| “You can’t fire me — I quit”? Kim Sajet, who directed the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery for over a decade, resigned Friday, June 13, weeks after President Trump claimed to have fired her for being a “strong supporter of DEI,” among other things. Staff Reporter Isa Farfan’s got the story. If another hotspot of the Trump administration — the US-Mexico border — could talk, what would it say of all this? Mariana Fernández reviews a book, or “aural essay,” as one of its authors puts it, that captures the landscape’s echoes as they come back to haunt, and to shame. The latter feels deserved, particularly in light of LA’s powerful large museums turning their backs against undocumented immigrants — who make up almost a tenth of the county’s population, Erika Hirugami writes in an opinion piece.
It’s a vision of calamity not unlike that which greeted Seph Rodney at an exhibition by Ali Banisadr at the Katonah Museum. “He paints as if bedlam is elemental, foundational to the world,” Rodney writes. But chaos being the base state of the world doesn’t preclude the forging of order, continuity, and beauty — if you need a little bit of that right now, check out Andrew Nachemson’s feature on preserving the art of Malaysian shadow puppetry. — Lisa Yin Zhang, Associate Editor |
