I’m Robin, Editor of Misstropolis.
I hope this site brings you some joy and some knowledge (or at least a nice distraction) during this surreal, enlightening and historic time.
I like to write about art, style and purpose. If you have ideas for stories or would like to contribute, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading!
Misstropolis
Spirit & Style, Inside & Out
In her cheerful, unassuming studio in Somerville, MA, Zainab Sumu is fashioning a bridge to Africa. The artist/designer has been working on it for years, creating a multidisciplinary body of work that honors and reimagines various artistic traditions of west and north Africa with all the color, ingenuity and music the region inspires.
Monuments and memorials stand at the center of our country’s contemporary culture wars. A city’s public art says a lot about what that city and that country stand for. In response, some of the most significant artists of our time are creating new public work that challenges, counters and responds to politically charged monuments and memorials. Their questions are cast in bronze and carved in stone: who gets to be memorialized? Who holds the power to inscribe public space?
It seems spring is here at last. Let the season opener (Red Sox and otherwise) inspire you to get out and explore something new. Here are a few exhibition and reading selections to help you embrace the best of Boston and beyond.
Following a three month leave from Misstropolis to work on my book, I’m happy to be back. But in the time I’ve been away, the news has descended even deeper into depths of despair. Again and again, art gives me the courage to carry hope into the next day. Two things inspired this piece: Hank Willis Thomas’ instantly iconic Boston monument to Dr. Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King “The Embrace,” and the CDC report on mental health in the US, which found that suicide rates rose 5% for people between 25-44. My message? Embrace hope despite everything.
It’s that time of year again. Welcome to the holidays! This year, do this first: give all your joy away, and we promise, you’ll get it back with interest. Someone is still wearing the smile you gave them last year. You’re entitled to the big, exploding-heart warmth that spreads through you when you give a special, selfless, carefully considered gift. Allow yourself that feeling. Make every gift count.
Boston’s Women’s Lunch Place has been serving hot nutritious meals, comprehensive health care and dignity to homeless women for forty years. Their just-released holiday cards feature the original art of a former client with alll proceeds benefiting their multidimensional programming. Can your holiday cards do that?
The latest exhibition celebrating the enduring legacy of designer Elsa Schiaparelli draws provocative connections between art and fashion, imagination and rebellion, and past and present, leaving the indelible impression that while much has changed since the years between the two world wars, much more has not.
This week I had a birthday. It happens to the best of us. 53 is so inconsequential, I’m embarrassed to even mention it. But despite not wanting to give it too much thought, I do still have a couple birthday wishes. Nothing crazy, just a few things that popped into my head when I woke up.
These are my birthday wishes: anti-gravity seat cushions, planet saving inventions from Elon Musk, an end to school shootings, social media influencer transparency, healthy school lunches for all American kids and mammography machines that don't bruise. Is that too much to ask?
The 59th Venice Biennale assembles artists from all over the world to address the greatest concerns of our age. Under the shadow of the climate crisis, weaponized communication technology and the war in Ukraine, women artists and curators dominated, addressing contemporary issues of representation, history, labor, dreams and our responsibility to the planet and each other.
Multi million dollar art sales at Christies, collaborations with musicians like Snoop Dogg and Madonna, collections of GOAT athletes like Tom Brady, and ongoing crowdsourced fundraising for Ukraine's military defense prove at last that NFTs are serious business.
Ukrainian artists are using their work and platforms to defy Putin’s attempt to destroy their homeland, seize their country and erase their culture.
On every front, astounding courage. Now the upcoming Venice Biennale has become a meaningful stage on which to exhibit the immense solidarity, courage and pride of the Ukrainian people, as a small but mighty team transports a treasured sculpture to Venice, against impossible odds.
Almost seventeen years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, causing almost 1,800 deaths and over a billion dollars in damages, the impact is still evident. Add a global pandemic, a racial reckoning and a tumultuous political climate and New Orleans becomes a national site of change, creativity and invention. Prospect New Orleans, the Art Triennial which debuted in 2008 in response to Hurricane Katrina, seeks to address the racial, political, ideological and historical issues surfaced by the devastation and its aftermath. This year, after a year’s hiatus due to Covid-19, Prospect was back for its fifth iteration, titled Yesterday we said tomorrow.
Happy Day 1 of 2022. It’s a great day to reflect on the art that helped carry me through this tumultuous past year, art that cracked my head open and filled it with new ideas and new lenses through which to view our world. Enjoy this brief tour of my year in art pictures. I look forward to sharing more ideas, beauty and creativity with you in the year ahead!
Warning: This is not a guide with “something for everyone.” This is a guide to help you find the right thing for the people you care about most. After all not everyone gets a present, just the ones who have been very, very good.
Sand T Kalloch utilizes expressive materials, a disciplined vocabulary of line, point, surface and color and repetitive motion to create her mesmerizing, energetic canvases. But her greatest resource of all might be the element of surprise - that and her willingness to embrace it.
From Tel Aviv to New York, Bucharest to Rotterdam, a cadre of rockstar, multi-hyphenate artists are working in the space between fine art and interior design, creating sculptural lighting inspired by nature. Abstract yet familiar, technically advanced yet always handcrafted, the work of these female artists bring the joys of natural light inside.
In her huge body of work, Walker confronts the way culturally constructed myths deliberately whitewash historical truths and reframe events to benefit existing power structures. She shocks, prods, explodes, confronts and challenges.
Kara Walker’s work helps me see history as a swirling, unfurling, voracious cacophony rather than one long, drawn out note.
“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.” So said Douglas Adams in the 80’s cult classic, Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Misstropolis contributor Jim Baldwin has a thing for sunrise. Channeling Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide, Jim shares his thoughts and stunning images of sunrise through the seasons. And lucky us, we look, holding our breath.
Sculptor Karen LaMonte gives shape and weight to subjects as amorphous as female identity and stratospheric phenomenon. With her cloud sculptures cast in marble and iron, she brings the consequential weight of climate change down to earth with a unique, material honesty.
But manifesting the weather is not the most complicated thing the Prague-based, multidisciplinary artist has done. She did something even more complex during COVID, which she hopes will be a model other artists can follow. She made her international artistic practice carbon negative.
Happy Earth Day, 2021.
At the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Eva LeWitt’s Untitled (Mesh Circles)’ bold simplicity, grand scale and sultry, unexpected colors announce to the city that beauty is back and everyone is welcome.
