TOPIC

Visual Art

Painter of Modern Life

The past and the present, the factual and the virtual, the foreign and the personal, are all layered in a New York portrait painted from a D-train dérive.

Community House is There for You

After half a century as a sanctuary for Indigenous people in New York City, the American Indian Community House still seeks a permanent home.

Landscape Orientation

An artist makes her books by walking. Their pages unfold in ways as unusual and idiosyncratic as the city itself.

Street Ballet Opera

An ambitious new opera plumbs the humanity and contemporary relevance of two mythic figures of New York City: Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.

Broom Swept

An artist stalks the storefront ruins of Lower Manhattan, documenting the material traces of real estate's perpetual churn.

Behind the Mask

Two scholars navigate the myths and abstractions attached to marginalized urban neighborhoods, bridging the distance between narratives imposed from outside and residents' experiences and spatial practices.

Circulation Desk

Pattern Recognition

From Manhattan to the banks of the Yangtze River, photographers index both the ordinary and uncanny effects of urbanization.

In the Hudson's Image

For activists, scientists, and designers, images from the river's past hold the key to imagining its future.

Reflections on a Rising Hudson

Two hundred years of environmental change have meant both destruction and conservation of the most interesting river in America.

The Truth About Trees

An artist and a historian talk trees: What they mean, and what it takes to get city-dwellers to see them clearly.