Midtown got a makeover on Wednesday, and thank the lord it did! Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian has a dispatch from the first iteration of “reigning diva of the L train” Amygdala’s joyous six-person drag show Pleasure Dome: Continuum, “a vibe manifesto for a city that is constantly shattering the old to make way for the new,” all the more urgent in the context of right-wing attacks on drag and queer creativity.
Meanwhile, French students are fighting their own political battle as they enter the third week of protests against underfunding, poor conditions, and staff shortages across the national education system. Staff Writer Anna Lee and Senior Editor Valentina Di Liscia highlight some of the defining images and photojournalism capturing the spirit of the movement.
Also today, something wicked this way comes … we’re less than three weeks away from our second annual Hyperallergic Halloween Party and Costume Competition! Reserve your spot for a night of all things spooky and surreal on October 28 at Oberon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and join our membership program to get $20 off your ticket.
—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor
The Ritual Joy of Queer Performance Refuses to Give Up
Mamdani’s New York is anything but a drag, as even the performance queens are taking their work to the next level in the commie corridor-inflected, sensorial extravaganza called Pleasure Dome: Continuum at SoMad. Brooklyn drag has always been known for its conceptual girth, but now Amygdala, the reigning diva of the L train, has hatched a Manhattan variety show at the Madison Square Park-adjacent multimedia art space, one that takes advantage of the strange, narrow room by distributing performances around it so there are no bad seats. | Hrag Vartanian
Sarah Sze: Images in Translation at the Yale University Art Gallery
Step into Sarah Sze’s world, where painting and sculpture collide with photography, printmaking, video, and installation. This immersive exhibition pulls viewers into the mind’s eye of the artist and her processes of image making, inviting you to consider the fleeting nature of imagery and art making in our media-saturated society.
News
- See 15 defining photos from the student protests in France.
- Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland proposes a bill calling on the Smithsonian to preserve items related to Trump’s “propagandistic assault on American history.”
- The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT) wins this year’s European Museum Academy Art Museum Award for social impact.
- Mary Deleary is named director of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Boston Public Art Triennial’s curatorial team, Kinosaito fall artist residents, Mariah Carey’s “Last Supper” selfie, and more in this week’s Art Movements.
Medical Imaging and Art Meet in the Exhibition “Overexposed”
The concurrent emergence of cinema and X-ray technology radically transformed how we see and understand the human body.
From Our Critics
I Wanted a Different Betty Parsons Exhibition
It might have made a more fascinating exhibition to explore her balancing act as a gallerist, but this show focuses on her less interesting art. | Seph Rodney
Frank Gillette’s Anthropic Blues
Elegiac, urgent, and infinitesimal, the videos and Polaroids in “Spectra Obscura” express distinct sorts of disappearance, decay, and fleeting natural phenomena. | Anthony Hawley
Hyper Links
- The UK will soon replace images of several historical figures on its banknotes with puffins, hedgehogs, and bumblebees. Take that, Winston Churchill!
- A glimpse into the prodigious work of Canadian author Anne Carson, who, in case you missed it, just won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature.
- Scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has some thoughts about the Democratic Party’s (perhaps predictable) backlash against leftist movements and so-called “Woke 1.0.”
A Hyperallergic Halloween
Join us on October 28 in Brooklyn, NY, for an evening of spooky cocktails, devilish delights, an art-themed costume contest, and more.
From the Archive
Mary Cassatt Was Forever an American in Paris
In a new book, scholar Ruth E. Iskin emphasizes Cassatt as a distinctly transatlantic artist whose identification with the US and France were deeply entwined. | Sophia Stewart
