Sanjeev Khagram
MERIT Summit •

“Pioneer When Others Retreat”: Why Digital Learning Can Be Powerful (Interview)

What if digital learning was not a compromise, but a chance to achieve even more? Dr Sanjeev Khagram shares a radical vision for transforming higher education and vocational learning. He is the Director-General and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University. Dr Khagram explains why educators have reason to be excited about digital learning, and what they need to do to make the most of it.
Susanne Mull
Pastel Journal •

At Home in This Place

Describing her studio, Mull says, “It’s a little bit similar to Adolph Menzel’s Balcony Room.” The 1845 German painting readily evokes the artist’s serene, sun-filled space with tall ceilings and French doors opening to a balcony. Mull’s home—a top-heavy 19th-century building with a Mansard roof—keeps her connected to the past. So, too, does the region of Rheinhessen in which she lives. This area was a stomping ground for the German Romantics...
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Brut Force •

Take Me to the Moon: Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas was the first African-American woman to be featured in the White House art collection, the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the first person to graduate from Howard University with a degree in Fine Art. During her life, she never fit into a certain artistic category, and the problem still stands of whether she belongs on the ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ of twentieth century art.
Ant Rozetsky
Columbia University Press Blog •

St. Petersburg, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

The protagonist of Sisters of the Cross, Marakulin, falls on hard times and leaves his nice apartment in the Burkov House to move into a rented room three floors up. This change in circumstances gives him a new perspective on the city. He is exposed to the city’s noise — “that wearisome sound of iron hitting against stone,” and to black soot that accumulates between his windowpanes. Burkov House’s various faces reveal the strikingly different life-worlds contained within St. Petersburg’s fabric.
Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press Blog •

Propaganda, the Absurd, and the Truth in Andrei Platonov’s Plays

In post-Communist Bulgaria, where I grew up, I often encountered traces of the fallen regime’s language. Houses marked “Exemplary Home” with a special blue plaque. Old newspapers reporting that agricultural brigades had overfulfilled their quotas. An inscription on a monument claiming that our republic needs friendship with the USSR just as every living being needs air and sunlight. The most ridiculous slogans, once posted on factory walls, are now circulated as internet jokes: "Communism is inevitable." "Every jar of compote: a fist in the face of imperialism!"
Andrew Edlin Gallery
Brut Force •

Imagined Spaces at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair

It is the last day of the 2017 Outsider Art Fair. With sixty-two exhibitors, this is the event’s biggest iteration so far. As we wander around the Metropolitan Pavilion, pushed along by the crowds, the exhibitors’ booths reveal their treasures: Domenico Zindato’s rhythmic patterns and Hiroyuki Doi’s circles. M’onma‘s nightmarish clown masks and Gil Batle’s carved eggshells. A brochure for the fair invites us to see our visit as a “road trip” across the United States and beyond.
Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press Blog •

The Conflict between North and South Korea, on an Intimate Scale

The plot unfolds over a few days in Yanji—in a hotel, a couple of restaurants, and on the bank of the Tumen River, which separates North Korea and China. In addition to the two long-lost brothers, we meet a Chinese Korean woman from Yanji who is bitter about the prejudice she experienced in the South; the overly zealous “Mr. Reunification,” who bores his companions with his utopian pronouncements; and a cynical businessman engaged in mysterious trade with the North.
Brut Force •

Drawing Circles: Hiroyuki Doi Wants You to Know That You Can Make Art

Hiroyuki Doi’s first drawing workshop in the United States is held in the Folk Art Museum’s Collections and Education Center, on a narrow industrial street in Long Island City, Queens. The street is lined with factories -- I sense the hum of machinery and the faint smell of acetone. I find the number and ring a bell. I enter a dimly lit space. Quilts by American folk artists hang on the walls. Doi is sitting at the far end of the room in semi-darkness, with his sunglasses on.
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