What is the Miami Rail?

Art

As my late friend Henry Luce III once wrote: “[The Brooklyn Rail] is a splendid publication that covers the arts, politics, and culture. I heartily recommend it.” Now it’s my turn to commend the addition of the Miami Rail.

Docs in Sight: Blood and Silence on La Frontera
Bernardo Ruiz with Williams Cole

Express

The epic violence that has plagued Mexico in the last decade or so can seem incomprehensible in its brutality and scope—especially as it manifests in cities near the U.S.-Mexico border. And given our many ties with Mexico, it’s nothing less than an outrage that its issues are not more prominent on our national radar.

A Field of One’s Own

Local

In the new food culture, farming as an ethos is hip. Farming as an industry, however, is in need of some serious revitalization.

Earthship, New Mexico

Express

Two years ago I was deciding whether to move to New York or New Mexico. A professional clown in Madrid, New Mexico asked me to watch her land for the summer while she was away. I would have to feed her dogs, water her plants, fill in a ditch, and pick tumbleweeds.

YAN PEI-MING with Charles Schultz

Art

On the occasion of his second solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery, Black Paintings (May 4 – June 23, 2012), Yan Pei-Ming sat down with Charles Schultz to discuss his recent paintings, his preference for visual rather than verbal communication, and the difference between the deaths of Bin Laden, Gaddafi, and Mao.

DANA SCHUTZ with Jarrett Earnest

Art

Dana Schutz’s retrospective If the Face Had Wheels opened at the Neuberger Museum at the end of 2011 and a new exhibition of recent work, Piano in the Rain (May 2 – June 16, 2012), opened at Friedrich Petzel Gallery last month. In her freshly empty studio in Brooklyn, Schutz sat down with Jarrett Earnest to talk about her paintings.

JIM LEEDY with Kara Rooney

Art

With the upcoming fall 2012 release of Leedy: The Documentary, a chronicle of the artist’s life and work, Associate Art Editor Kara Rooney sat down with the legendary Abstract Expressionist sculptor in his Kansas City studio to talk about Zen Buddhism, clay, and the rough-and-tumble Ab-Ex crowd of 1950s New York.

Notes on Altered States

In making art or seeing art, we may become acquainted with and vicariously experience other possible states, states that local norms may dismiss and devalue but that might be useful therapeutically and spiritually.

AFTEREFFECTS: Mapping the experimental ethnography of Juan Downey in The Invisible Architect

Film

Chilean-born artist Juan Downey (1940 – 1993) is best known as a pioneer videomaker who persistently pushed the boundaries between ethnography, autobiography, and media arts, immersing himself in a quest to explore issues of identity in the Americas and in Western culture, and bridging indigenous worldviews with cutting-edge, experimental communication technologies.

from The Secret Life of Objects

Fiction

The vase—blue, pottery—was a gift from my college boyfriend. We’d drifted apart and become just friends for a few years and sometimes we wrote and sometimes we called and we invited each other to our weddings in cities four hours apart and neither of us went to the other’s wedding and we sent each other presents.

BENJAMIN MARRA with Ashok Kondabolu

Art Books

A few months ago I was reading Benjamin Marra’s Gangsta Rap Posse (Traditional Comics)—a comic book series about an N.W.A.-style group that spends its days brawling with rival rappers, fighting a racist L.A.P.D. force, and running lucrative drug and prostitution rackets (while paying scant attention to actually recording music)—and wondering, Who wrote this crazy shit?

So. Seven playwrights, five directors, and four producers sit down to write a play…

Theater

If the demands of collaboration are infinite and unpredictable, so are the rewards.