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Dona Nelson stands inches from El Toreador (2023), a massive painting mounted in a steel stand several feet from the nearest wall. They’re looking closely at the surface. “This canvas is from China,” they tell me. “It’s whiter, it’s very soft.”

For as long as sculptures have decorated buildings, sculptors have tailored their creations to their sites. The ancient world is littered with examples, such as the reliefs that rise up the interior walls of the monumental stairway of the Pergamon Altar, from around 170 BCE. Depicting a battle between the gods and giants, the figures spill into our space, with knees and other body parts deliberately carved so that they appear to rest on the same stairs we climb. We are immersed in the action&#15...

Maybe this is a time to look for something else in art, to look at art that resonates with this moment on the precipice of authoritarianism, and to learn from it. What can be gleaned by reconsidering art made in similarly dangerous situations in the past, not with the complacent relief of historical distance, but with an awakened sense of urgency for our own time and place?

Mikel Rouse is one of the most important and accomplished contemporary American opera composers. He’s an avant-gardist with pop and deep humanist appeal. His memoir, The World Got Away, will be published May 21 by the University of Illinois Press. He sat down for coffee with the Rail on a bright, chilly March afternoon in Hell’s Kitchen.

Sarah announces herself from the stairwell: “…are you afraid of me, too? Like everyone else?” An ever-present voice resonating from all corners of Anti-Aging, her presence looms large over Lynn Hershman Leeson’s current exhibition.

Being a massive opera star is only a narrow slice of Costanzo’s purview: not only is he a tireless campaigner on behalf of the art form itself, enchanting school children in the Bronx and helping to coordinate Orfeo-spinoff mini-operas in a school in Brooklyn, he has joyously commandeered the project of becoming the historian of his singing genre.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

There’s a marked element of excess thought surrounding this adventurous ten-day Berlin festival of “moderne” composition. Its schedule is loaded with afternoon discussions, panels, laboratories, and general conceptual wrangling, but much of the evening performances are emphatically visceral, jagged, unpredictable, and disobedient toward implied traditional staging requirements of new works.

Micaela Warren (she/her) has poetry published in The Normal Review, and is studying English at Montclair State University. She lives in Hawthorne, NJ.

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.