Interview
The writer on using Chaucer’s Middle English to channel transgressive figures, rethink gender, and experience the pleasures of language.
“To me it was about energy, persistence, optimism, will, desire, and manifestation. I believed that everything I wanted was already in the world and that it was my job to be aware enough to see opportunity when it’s headed my way.”
On directing a film about the Mir space station and viewing the fall of the Soviet Union from above.
The late poet on his artistic influences, leftist politics, and reading to anarcho-punks.
Shapeshifting, cosmological nudes.
The artist discusses his approach to drawing and color.
On deep listening and language as liberation.
Painting that works with politics and abstraction.
The Man Booker finalist on telling a story from the perspective of a spirit and writing to expose historical truths.
Creating a space between humans and machines.
The artist on her meandering research process and spoken narratives.
Sculpture made from shattered dishware.
A look behind the scenes of Akhnaten, Philip Glass’s 1983 opera now playing at the Metropolitan Opera, in which the countertenor plays an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who defied gender conventions.
The writer and musician on queer representation, empathy for our younger selves, and music for our feelings.
Bringing painting into space as an object.
The poet on her reimagined version of Vyasa’s Mahabharata and the human cost of war.
Working with bed boards and found objects.
On writing for the sound of it, scandalous joy, and the seriousness of scatterbrained expression.
On writing about cancer and healing under the looming specter of Berlin’s history.
The sound artist on collecting and hunting for language.
