencer”
Huck Finn had his river, Kerouac his road, Ishmael his sea. Sham has his abandoned buildings. All 21 of them. Eighteen abandoned, two under construction, one still operational. Ten cities. Thirty-five hours of exploration.
Color Bursts – The Utopian Art of Avery Williamson
Williamson struggled with processing the emotional weight of living in what seemed like relentlessly unprecedented times. "At the time, I was thinking about them as... a place to capture competing, strong emotions."
A Pink Apocalypse in Elizabeth, PA
Experiencing Danielle Mužina’s paintings at MadKat beside the river and the train tracks in Elizabeth was one of the first times I felt women were the subject of the sentence.
New York, Los Angeles, Columbus?
How art can grow from Midwestern roots.
Unbreakable: Glass in the Rust Belt
What’s left of domestic glass manufacturing in the U.S. remains concentrated in the Rust Belt–eight of the industry’s top ten employers are in Pennsylvania, New York, and the Midwest. But studio glassblowing is adding relevance to a material long forgotten by many communities shaped by it. Today, the Rust Belt is home to three of the United States’ top five hubs for glass studios.
Midwest Arts and Culture
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