An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This long-awaited and essential volume collects writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose canonical paintings, neons and installations have been delivering a cutting examination of race, history, sexuality and culture in America since his emergence in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, the artist has routinely utilized writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the art world and culture writ large. Ligon began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili and Lorna Simpson, as well as with artists who came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons and Andy Warhol. Interweaving a singular voice and a magical knack for storytelling with an astute view of art history and broader cultural shifts, this collection cements Ligon's status as one of the great chroniclers of our time. Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960. He began as an abstract painter but shifted to text-based works which often incorporate quotes from Black authors. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.

Now, for the first time, in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (Harper, 2023) Dr. Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives.

An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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'Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (MIT Press, 2022)' by Hannah Star Rogers

When I sat down with Hannah Star Rogers to discuss her new book Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge, I found myself nodding along to a refreshingly obvious yet somehow radical proposition: why do we insist on keeping art and science in separate corners? Rogers makes a compelling case that this artificial boundary isn't just limiting our understanding of both fields, it's actively distorting how we think about knowledge itself.

What struck me most during our conversation was Rogers' articulation of Art-STS (ASTS) as an emerging field that refuses to play by the old rules os separation and siloed study. The field, and Rogers, recognizes that both artists and scientists are engaged in the same fundamental project - making sense of the world through experimentation, observation, and yes, imagination. When we acknowledge this shared enterprise, the implications ripple outward. Who gets to produce legitimate knowledge? Whose methods count as valid? These questions matter because they shape everything from funding decisions to educational curricula to which voices we trust in public discourse.

Rogers doesn't just theorize about these connections; she shows us what happens when we take them seriously. The experimental collaborations she documents reveal knowledge production as a deeply social, often messy, always political process. This isn't a bug in the system, it's the system itself. And maybe, just maybe, admitting that is the first step toward building more honest and inclusive ways of understanding our world.

Notes:

Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies

Picturing the Invisible

Science Communication as a Boundary Space: An Interactive Installation about the Social Responsibility of Science

Gaïa Global Circus: A Climate Tragicomedy

Shot on LiDAR, a Short Film Examines the Contradictions of Urban Surveillance

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As a Jewish and openly gay artist, Cagli became the target of virulent attacks, especially after Italy promulgated its racial laws in 1938. In response to these hostile conditions, Cagli chose to leave his homeland and seek refuge in the United States. In America, he became an influential figure within the New York émigré artistic scene. He found camaraderie among the Neo-romantic milieu centered around the Julian Levy Gallery and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Cagli actively participated in the environment of anti-Breton surrealists of View magazine and became a part of a foundational moment in gay culture in New York, collaborating with other artists working for the Ballet Society and Harper's Bazaar, and exhibiting at Alexander Iolas's gallery. Throughout his ten-year stay in America, Cagli continued to produce and exhibit drawings, a medium that allowed him to interrogate and critique fascist rhetoric.

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Jiří Anger is a scholar, archivist, and videographic critic devoted, as he says in this interview, to "making weird shapes shine." In this episode of New Books in Film, Anger sits down with Alix Beeston to discuss his award-winning book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. 

Anger's book is an experiment in theorizing film "from below," from the perspective of moving-image objects themselves. Its revelatory readings of single frames from the digitized first Czech films by Jan Kríženecký challenge what we think we know about film materials, histories, and spectatorship. These early film objects are defined and deformed by scratches, stains, tears, and shakes that Anger takes seriously as part of an "accidental aesthetics" which reveals the creative potential of material traces and processes — beyond their shaping through human intention.

How does doing film theory from below complicate our understandings of creativity and agency? What forms of scholarly or artistic interventions into film materials does it prompt? What are the ethics of "touching" or manipulating archival objects for the sake of restoration, dissemination, or interpretation? Reflecting on both his written scholarship and videographic practice, Jiří offers thoughtful answers to these and other vexing questions for all who seek to reimagine film history and theory through the archive's preponderance of idiosyncratic forms, disruptive materials, and weird shapes.

Towards a Film Theory from Below is out now with Bloomsbury Academic. Anger builds on the work of the book in A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds, a new videographic essay coproduced with Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Žák.

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On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperCollins India.

As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan was enthralled by her father’s stories about how their ancestors had made the ancient rock-cut cave temples at Ellora. Recalling those stories as an adult, she was inspired to learn more about the caves, especially the Buddhist worship hall known as the “Vishwakarma cave.” Immersing herself in family history, oral traditions, and works by archaeologists, art historians, scholars of Buddhism, Indologists, and Sanskritists, in Cave of my Ancestors Narayan set out to answer the question of how this cave came to be venerated as the home of Vishwakarma, the god of making in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Part scholarship, part detective story, and memoir, Narayan’s book leads readers through centuries of history, offering a sensitive meditation on devotion, wonder, and all that connects us to place, family, the past, and the divine.

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Grant Us Eyes is a book-length close reading of Bloodborne by literary critic Nathan Wainstein (LA Review of Books, Cartridge Lit, American Book Review). Grant Us Eyes situates the game’s oft-discussed difficulty in relation to a much longer tradition of difficult art – surrealist painting, the modernist novel, etc. Wainstein probes the difficulty of Bloodborne’s fragmented narrative, the difficulty of its graphical and aural glitches, the difficulty of the philosophical problems it poses, and the difficulty of performing close analysis itself within a medium that still doesn’t have established, agreed-upon methods of interpretation in the way literature and film do.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.
Professor Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt (Viking, 2025) offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely.

Find Professor Weathersby at his website, where you can order In Open Contempt, check out his other writings, and attend upcoming events.

Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Professor Weathersby continue their conversation.

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hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University and the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Art, Culture and Global Relations, examines the history of cultural relations between Canada, the USA and Mexico at the turn of the twenty-first century. The book considers how North America was conceptualised by cultural practices such as art and video, as well as how the arts engaged and responded to free trade agreements in that period. As the world confronts a very different trading and cultural context, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future, as well as the past, of cross-national cultural exchange. The book will also be available open access in 2026

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From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, experimenting with a blend of genres in innovative and unheard-of ways. Not only did his exploratory styles challenge the expectations of what popular music could sound like, but his prolific creative endeavors also shaped how audiences thought about the freedom of artistic expression.

In Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), Bradley Morgan casts the artist as an often-misunderstood figure who critiqued the actions of religious and political groups promoting a predominantly white, Christian vision of the United States. A controversial and provocative satirist, often criticized for the shocking subject matter of his songs, Zappa provided social commentary throughout his career that spoke truth to power about the nefarious institutions operating in the lives of everyday Americans. Beginning in the late 1970s, his music frequently addressed the rise of extremist religious influence in American politics, specifically white Christian nationalism.

Despite commercial and critical pressure, Zappa refused to waver in his support for free speech during the era of Reagan and MTV, including his pointed testimony before the U.S. Senate at the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) hearings. Throughout the 1980s, and until his death in 1993, Zappa crafted his art form to advocate for political engagement, the security of individual liberties, and the advancement of education. Music became his platform to convey progressive views promoting the rights of marginalized communities most at risk in a society governed by the principles of what he perceived as Christian radicalism.

Frank Zappa's Americexamines the musician's messaging through song, tracing the means by which Zappa created passionate, at times troubling, art that combats conservativism in its many manifestations. For readers in the twenty-first century, his music and public advocacy demonstrate the need to preserve democracy and the voices that uphold it.

Bradley Morgan, a media arts professional based in Chicago, is the author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships for CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and directs the station's music film festival. Morgan also interviews authors of music and pop culture books for the New Books Network podcast.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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