From June 1942 until its dissolution in 1945, the Office of War Information (OWI) generated public support for World War II, ...

In the end, it almost seems like it was always meant to be this way. Khaled Sabsabi sat quietly beside his friend Michael ...

Last November I spotted an unusually mundane poster at Printed Matter, the nonprofit bookseller that once served as the distribution arm of New York’s Conceptual art scene. The print, designed by ...

1. Writing is a way of loving. To love is to give life, continuity. This is a story about lives that were not meant to go on. But they did go on. Soon after artist Gabrielle Goliath was informed that ...

So many books have been written on the art and music of New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s that one imagines the texts on the much-romanticized period, stacked end to end, could reach the ...

Margo Jefferson is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She has previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other ...

“I don’t ever want to live in one place again,” Paul Thek declares in a letter to Peter Hujar in 1968, “too many pretty places in the world.” Both Paul and Peter are deeply New York artists; that’s ...

Between 1973 and 1978, Lynn Hershman Leeson hired photographers to document the life of her alter ego, Roberta Breitmore. Dressed in a glossy blond wig, white blouse, and polka-dot skirt, Hershman ...

Systems call to mind the grandiose, sweeping, and entrenched, for better or worse. Systems of belief, systems theory, the prison system … By comparison, Nancy Holt’s Systems Works, a body of ...

Contemporary histories of Los Angeles seem to come in two main forms. The first, as exemplified by the indispensable work of the writer Mike Davis, deals with the existential problem of the city ...

I got lost several times on my way to Casa Susanna, the exhibition I had set out to write about. It was a sticky Friday night in July—“date night” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the Met ...

This is the first of two reflections Momus published on the occasion of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, on view at Dia Beacon through 2027. Find the second, by Lisa Hsiao Chen, here. “I wanted to ...