Category: Written Word

Contemporary Native American artists, plus a century of Surrealism

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Above: Detail of Martine Gutierrez’ “Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67,” from Indigenous Woman, 2018.

Work by nine contemporary indigenous artists was assembled for “Native America: In Translation,” curated by artist Wendy Red Star and displayed at the Blanton Museum of Art.

No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.”

Martine Gutierrez referring to her 2018 art magazine, Indigenous Women, Curator notes

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2024: More than 16,000 pages in 49 novels

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With a talent for losing myself in a novel accompanied by absolutely no capabilities for recalling the name of the author or title, I love using Goodreads to record those for me. The website also tidily bundles your reads up at the end of the year. This look back reminded me that the first book I completed this past year was also both the longest, with 736 pages, and among my favorites – The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.

Other books that that rang five-star for me for varying reasons were: Peace Like a River by Leif Unger; The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff; Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park; The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng; Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov; The Turtle House by Amanda Churchill; The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez; Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia; Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez; My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You I’m Sorry by Fredrik Backman; Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin; All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker; and Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang.

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Postcard from London, England: Globe-spanning collection ignites imagination

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A vintage postage stamp featuring a profile of a queen, with a cancellation mark and the denomination of one penny visible.

Above: “Tippoo’s Tiger,” Tipu Sultan’s automaton seized from Seringapatam, Mysore, South India, by the East India Company in 1799, eventually ending up displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

It’s a giant mechanical tiger… and I just was so enchanted by it. Because I’d seen British propaganda – you know, cartoons and ethnographic representations of Indians – but I’d never seen Indian art depicting the colonizer or the English…. I think Tipu Sultan, who commissioned it… was so contemptuous of the British and so determined to drive them out of India…. This was a gift to his sons, who had been taken hostage by the British.”

Tania James, author of the novel Loot, interviewed in 2023 by Ari Shapiro for All Things Considered on NPR

By chance, I had recently read Tania James’ Loot when we visited Victoria & Albert Museum last year. Spying the 18th-century automaton tiger one grasps how it sent the author’s imagination flying back into history to investigate the tiger’s origins. The soldier-mauling tiger serves as a mighty symbol of conquered nations’ contempt for their colonizers.

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