The point of creating forms is to make an idea communicable or to make that idea persistent enough to use, continuously or repeatedly, over time. The use of the form is what gives it meaning. "Usage" includes intentionally experiencing the form whenever that is relevant to a need or desire. Naturally, issues such as which form is "the right one" for the usage are basic here. But what makes a form "right", due to its availability and effectiveness, is the distinctive way that

Richmond Art Center’s 2026 Art of the African Diaspora exhibit. By definition, a diaspora involves movement across space and time. Also, by definition, an event about the art of a diaspora involves people bringing culture across space and time. And in the Richmond Arts Center’s annual event – titled Art of the African Diaspora  – the criteria for participating makes identity a prerequisite consideration of what will appear in the diasporic pathways. But none of the above pred

How a commercial release of a documentary about a historical investigation ruptured the photojournalism community. https://malcolm-ryder.medium.com/shoot-the-messenger-475f18818cee Given the unholy combination of Social Media and AI as top corrosives of truth, it's important to remember that people are more of a threat than either of those. My analysis of the controversy over the documentary The Stringer is a long-form piece in my growing collection of articles about visual

Six separate takes on a controversial new film — not from a film critic but from a photographer who considers various aspects of how we view pictures and the medium. The new documentary The Stringer, released Nov. 28 on Netflix, refutes more than 50 years of celebrating Nick Út’s authorship of the iconic “ Napalm Girl ”  photograph from the coverage of the Vietnam War. Since the film saw its first public showing at Sundance, passions pro and con have been running very high ab

SF MOMA Fall 2025 Source: https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/fortuna-and-the-immortality-garden-machine/ The word conjure   neatly accounts for how a lot of art works. But what is it? I’m confident enough in my education to say that this AI-generated summary of “conjure” stands well for what I mean: To conjure means to produce or create something as if by magic, or to evoke a memory or image. The word's etymology traces back to the Latin verb coniūrāre, meaning "to swear toget

Nine Notes on how Kehinde Wiley makes Black Lives Matter 1. More is More August, 2023 – As of this writing, there is plenty of time left for the de Young Museum’s general audience to make it to the Kehinde Wiley show, An Archaeology of Silence . Much of that audience will be attracted to the show by the celebrity Wiley earned through being the selected artist for the official Presidential portrait of megastar Barack Obama. But that very large painting, with its curious leafy

Project overview Critiquing a specific legacy archetype of maleness, the Not Male Show extends beyond feminism to a more inclusive representation of self-determining identities that are alternative to that archetype. It will simultaneously exhibit an overall group contrast to that legacy and argue against the ambiguous generalization of catch-all categorizations (such as "LGBTQ"), through art works concretely expressing interpretations and experiences that distinguish these r