Interviews & Essays

Nat and Corrie cover the Forbidden City in Beijing, China in this Art History BB. As the imperial palace and political epicenter of China during the Ming & Qing dynasties, the Forbidden City housed the Emperor, his family, and his concubines. On this episode the babes discuss elements of the Forbidden City, as well as the lives of its inhabitants.

Doug Aitken is blowing things up again, just another day in the career of an artist bent on transcending the confines of galleries and museums.

Featuring aspects of 18th-century visual culture in a self-aware and witty way, the Hulu period drama Harlots plays off of modern understandings of this period’s style in an unconventional way. Taking the known facts into account and riffing off of them, this strategy gives the show a punk feel with sharp commentary.

All four babes unite to discuss the amazing artwork of Ana Mendieta. Born in Cuba, but transported to Iowa as a preteen, Mendieta is known for her performance as well as earth-body works. The babes express their thoughts, feelings and speculation around Mendieta’s art as well as her way-too-short, but fascinating life.

July 20 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission this month, and preparations to celebrate this historic moment are underway across the country. But this anniversary is perhaps felt nowhere more strongly than where much of the action took base—at Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of the Mission Control that launched the famed flight into space.

It’s virtually impossible to give a cohesive assessment of the 58th Venice Biennale: its multiple venues are distributed between the industrial-looking former shipyard space Arsenale, the quaint Giardini with the various national pavilions and the dozens of individual installations scattered all over town. As a result, what tends to stick after a visit is whatever happened to align with an individual’s personal taste—and with so much on view, there is something for everyone.

When the London-based workspace company Second Home was ready to leap across the pond to the U.S., they first set their sights on San Francisco, a move co-founder Sam Aldenton found obligatory at the behest of financial backers. But a family relation who studied architecture at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles convinced him to establish Second Home’s U.S. beachhead in L.A.

Nat and Corrie discuss the Ancient Egyptian sculpture the Seated Scribe.

Photographer Martha Cooper was taking snapshots in the Bronx for the New York Post one day in the early 1980s, when she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. “I can introduce you to a king,” one of the boys she had been photographing proposed. Cooper immediately said yes.