Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists' engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world's fairs...

What do we learn by making art? What do we discover by discussing our art with other people? These are the questions at the heart of "No New Kind of Duck", which documents an exchange between Jan Verwoert and artists, critics, and other researchers a...

Issue 42 of "Afterall" addresses the crisis of representation in contemporary art through the work of Pierre Huyghe and Tania Bruguera, reflecting on how they each intervene into biological and political systems. We also put a spotlight on the contri...

On September 25, 1890, the Mormon prophet Wilford Woodruff publicly instructed his followers to abandon polygamy. In doing so, he initiated a process that would fundamentally alter the Latter-day Saints and their faith. Trading the most integral elem...

"Beyond Words" accompanies a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University's Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area instituti...

Bright and bold and found everywhere in fin-de-siecle Paris, the poster was a brilliant fusion of art and commerce. New printing methods made it possible to distribute and post vivid full-color prints, spurring both artists and advertisers to take ad...

Cuban painter Rafael Soriano (1920-2015) was an acclaimed master of geometric abstraction and a global figure in the twentieth-century art world – his work resonated with such international artists of Latin American origin as Roberto Matta, Rufino Ta...

In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: "Contemporary Black Artists in America", at the Whi...

Even as the media environment has changed dramatically in recent years, one thing at least remains true: photographs are everywhere. From professional news photos to smartphone selfies, images have become part of the fabric of modern life. And that m...

In 1975, German readers were introduced to the "Rheinlandschaften", a collection of stunning images of the Rhineland captured in the first half of the twentieth century by photographer August Sander (1876-1964). This fresh edition, now in English, br...