Bald Fear and Blue Erotica
(03/16/26 8:21pm)
Charli xcx just unfollowed the Blue Man Group on Instagram. Don’t repeat her mistake.
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(Resisting) Bodily Resolution
(03/06/26 12:22am)
The blank white insides of Blah Blah Gallery shine like a star in the late winter afternoon. But inside those tightly bound walls, bursts of color and play erupt as you enter its enclosure of whimsy. Blah Blah Gallery’s juried exhibition, Holding Pattern, shown from Jan. 15 to Feb. 28, encapsulated its theme of transitory contradiction in life while also speaking to the role that art has in our lives, outside the white cube and in our imagined communities.
Furniture as Art in ‘A World in the Making: The Shakers’
(03/27/26 3:03am)
Before checking out the Institute of Contemporary Art’s newest exhibit, my knowledge of the Shakers was limited to whatever morsels of information I had gleaned from my early morning APUSH class in high school … which is, safe to say, not very much. After an afternoon of squatting down next to handcrafted stools to examine the wood grain and squinting at wall text for so long that an elderly lady exaggeratedly cleared her throat at me, I can’t say that my understanding of their lives has much improved. The concept is definitely fascinating, but as I roamed the gallery space, I was left questioning whether it was the best fit for a contemporary art museum … at least in its present state.
Drawing Bodies, Missing People
(03/19/26 3:00pm)
Pencils down, robes on. During the break of a life drawing session, Danny Ramirez—a freelance model based in Philadelphia—walks around the studio looking at versions of themself. They’ve been modeling for seven years—long enough to know what to look for in a drawing.
When Museums Resist Modernization
(02/19/26 11:37pm)
In the heart of northern Philadelphia, there’s a portal to another world. Perfectly preserved are hundreds of thousands of inhabitants from another time; minerals, insects, and coral, skeletons that paint a picture of a world that is long gone. If you look close enough, they may even reveal their secrets to you; how they lived and how they died, what they ate and what they cared for.
Noah Davis Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
(03/06/26 3:32am)
The exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is the first museum retrospective of Noah Davis’ work, and the only North American stop. The paintings are arranged in an open, expansive space, so both the artwork and the viewers are able to breathe in the legacy and grief that weighs heavily in the art. Davis’ works, while steeped in unspent tears, do not wallow in pity but instead contemplate the underbelly of America’s past, and the collective suffering of the human experience through the backdrop of loss. The paintings work as stages of healing and belay the conviction that progress will be made. The exhibition reveals Davis’ enduring commitment to translating the felt world and textures of life into a language only paint can speak.
Why Are Performing Arts at Penn Dying? What Can You Do to Help?
(02/25/26 2:33am)
Over the first three weeks in February, performing arts students at Penn spend their precious weekends in the Montgomery Theater for the Out of the Dark Performance Festival. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, multiple performing arts groups and students showcase their acts in the Annenberg Center.
Save Yourself: Choose Whimsy!
(02/13/26 6:14am)
We have devolved into Franz Kafka’s worst nightmare and M.C. Escher’s Relativity’s reality. Simply, we are cogs in a larger institutional machine, pawns in a flimsy man–made game whose brochure has long been lost. We are taught to value conformity and are manipulated into believing that life’s goal is material, monetary, and superficial.
What if These Worlds Were Within Us?
(02/05/26 5:22am)
“How are you doing, Laura? Welcome, welcome in.”
Batman and the Business of Starting Over
(01/30/26 4:27am)
Every year, the comic book market leaves behind a paper trail of what actually matters. Not what critics praise, not what goes viral online, but what retailers order in bulk and what readers consistently pick up. The best–selling comics of 2025, viewed month by month, offer a revealing snapshot of where the industry’s commercial center of gravity now sits and what kinds of storytelling it is quietly incentivizing.
The LOVE Statue: Love on Command
(02/13/26 5:33am)
When the LOVE statue was unveiled on College Green in summer 1999, the student body hated it. “It’s a copy of what’s downtown, and I think it’s disgusting,” Josh Croll (C ’00) told The Daily Pennsylvanian at the time. Jon Sell (C ’01) echoed the frustration: “I think they should set it on fire and put it on top of the high rises.” Pop art had always had its share of dissidents, with many art critics (or non–art critics, like Josh and Jon) finding it a crass, tasteless, bottom–of–the–barrel, watered–down version of fine arts. “I can imagine they might’ve been thinking, it’s embarrassing taste in some ways,” says History of Art professor Michael Leja. “It’s like, the campus is too classy to have a tacky sculpture like that on it.”
