The artist Qualeasha Wood can make a computer glitch look mythic. She distorts her likeness freely in her large-scale recycled cotton jacquard tapestries, which are machine- and hand-embroidered and beaded with webcam and iPhone self-portraits, as well as snapshots of memes, early aughts-style desktop screens and other digital ephemera, each pixel represented by a stitch….
Last year, Everett published “James,” his reimagining of the American classic “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told through the voice of Mark Twain’s enslaved Black character Jim. In the strictest sense, “James” employs parody and pastiche, drawing broadly from Twain’s plot and characters but endowing its first-person narrator with the wit and eloquence that his…
There is a flat, amorphous pendant stamped with a faun’s face by Pablo Picasso. A brooch that fuses the forms of a hair comb, watch and a spoon certainly is the work of Salvador Dalí. And Man Ray’s gleaming “Optic Topic” gold face mask would be borderline creepy if it weren’t so impressive. These rarities,…
For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin. Its triple-height vaulted cellars, which Ai, a self-taught architect, renovated himself after leaving his native China in 2015, are now pristine and well-lit, but when he first…