For years Reflective Head, a 21 and a 1/2 foot high bronze and mirror sculpture by Michael Ayrton, attended the entrance courtyard of the corporate headquarters of the S.S. Kresge Company in Troy, Michigan. The sculpture was one of a very few commissions the artist Michael Ayrton took from corporate clients, and it had been unveiled to significant public and critical support in 1972. The work was the largest sculpture he had ever created.

The relationship between the artist and his corporate patron was an unlikely one. Ayrton was an English artist and writer, whose work was best known for its mythic and psychological themes. S.S. Kresge Company was the discount retail empire that later became Kmart.

At the unveiling of the sculpture, Ayrton learned that Kresge Company had renamed the piece, Corporate Head, without his permission.

In The Reflective Head, author W.C. Bamberger explains how this name change affected Ayrton. "In addition to being an accomplished sculptor, painter, and printmaker, Ayrton was a writer, so this dismissive name change must have rankled him both as artist and as someone with a sensitivity for the resonance of words. He would have known full well that viewing the sculpture under the business-oriented name rather than its more complex and human-centered original would change what the viewer sees."

This dismissive attitude towards the sculpture set the tone for its tenuous history with its corporate owner. When Kmart's fortunes began to decline, so did those of Reflective Head. It would take five years' work to save the sculpture and see it relocated in a public park in Troy. Its story offers a lesson in the difficulties of creating public art for corporate clients, whose fortunes (and legacies) are more fleeting than those of art.

Click to purchase on Amazon.

W. C. Bamberger is an author, editor, translator and publisher. He has published essays on artists Trevor Winkfield and Donna Dennis, and composers Mauricio Kagel and Christos Hatzis, among others. His latest translation is Bess Brenck Kalischer's hallucinatory 1922 German Expressionist novel, The Mill. He lives in Michigan.

Subscribe now

In 1935 Duke Ellington composed Reminiscing in Tempo. The piece was a departure for the great jazz composer. Reminiscing in Tempo (RIT) didn't sound like Ellington's popular songs. It was long, clocking in at over twelve minutes. It didn't swing. It was experimental. It wasn't something the white audience at the Cotton Club expected from a Black composer.

RIT posed a creative risk for Ellington. The work was personal. Ellington wrote RIT in response to the death of his mother. In A Beat of His Own musicologist Rebecca Bodenheimer explains how this composition challenged Ellington's creative reputation. She writes, "Nothing of this scope or length had been attempted in jazz before or by a jazz orchestra. It was particularly surprising to jazz aficionados because Ellington’s orchestra was a dance band; and yet, he wrote this longform piece specifically for his musicians."

RIT led the way out of the "jungle music" Ellington was known for and into longer symphonic compositions. Again, Bodenheimer: "In fact, Ellington’s creative deviation was labeled a failure by many critics of the time. The fact that it sparked controversial opinions speaks to the racial politics of music-making in the U.S.—particularly the expectations of what “Black music” should and could sound like, particularly in the 1930s."

Click to purchase on Amazon.

Rebecca Bodenheimer is an Oakland-based freelance writer and cultural critic with a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology. Her writing has been featured in CNN Opinion, Vice, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Billboard, NPR Music, The Ringer, and many other outlets. Rebecca is also the author of Geographies of Cubanidad: Place, Race, and Musical Performance in Contemporary Cuba.

Subscribe now

When writer Noelle Nicholson encounters the painting Blue Monday by Grace Carpenter Hudson she is struck by its subject matter and unusual composition. She is compelled to learn more. A Woman's Work takes readers through the writer's process of discovery and includes interviews with curators at the Grace Hudson Museum and Sun House in Ukiah, California. Blue Monday's story is about Grace Hudson's career and controversial methods, as well as her lifelong appreciation for the Pomo Indians.

As Nicholson writes, "[s]tanding in front of Blue Monday, a story unfolds in my mind that I naively assume to be true: Hudson, a working woman herself, must have identified with the single mother at the center of Blue Monday, another woman supporting her family. But I’ll come to realize I was creating my own romanticized story, that Blue Monday is about much more than a solitary washer woman. It is a record of a people surviving genocide; a lie trying to tell a truth; and an unexpected echo of my own family history."

Click to purchase on Amazon.

Noelle Nicholson is a freelance writer from Washington state. She has worked as a technical writer and book promoter. Her works have appeared in Cricket and ThurstonTalk. In her free time, she critiques local art exhibits and tutors ESL students. She also enjoys playing the guitar and spending time on the coast with family and friends.

Man Ray’s photography made Elizabeth "Lee" Miller’s face and body world famous. Yet one photograph in particular nearly didn’t survive: 1930’s Neck is a haunting view of Miller’s profile craning from the side, neck and face forming one ethereal, phallic column slanted against a void. Miller fished the negative out of the trash moments after it was discarded, and developed it in the same session, employing the bold cropping method she had learned from Man Ray to make a striking final product. Then she informed him that she was claiming it as her own work.

