Weekend

August 7, 2021 • View in browser

Amid the summer doldrums some opportunities to brood on humans and nature: This week John Yau reports on Monica Ong's exploration of motherhood and diaspora identity in her visual poetry devoted to astronomy; Carl Little considers Thalia Field's critique of speciesism offered in her volume of poems titled Personhood.

In his review of a Shayok Mukhopadhyay's environmentally alert installation Waiting for Water, Louis Bury notes "these recent climate-related artistic imaginings aren’t far-fetched apocalyptic fantasies but tweaky versions of the compounding crises — past, present, and future — that our species navigates the way fish do water." Perhaps the question is whether we can learn to survive from nature before we destroy it.

— Albert Mobilio, Weekend Editor

Trevon Latin Finds Joy in Melancholy

Latin’s colorful artworks touch on aspects of queer and Black experience, not in broad strokes, but in exceedingly specific ones. | Megan N. Liberty

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Imagining Our Climate Future

Speculations about climate change by an array of artists feel eerily probable, if not already real. | Louis Bury

Facing Catastrophe With Calm

Joshua Marsh has fashioned a world where a sweet, wise humor in the face of mortality and inescapable change prevails. | John Yau

Humankind’s History of Betraying Animals

Thalia Field's poems collage scientific, historical, and philosophical sources to explore speciesism. | Carl Little

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With Mother Tongue, Camille Henrot Calls for Change

Henrot demonstrates the need to look at the beginning of our very existence to address social and gender inequalities. | Alexandra Sommer

A Poet-Artist Looks to the Stars

Monica Ong is a 21st-century visual poet who extends the reader’s sense of what is possible.| John Yau

Required Reading

This week, the real meaning of “carpe diem,” Kerry James Marshall gets the profile treatment, Andrew Cuomo’s network of protection, James Baldwin’s birthday, and more. | Jasmine Weber

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