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1 week ago | 
artnews.com | Rhoda Feng
When Patrick Bringley was 25, his older brother, a brilliant doctoral student, died from cancer. Reeling from the loss, Bringley decided to put his burgeoning career at the New Yorker on hold. A visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother offered an unexpected reprieve: lingering in front of paintings, he found solace in simply being allowed to “dwell in silence.”The experience planted a seed.
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1 week ago | 
newyorker.com | Rhoda Feng
The Maverick’s Museum, by Blake Gopnik (Ecco). Albert C. Barnes was born into poverty in 1872, in Philadelphia, and went on to make a fortune as the inventor of a topical antiseptic and to amass a staggering collection of modern art. Gopnik’s animated biography chronicles Barnes’s lifelong campaign to make art accessible to the working class, a democratizing impulse that found its greatest expression in the Barnes Foundation, which opened in 1925 to display his acquisitions.
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3 weeks ago | 
4columns.org | Rhoda Feng
The Picture of Dorian Gray Rhoda Feng
In Kip Williams’s innovative production of Oscar Wilde’s novel, Sarah Snook takes on all twenty-six of the work’s characters with virtuosic finesse. Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray. © Marc Brenner.
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1 month ago | 
ft.com | Rhoda Feng
In a well-appointed living room in Illinois, a painting of Martin Luther King Jr watches over a gathering of a family that has...
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1 month ago | 
artforum.com | Rhoda Feng
Intergenerational Feminism in Bess Wohl's LiberationSHULAMITH FIRESTONE’S The Dialectic of Sex is many things: an audacious manifesto, a theoretical provocation, a utopian horizon. When I first read it—in a seminar at a women’s liberal arts college—I was made to understand that the radical feminist’s magnum opus advanced several groundbreaking propositions—the kinds that professors handle with tongs, if they handle them at all.
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2 months ago | 
frieze.com | Rhoda Feng
One colour roosts in another in the title of Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). Now, run the first two words together: blacken blues. Black modulates blue, hatching a new hue; several subtle variations ray out from this specific tint. Think of William H. Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1975), which opens with a gregarious list of blue objects and entities.
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2 months ago | 
frieze.com | Rhoda Feng
Do androids dream of their human owners? It’s a question that’s implicitly posed in Will Aronson and Hue Park’s musical Maybe Happy Ending(2016), and one you may find yourself pondering long after seeing this searingly beautiful production. Recently transferred to Broadway after a successful run in Seoul, the show begins as a meet-cute between two retired Helperbots in 2064, but unfolds into a subtle, dusk-lit meditation about loneliness and the ache of impermanence.
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2 months ago | 
theparisreview.org | Rhoda Feng
By Rhoda Feng February 5, 2025 For two weeks at the beginning of January in New York, a cluster of theater festivals—including Under the Radar, Prototype, the Exponential Festival, and PhysFestNYC—stage a confetti cannon’s worth of experimental shows. This year, the first two festivals ended January 19, though some works have been extended into February. Past years have taught me to set modest expectations about intake.
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2 months ago | 
vulture.com | Rhoda Feng
From Schmigadoon!, at the Kennedy Center. The mythical town of Brigadoon manifests for one day every century, but Schmigadoon! — that high-fructose fever dream of a town where life is a mashup of (immersive) mid-century musicals — has rematerialized in less than four years. What , including me, loved about the series was the way it wore its love of classic musicals on its satin cuff, at once reveling in their conventions and gently roasting their outdated sensibilities.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | Rhoda Feng
In Defense of Partisanship, by Julian E. Zelizer (Columbia Global Reports). In this concise treatise, Zelizer argues that the solution to the dysfunction in American politics lies not in third-partyism, bipartisanship, or a strengthened executive branch but, rather, in an improved two-party system.