In The Artist's Home Undone writer Joelle Jameson explains that "as we grapple with the question of what to do with the art of men who hurt women, it’s instructive to sit with Le Logis de l'Artiste and its depiction of a literal altar to male genius—a concept that individuals and institutions still fight fiercely to preserve."

Click to purchase on Amazon.

Joelle Jameson is an art critic and poet living in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in ÆQAI, the Houston Press, Salamander, Measure, and numerous other publications. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College.

Subscribe now

On the evening of March 21, 1921, a New York City audience crowded into a downtown theater to see the latest work by Provincetown Players cofounder Susan Glaspell. A United States Marshall was in the audience to make sure the play was unobjectionable. When the curtain rose on Inheritors the audience discovered a distinctly American story of frontier life and democratic ideals. Had the Marshall stayed past the play's first act he would have discovered that it was truly radical, in form, in content, and especially in its treatment of the matter of immigration.

Writer Rob Hardy explains, "Inheritors is the first American play to deal with political issues and events as they affect ordinary American lives."

In An Open House, Hardy tells the fascinating story of this revolutionary play, and asks why it was allowed to fall into obscurity.

Click here to purchase on Amazon.

Rob Hardy is a research associate in Classics at Carleton College and the first Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minnesota. He frequently writes about lesser-known writers. He’s also the author of a collection of poetry, a chapbook, an adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and a commentary on selections from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica.

Subscribe now

Now considered an American icon, Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial marked a radical departure from traditional monumental architecture. In Anti-Monument, writer Catesby Leigh examines Lin's design concept, explaining the controversy it caused and defining the memorial's legacy. Monuments determine our remembrance of the past. And as Leigh writes, "[the] community that denies the presence of its past — that is, the aspects of its past worthy of reverence and emulation — is doomed."

Click to purchase on Amazon.

Catesby Leigh writes about public art and architecture and lives in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, First Things, Modern Age, National Review, the Weekly Standard and other publications. He is a co-founder and past chair of the National Civic Art Society.

Subscribe now

In 1987 an American choreographer working in Europe turned ballet on its head. William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, created for the Paris Opera Ballet and with music by Thom Willems, challenged the company’s classical dancers to move in ways they never had.

As writer Zachary Whittenburg explains, “In less than half an hour, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated decoupled the spatial-geometric tenets of ballet — that the relationships between limbs make certain positions of the body appear ‘classical’ in nature, or not — from the established list of steps with French names in ballet’s centuries-old syllabus. Where five degrees of torsion, or épaulement, once gave a basic classroom shape some cosmopolitan élan, Forsythe pushed those tensions to their theoretical and physical breaking points.” The ballet set a new standard, making classical dance more athletic and sexier than it ever had been.

Click here to purchase on Amazon.

A regular contributor to Dance Magazine, Zachary Whittenburg is Communications and Engagement Director with at Arts Alliance Chicago. He is a member of the executive committee for the Chicago Dance History Project, serves on the artistic advisory council for High Concept Laboratories, ad tweets @trailerpilot about contemporary culture and the performing arts.

Subscribe now

Eight years before he went into hiding author Salman Rushdie was enjoying the critical success of his second published novel, Midnight’s Children. In A Time To Be Born, Joanna Scutts explains that Rushdie's voice, and what it stands for, emerged with this semi-autobiographical work that is set in the early years of India's independence. It was a book that one critic claimed sounded like "a continent finding its voice." Scutts writes that “especially in the Internet Age, when boundaries and affiliations can transcend national borders, we are all Rushdie’s children now."

Click here to purchase on Amazon.

Joanna Scutts was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women's History at the New-York Historical Society and is the author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (Liveright/ W.W. Norton, November 2017).

Subscribe now

When the National Portrait Gallery opened its first queer exhibit, the 2010 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the curators expected controversy. They didn’t expect the controversy would center around an obscure, 11-minute film by the late David Wojnarowicz. A Fire in My Belly would be removed from the exhibition. Writer Hugh Ryan revisits this controversy, interviewing the exhibition curators and examining A Fire in My Belly against Wojnarowicz’s body of work.

According to Ryan, “On the surface, the story of A Fire In My Belly seemed like a fable about the futility of censorship and the hydra-headed nature of resistance. There was just one problem: David Wojnarowicz didn’t exactly make A Fire In My Belly, at least, not the version that was shown at Hide/Seek.”

Click to purchase on Amazon.

Hugh Ryan is the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer  (St. Martin's Press, 2019). Ryan is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar fellowship at the New York Public Library, and a 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature. He is the founding director of The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, a 2016 Curatorial Fellow in Ira Sachs' Queer / Art / Mentorship program, and an advisory board member for QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking.

Subscribe now