Veronica Esposito

2 weeks ago | asianamericans.einnews.com | Veronica Esposito

Chinoiserie – the European practice of imitating Chinese aesthetics – flourished throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, touching areas ranging from home decor to gardens, architecture and even the literary arts. The Met’s fascinating new exhibit, Monstrous Beauty, takes an innovative look at the practice by showing the significant role it played in shaping modern womanhood, and offering compelling arguments about how it can revise our ideas of women and femininity.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Veronica Esposito

The California artist Dashiell Manley had been at work for over a year on the paintings he was to exhibit at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s elegant new show California Is Somewhere Else when fate intervened. In early January, he set the works to dry in his studio in Altadena – and two days later nearby Eaton Canyon was engulfed in flames, part of recent California wildfires. “My sense of security was shattered around 11pm on January 7th,” Manley told me via video interview.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Veronica Esposito

Thirteen years after his death from an overdose of alcohol and valium, the American painter Thomas Kinkade’s brand lives on. The original Thomas Kinkade store in Carmel, California, still operates, and the official Kinkade Instagram account has a tidy, if modest, 67,000 followers. A recent partnership with Disney features, among other things, a 16-month calendar showing some of the Disney empire’s best-known faces in fantastical landscapes.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Veronica Esposito

In the 1980s, while the Aids pandemic ravaged the LGBTQ+ population of the United States, then president Ronald Reagan failed to help. He didn’t even acknowledge the illness existed until 1985, four years into the outbreak, and research has shown that Reagan’s government spent four times as much researching cures for Legionnaire’s disease than HIV (in spite of the former having an infection and death rate that was dwarfed by Aids).

1 month ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Veronica Esposito

What is lost when a language dies? Our columnist considers the loss of languages across time and wonders what it would look like to re-Babel the world. How many languages have ever existed? It’s the kind of question that smacks of Borges’s unforgettable short story “The Library of Babel,” which imagines a library so vast in its exhaustion of language, form, content, and cognition as to be a universe in itself.