If there’s one thing that people the world over know about Americans, it is that we are a striving, hardworking, and ambitious bunch. So why shouldn’t an exhibition aiming to trace the entire timeline of American art hold those same traits — and in the cradle of American democracy, no less? “A Nation of…
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A young girl lays her head on a table and drifts off to sleep while a radio plays in the background. During her long rest, she dreamt of being a lively performer. But what young person doesn’t have dreams, you might ask? What young person hasn’t dreamed of being a performer at least once?…
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If there’s one thing that people the world over know about Americans, it is that we are a striving, hardworking, and ambitious bunch. So why shouldn’t an exhibition aiming to trace the entire timeline of American art hold those same traits — and in the cradle of American democracy, no less? “A Nation of…
Keep Reading
A young girl lays her head on a table and drifts off to sleep while a radio plays in the background. During her long rest, she dreamt of being a lively performer. But what young person doesn’t have dreams, you might ask? What young person hasn’t dreamed of being a performer at least once?…
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Marcel Duchamp: the artist who signed a urinal and called it a work of art. Marcel Duchamp: the artist who, while dressed in a suit, played a game of chess with a nude Eve Babitz, the now-famous writer who was a college student at the time that the photograph was shot by photographer Julian…
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Everything is new at the New Museum, it seems. The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)-designed building expansion. The exhibits. The humans. But we’re still working to find answers to questions as old as the Industrial era, especially this one: what does it mean to be human while coming to terms with an array of…
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Americans like to believe that they exist in a world of individualism — that the United States is a paragon of distinctiveness. The Whitney Biennial 2026 argues that this could not be further from the truth. Featuring the work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives — most of whom have never been included in…
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The Philadelphia Art Museum is excited about the shows that it is hosting this year. It also really wants to leave its messy divorce from Sasha Suda, its former leader, in the rearview mirror and focus on the stellar art for which it is known. This much was evident in a recent interview that Daniel H.…
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Jump To: Fashion + Technology Critiques of Fashion Cultural Questions Reviews Philadelphia Art, Culture, & Design Sustainability Fashion History + Theory We’re coming up on our fifth birthday here at Manic Metallic (on 1/1/2026), and to say that I am in awe is an understatement for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that the odds are generally pretty low…
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Surrealism might have turned 100 last year, but the art movement’s impact is still being celebrated at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Part of a five-stop tour across the United States and Europe, Philadelphia is the only US city in which the Surrealist retrospective can be viewed. The first exhibition, shown at the Musées Royaux…
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This exhibit is “not a surrealist show, per se”. Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum, was sure to hammer home this point in yesterday’s press preview of “Sixties Surreal”, the museum’s latest showing. The exhibit, surveying American art from 1958-1972, dispenses with the notion that American art was solely…
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Man Ray, the multidisciplinary artist whose name is closely associated with the Dada and Surrealist artistic movements, finally gets his due at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show, which primarily focuses on Ray’s work from the 1910s and 1920s, is the first solo exhibition that the museum has dedicated exclusively…
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