Brooklyn's Beachfront Romance With Cinema Continues at the Coney Island Film Festival

By Joshua Glick

DEC 19-JAN 20 | Film

The 19th Annual Coney Island Film Festival (CIFF) wrapped, per ritual, in an epic bumper car bash. Filmmakers, organizers and spectators found themselves colliding into one another at the Eldorado Auto Skooter rink on Surf Avenue. The event was thoroughly in the spirit of the festival, which does not simply take place at the storied amusement destination, but is of it in distinct ways. The cultural geography of the region shapes all aspects of exhibition and programming.

Barbara Takenaga and Patricio Guzmán: telescopes and other visions

By Joan Waltemath

FEB 2019 | 1 by 1

The buzz about Barbara Takenaga’s recent show, Outset at DC Moore Gallery, had already reached me by the time I got back from my summer on the Great Plains and was standing in front of her lush new paintings.

Visions of Brazil

By Madeline Murphy Turner

JUNE 2019 | ArtSeen

Visions of Brazil is an ambitious exhibition that seeks to locate itself within a contemporary discourse on the construction of Brazilian Modernism. Curated by Sofia Gotti for Blum & Poe’s New York gallery, the exhibition begins with historian Walter Mignolo’s assertion that coloniality is the “darker side” of modernity.

Editor’s Note

By Will Chancellor

FEB 2021 | Fiction

This month we’re pleased to publish an excerpt from Vesna Maric’s The President Shop. The novel’s backdrop is an allegorical country, The Nation, steeped in tyranny, but the focus is on the human rather than the trappings of propaganda. I was struck by the young woman, Mona, decoding the timelessness that’s always present, even as we pass through moments that are consciously historic. “Symbology,” by Betsy M. Narváez, abounds in images, meanings, dreams, and visions. Here, there’s no official, waking world, little external at all. Narváez gives us resonant moments over coffee of a mother and a daughter unpuzzling the language of dreams. We’re also tremendously fortunate to have Maisy Card stepping in as co-editor of the fiction section of the Brooklyn Rail. Her debut novel, These Ghosts are Family, masterfully courses through the history of a family while communicating the texture and hunger of life as it was lived.