Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with the Arts & Culture MA concentration at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Cockroaches scuttled around a cubed vivarium.

In the early 1990s, the art historian Barbara Bloemink was rummaging through a Yale library in search of a dissertation topic when she came across “a funny letter about how impossible men are” from ...

THE art of biography, we say — but at once go on to ask, Is biography an art? The question is foolish perhaps, and ungenerous certainly, considering the keen pleasure that biographers have given us.

As Women’s History Month draws to a close, here are 10 recent biographies of women artists to round out your reading list—at any point throughout the year. Sheila Barker tackles the life and career of ...

The art critics of The Times select their favorites, from the biography of a “famously unknown” artist to an ode to the Louvre from 100 poets. By Holland Cotter Jason Farago and Walker Mimms Say what ...

With unprecedented access to Miranda’s inner circle and more than 150 original interviews—including conversations with family, collaborators, and Miranda himself—Pollack-Pelzner’s book offers a deeply ...

David Hale doesn’t know whether his poem will kill the culture. It’s not that “Affliction 11” is a bad poem. It’s a beautiful one, a brief, subtle meditation on the transmission of belief, filtered ...

Narratives have served a crucial role in both the creation of art and in art history because the process or action of telling a story is one of the simplest ways to engage an audience. This effect is ...

In 1945, when Yoko Ono was 12, her home city of Tokyo was firebombed. With her mother and siblings, she fled to the safety of a farming village in Nagano Prefecture. Food was scarce. During this time, ...