In Vermeer’s paintings, the world is much larger than we imagined and yet somehow deep, meaningful, and magical.

Sendak’s illustrations carry weight all on their own for children and adults alike, and this book beautifully captures his prolific career.

Simulation Sketchbook takes as its starting point the reality that digital artists, like all artists, sketch out their work as well.

A documentary trilogy follows the life of Thich Nhat Hanh, who expounded the principles of engaged Buddhism.

Wakaji Matsumoto's photographs provide a glimpse of a world in the midst of transition into the next stage of global capitalism and Westernization.

When it comes to capitalism, to quote the great Cardi B out of context, “It’s gon’ hurt me to hate you, but lovin’ you’s worse.”

Sometimes, exhibitions about identity demand too much of those bearing the identities, expecting them to speak explicitly to their experience.

If there is an object you have ever desired in your life, rest assured that someone in the advertising industry made money convincing you of exactly that.

At the heart of What if the Matriarchy Was Here All Along? is the idea that matriarchy never really died but rather has transformed.

Voice a Wild Dream dismantles the idea that activism is driven by individual charismatic figures; in reality, social change is possible because many hands come together.

Though smaller in size than the artists’ usual works, the works in Modernism in Miniature gain their heft from their big-name creators.

Spell Bound helps readers curious about the craft to both see and understand the wide array of expressions that magic can assume, including in the context of new technologies.

To see Upson's memorial exhibition at Sprüth Magers is to absorb the full intensity of the artist’s explorations of trauma, vulnerability, and abjection.

The recent government threats to TikTok raise questions about the future of the internet, which we once saw as free and democratic. Is that still the case?

The emergence of spiritual circles online in the face of COVID-19 strikes me as the opposite of viral — a place to be still in the face of viral turbulence on the streets and in the air, and viral turbulence on social media and the broader internet.

After the Families Belong Together protests this past weekend, we talk to Greek media scholar Alexandra Boutopoulou on the widely used phrase, "They tried to bury us, they didn't know we were seeds," and its poetic origins.

On the occasion of the publication of Trap Door, the New Museum convened a panel to discuss the realities of transgender artists and cultural workers and their lives in the so-called mainstream.

As anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and isolationist policies sweep a growing number of nations, Sense8 takes us into a microcosm of a world these policies react against.

They’re on top of the world: partying, popular, queer kids with everything going for them. This is not 1960s San Francisco or 1980s New York or today’s internet communities: it’s 1933 in Weimar Berlin.

SAN FRANCISCO — The past year has seen many powerful, violent images.

SAN FRANCISCO — Follow a major social movement today, and unless you can afford to travel onsite, you’re likely to experience it through photos, hashtags, and video uploads. But a movement's record has always had global resonance, distributed through a mix of broadcast and pre-internet forms of citizen media like pamphlets, posters, and zines.

ASPEN, Colorado — Despite its reputation as a resort town for the 1%, the heart of Aspen looks much like a classic Western American town. The new Aspen Art Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban, stands out in this context in both height and design.

SAN FRANCISCO — Anyone who's read Arnold Lobel's iconic Frog and Toad series may wonder: why pick a frog and a toad? And what's the difference between a frog and a toad anyway?

SAN FRANCISCO — At San Francisco's annual Dickens Fair, I learned about the work of Darren Way, whose Dangerous Puppets creations feature fanciful characters and bizarre imagery bordering on the fantastical and grotesque.

SAN FRANCISCO — While we tumble, tweet, and post our remixes of media online in a daily creative dialogue, it helps to remember that the history of creative correspondence extends to well before the internet.

SAN FRANCISCO — The day before the WhatsApp acquisition was announced, I was just using the app. It's one of many mobile messaging platforms I use, along with Viber, Line, and WeChat. I used WhatsApp to chat with friends as far away and diverse as Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Western Europe, and with all the other short-messaging apps, I'm regularly chatting with a good chunk of the world.

Koyanisqaatsi, a debut collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, broke ground in so many ways in the 1980's for exploring film as a poetic, rather than narrative or theatrical expression. Over ten years later, Reggio and Glass have come together to produce Visitors, another moving poem, at once visual and musical, without words or a clear narrative.

