Charis Caputo
The June Leaf sculpture depicted on this issue’s cover, Shooting from the Heart (1980), lends its title to the Leaf retrospective on view at NYU’s Grey Art Museum through December 13. Photographed here is the artist’s hand by Leaf’s third husband, the Swiss American photographer and documentarian Robert Frank, the
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2026
- The Coherence of Experience
Mercedes Matter, Untitled (Main Landscape), c. 1957, oil on board, 16 × 20 in., Estate of Mercedes Matter, courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery, New York. “A young person studying art today steps into a particularly confusing situation,” wrote Mercedes Matter in 1963. “The extraordinary kaleidoscope of events of the twentieth
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2026
- The Matter of the Patter
Courtesy of the Criterion Channel. Joan Micklin Silver’s romantic comedy Crossing Delancey (1988) opens in a dimly lit bookstore on the Upper East Side. “They want to pull us down and make something clean and tall and obscenely profitable arise out of our ashes,” the bookstore’s owner tells a group
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 3
SUMMER 2025
- Jesus Christ!
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” So wrote David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A founder of empiricism, Hume argued that miracles are extremely unlikely since, by definition, they subvert our sensory understanding of the world. “It is a miracle, that a dead
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 3
SUMMER 2025
- Interview
JinJin Xu. What Would You Hear If You Could? #8: Against This Earth, We Knock. Site-specific installation. Old pots (collected in JiangYong), coal ashes (collected in JiangYong), resin, mechanical installation, 2024. Photo courtesy of How Art Museum. Since 2017 JinJin Xu’s head has been full of voices. What the voices
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 2
WINTER 2025
Front Cover: Bayan Kiwan. Lesser Legible Love, 2023. Oil on canvas draped in tulle; 44 × 35.8 in. I grew up in many different places, so belonging was always fraught,” says Bayan Kiwan. She hands me a bottle of coconut water. A weak but hopeful December light pours through the
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024
- Crit
Old Westbury Gardens, Smoggy Afternoon, by the author. The biggest book I own is the Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition. It’s all the plays, annotated: 3,600 pages. Lately I’ve used it to prop up my computer, to enable a more flattering angle on Zoom calls. In the fall of 2020, I
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024
Volume 3: Issue 4 Winter 2026 Select articles available free below On the cover: June’s Hand and Sculpture, Mabou, c, 1980, by Robert Frank Contents DEPARTMENTS REVIEWS
Donna the chimp. Photo by Victoria Horner. Donna is a biologically female chimpanzee who exhibits many traits associated with her male counterparts; she likes to wrestle, walks with a “swagger,” and can erect her body hair. In Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, Frans de Waal describes Donna
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 4
FALL 2022
On the cover: “Audre” Elise Peterson’s digital collages are casually electrifying. “Audre,” on the cover, evokes Lorde’s distinct feminism by juxtaposing cozy intimacy and radical commitments. The last page of LIBER features Grace Jones circa 1985 perfectly balanced within Matisse’s La Danse (1909), effortlessly central. A writer, children’s book illustrator,
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 1
MARCH/APRIL 2022