Sculptures Can Make People Cry
(12/03/25 1:33am)
I’m falling asleep in the back of the dark lecture hall when suddenly, plaster bodies wrapped in plastic packaging fill the screen, instantly snapping me awake.
The New Age of Superheroes
(11/06/25 8:28pm)
Superheroes used to save the world. Now they’re just trying to survive it. That’s the central theme of the two biggest comic book hits of the last year, Marvel’s Ultimate line and DC’s Absolute universe. These runs exploded in popularity, offering storylines that were easy to jump into and required no prior knowledge of complicated canons and decades of sprawling superhero history. At face value, to any executive, the key to modern–day comic book success seems to be accessibility. But what really makes these books land so well is the way they capture our real–world disillusionment with systems built before our lifetime in stories where fan–favorite heroes wrestle with stolen time, corrupt institutions, and violent extremism. Instead of escape, they offer readers catharsis—forcing us to reckon with the fact that the world we live in was built by forces we cannot change, but can try our best to fix.
I Hate the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Rebrand. You Should Too.
(10/28/25 4:55pm)
Everything is ephemeral. Nothing stays the same. As college students, we’re no strangers to phases of drastic reinvention, be it through choppy bangs, Splat hair dye, or a new nickname. For many of us, we’re trying to find ourselves and be who we believe we ought to be. These aesthetic changes are experiments in establishing identity during a seismic period of our lives.
More Than Geometry
(10/26/25 3:20am)
Mobile Images, an exhibition on Mavis Pusey at the Institute of Contemporary Art co–organized with the Studio Museum in Harlem, is an insightful exploration of the world through the lens of geometric forms and abstractions. It was curated by Hallie Ringle, Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator of the ICA, alongside Kiki Teshome, curatorial assistant at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
'Hung Liu: Happy and Gay'
(10/03/25 2:14am)
“It’s our National Day. We are happy and gay!” proclaims one line high above the frames of the Arthur Ross Gallery. “When I grew up, we were expected to be happy and gay, by the government, by the Party,” cries out another. Read once, the words sound chirpy. Read twice, they leave a bad taste in the mouth, like a smile that was rehearsed too many times. That is the structure of Hung Liu: Happy and Gay—a promise, then a question.
Local Theater: The New Third Space?
(10/15/25 4:44pm)
“I’m just obsessed with the idea of belonging,” playwright Shay Overstone tells me. “It’s the second most important part of being human.”
Melissa Broder on Obsessive Love and Mental Illness
(10/17/25 7:22pm)
When Melissa Broder’s debut novel The Pisces was published, The New York Times heralded it as “a modern–day myth for women on the verge.” That was seven years ago, when Broder was among the few writers carving a niche with novels that gave voice to the sad girl. Since then, the ‘women–on–the–verge’ genre has only mushroomed (think Miranda July’s All Fours, Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Mona Awad’s Bunny). The impetus behind the genre—which has its roots in writers like Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Clarice Lispector—was an earnest quest to portray the raw reality of mental illness in women. Today, it has devolved into a race for female protagonists to ‘out–weird’ each other, each one exhibiting progressively more bizarre behavior with diminishing emotional reality. Readers who once turned to the genre for comfort in their own struggles are now alienated by its catalogue of cultists and cannibals. Broder’s work, however, continues to stand out for its unflagging wit and poignancy, as well as its adherence to emotional truth over literary clickbait.
Afternoons at the Prado With Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’
(09/10/25 12:44am)
Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings sit in a dim room at the far southern end of the Museo del Prado, across the museum from the stern gaze of his likeness in bronze at the main entrance. After walking through grand halls of romantic historical paintings and light–filled salons of sculpture, entering this small, grey room feels a little like walking through a portal. Suddenly, you’re faced with walls of twisting greys and blacks, the brightest color being the crimson blood spouting from the severed head and wrist of the child in Saturn Devouring His Son.
Refusing the American Dream in ‘The Emperor of Gladness’
(07/24/25 2:29am)
Seeing Ocean Vuong at the Philadelphia stop of his latest book tour feels, in a kind of communal, spiritual affect, like going to church. Ironically, Vuong actually does give his talk in the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, speaking to pews of enraptured readers from beneath an enormous stained–glass window. For those who have hailed Vuong as one of this generation’s biggest literary superstars, the poet–turned–novelist’s words might not be scripture, but they land somewhere close.
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