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry," Emily Dickinson once wrote.

This past December, Uganda's Parliament passed an Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would extend criminalization of homosexuality to life in prison and up to seven years for advocacy work. Nkoyooyo Brian decided to respond with an anthem for the country's LGBTQ community.

SAN FRANCISCO — According to Cliff Chen, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, if a solar power system were built in the American Southwest it would apparently only need to be 100 miles by 100 miles to provide enough energy to power the entire United States.

The internet is a visual space, where virality comes most frequently to media rich in images, whether videos, animated GIFs or simple memes. Connecting these new forms of media with all the classic ways that human beings have told visual stories is a powerful way to reanimate them, sometimes literally, for the digital age.

Flutter, Massachusetts-based writer Jennie Wood's latest comic series, explores themes of gender and sexuality through science fiction.

What might children's drawings look like in an internet age? Photographer Yoni Lefévre's Grey Power series reimagines children's drawings as photos.

ALBUQUERQUE — As arts communities across the nation work to develop long-term sustainability in the face of the shifting economy, getting people talking together seems like a good first step.

SAN FRANCISCO — In Stereo, an exhibition of new works by Bay Area-artist Chris Fraser at Highlight Gallery, plays with the ways our eyes perceive space.

SAN FRANCISCO — Import/Export, currently on show at the Asia Art Museum, looks at Asia's impact on our everyday lives.

Kung Fu Grandma, a new short documentary by London-based director Jeong-One Park, explores a group of elderly Kenyan women who have studied kung fu to protect themselves from rapists.

On Twitter recently, #NotYourNarrative popped up, a series of hashtag statements largely from persons of color in the United States who wanted to challenge dominant media narratives.

"Octodad: Dadliest Catch" is a new video game coming out early this year that puts the player in the perspective of an octopus masquerading as a human.

Earlier this month, Open Culture pointed to a big move from the British Library: the library is putting a million images into the public domain.

OAKLAND, Calif. — With our data-driven lives, so much of what we do can be seen through the lens of algorithms.

One of the fascinating aspects of studying the history of communications is how often we repeat the same strategies, and telegraph code is a great example of this.

A few years ago, China's traffic jams of epic proportions started to make the news. Traffic on the ring roads in a city like Beijing is on par with, sometimes even worse than, that of Los Angeles's 405 or New York's BQE at rush hour. It seems to be an inevitable part of our lives, as this amazing compilation of traffic jams the world over reveals.

LOS ANGELES — One of the loveliest sites on the web belongs to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, a database of all of UNESCO's World Heritage sites, from famous locales like Australia's Great Barrier Reef to the lesser-known underground river of Puerto-Princesa, Philippines.

Around this time last year, Instagram caused a flurry after attempting to change its terms of service — what the Globe and Mail's Russell Smith called "an apparent move to appropriate and sell every user’s photos." Smith pondered how growing awareness of the public documentation of our private lives will play out.

OAKLAND, Calif. — A few weeks ago, I looked at contemporary African photography thanks to a terrific series from Dynamic Africa, one of my new favorite blogs. A great example of Tumblr's possibilities as a site for curation, it is the work of Funke M., a culture curator and observer based in South Africa and originally from Nigeria.

OAKLAND, Calif. — We've all seen the moment in movies when the hero, villain, or unwitting victim has to stare down the barrel of a gun.

I was recently sent an article about the potential of e-books in developing countries. It's one year old, but with the rise of e-books and the growing popularity of Kindles (including on airplanes taking off and landing), it seemed worth revisiting.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Stare up at the ceiling of any bar or night club that's been around since before indoor smoking was banned and you'll doubtless see traces of smoke on the ceiling. Though a symbol of the ephemeral, smoke leaves lasting marks over time, whether that be buildings or lungs or anything else it comes in contact with.

SAN FRANCISCO — If our first impressions of a city are often framed by the airport, then SFO makes up for its lack of architectural grandeur with its own unique museum and culture.