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…
Keep Reading
The Studio Museum in Harlem cuts an imposing figure on bustling W. 125th St, and its design stands out distinctly from that of its surroundings. But yet, it manages to fit in. And that contextual friction is what makes it interesting. The Adjaye Associates-designed Studio Museum — completed in partnership with New York-based architecture…
Keep Reading
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…
Keep Reading
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…
Keep Reading
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.…
Keep Reading
Almost four months after the opening of Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens to the general public, you can still observe the excitement and curiosity from patrons about the much-hyped artistic space (the institution prefers to not be called a museum). It lives up to the high praise that it has received. Philadelphians have been anticipating the…
Keep Reading
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…
Keep Reading
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…
Keep Reading
Our latest guest on The Manic Metallic Podcast is Kanyinsola Onalaja, the founder and creative director of womenswear brand Onalaja. Kanyinsola’s designs are painstakingly embroidered and embellished, and I had to have her on the show as soon as I got a look at her work. Our talk was filled with priceless fashion and…
Keep Reading
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…
Keep Reading