Recognition as a visual artist—or, as he prefers, “a maker of things”—came late to Stanley Greaves. Until 1994 he was little known outside Guyana, where he was born in 1934, and Barbados, where he moved to live in 1987.

The controversy over Santiago Sierra’s installations, in which hired laborers perform meaningless tasks, has gained in intensity. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles enjoys a similar notoriety: she finds tools for commentary on social unrest in the morgue.

Reading Dr. Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (New Beacon Books, 1988) is a transformative experience that unchains both truths and memories and moves you to explore what she calls the “half that’s not been told.” 

Far from the magic realism of conventional Latin American narrative, Jorge Volpi’s novel In Search of Klingsor ( En busca de Klingsor; Seix Barral, 1999) relates a historical fiction set in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and in postwar Germany under the Allied occupation. 

Jesús Tenreiro-Degwitz and I “spoke” via email from fall 2001 to late summer 2002. I have known Jesús most of my life; we became close in 1979 when we and 15 other architects founded the Instituto de Architectura Urbana (IAU) in Caracas.

Nilo Cruz and I recently found an hour to sit down with a tape recorder in my office at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

I had probably heard them on the radio. They were a popular band, after all. I know I had heard them perform in the huge cement-floored auditorium of my high school. 

It is hard to admit to the subject of an interview—someone you have long admired for her righteousness and nobility, someone whose art has left you feeling a sense of appreciation for the dignity of artists who are socially and politically engaged—that your most primal connection to her is physical. 

Si and his mother had been in Hue for three days and the heat was growing more oppressive by the hour. 

Was me mudda, me gran’mudda, me sisters and me in the house. In Telescope. Claudette, Letitia and Marian—the three’a them, that’s the sisters.

He was set to leave that evening on a packet boat that had arrived the night before from Cartagena via Port of Spain. Officially, he’d only been recalled, but a secret letter brought him wind of circulated gossip—they were going to defrock him in New York.

This novel is based on events that occurred in the recent past in Cuba. 

On a recent trip to Cuba I visited the studio of photographer and filmmaker Juan Carlos Alom in the small beach village of Cojimar, outside Havana.

Race, representation, sexuality, migration, and belonging are recurring themes in the work of video maker Richard Fung.

The first time I looked at the work of Cuban-born artist Zilia Sánchez I was struck by how simultaneously assertive and retiring her massive shaped canvases are.

Jan Hendrix is a Dutch artist who has lived and worked in Mexico City since 1979.