While I have enjoyed every exhibit I have seen at Poster House, Black Power to Black People stands out for its striking imagery, explicit politics, and clever integration of poster aesthetics into the installation design. I also loved the use of music in the gallery (with printed lyrics available) and the newspaper available to take home, including more in-depth information about women and the Black Panther party. I wish that the exhibit could have acknowledged how the BPP’s effective imagery and dissemination of information had a global impact, but overall I found the exhibition informative and impactful.

I saw Hyperfantasia at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn in June 2022, a hypnotic drag cabaret unlike anything else I have seen. Tiresias’ performance is a wonderfully abstract meditation on creation and being, essentially using the lessons of evolution and the example of the peacock (and other animals that have evolved to be beautiful) to present the necessity of beauty to survival. The show is a celebration of artistic experimentation and excess, one of my favorite examples of how science fiction and art can intersect and enrich each other.

At this point, Much Maligned Monsters is a classic text of Indian art history, and one that I found incredibly eye-opening and surprisingly funny when I came across it as an undergrad. Before Said’s Orientalism, Partha Mitter tackled the problem of how European bias shapes the perception of Asian art, drawing on numerous examples from European archives to show the stunning gaps between what an object actually is, and how a god can transform into a monster in the eye of a visitor. The book is still strikingly relevant, both to understand historical misconceptions about India, but also to grapple with the problems of intercultural communication today.

Past Lives is a recent find that I found unexpectedly powerful. While the film ostensibly centers on a love triangle between a woman, her husband, and her childhood crush, the story really explores the complexities of immigrant identity, the simultaneous familiarity and estrangement of the culture one has to leave behind. Specifically, the film implicitly considers the sacrifices of creative people who must move to pursue their dreams. The protagonist’s parents are both creatives (artist and filmmaker), and she is a writer who immigrates again as an adult to pursue her dreams. For me, the film beautifully illustrated the possibility and loss of both immigration and the instability of a creative life.

Phoenix Extravagant is a fantasy novel set in a fictionalized version of 1930s Korea, where queer identities are normalized but colonial occupation and war looms. The protagonist, nonbinary artist Gyan Jebi, is recruited by the occupying power (a fictionalized Japanese government) to magically paint an automaton dragon, a weapon of war. In this world, magic paint is created through the destruction of artwork - the older the artwork, the more potent the magic, and the more powerful the weapon. Lee uses this fantasy setting to skillfully intertwine iconoclasm military violence, considering the ramifications of colonialism on cultural identity while exploring the nature of complicity and agency during colonial occupation. Phoenix Extravagant is a straightforward read, but one whose implications I find endlessly fascinating.

Chitra Ganesh’s print series Sultana’s Dream loosely illustrates Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 story of the same name. The original story imagines a world run by women who have invented solar power, hydrpower, and ensured equality, while men are kept indoors and subjected to the conditions of purdah. Ganesh’s interpretation of the story draws on an exuberant mix of South Asian artistic traditions, Afrofuturism, and her characteristically whimsical art style. This series is a true favorite that continuously inspires me, and I was so excited to see it featured in The Whitney’s recent exhibition Inheritance.

Surrealism Beyond Borders was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring surrealist and surrealist-inspired art movements from around the world. The exhibition eschews a typical chronological format, instead allowing visitors to wander between different cultural and political moments, often including juxtapositions between different artworks from around the world. I often struggle with blockbuster exhibitions because I find the scale overwhelming, but I found that the breadth and scope of Surrealism Beyond Borders to be successful and exciting, rather than exhausting. The curators did an excellent job in drawing out the inherently political nature of Surrealism in a variety of cultural contexts. Sometimes, shows that look at modern art movements in non-Western contexts relegate non-Western artists to imitators or define their artistic production in terms of the West, so I appreciated how the exhibition granted artists from across different cultures the same agency, and actively worked against the “center-periphery” model that characterizes older art history.

Ursula Le Guin is the fiction author that inspires me the most - across her works, I am fascinated by how she incorporates and critiques anthropology through the lens of science fiction. Out of all her books, this short story collection is my favorite because it focuses on gender politics in a variety of settings, from a world where people have no gender characteristics outside of a limited time period (when they have sex) to a world where women outnumber men thirteen to one, leading to a dark and unusual perspective on matriarchy (which interestingly parallels and subverts the utopianism of Sultana’s Dream.) I love the ambition and imagination of this book, which always reminds me that our society, our values, our understanding of gender and our way of being is not inevitable, and there are so many other ways for a world to be formed.

While I have read many science fiction books about travel and exploration, few capture the thrill and confusion of being caught between cultures quite like Vagabonds. Part of what makes this book so special is how Hao, an economist, imagines far-future economies. In the novel, a hypercapitalist Earth is entirely based around the constant production, packaging, and selling of new ideas, while Mars is built around an archive freely accessible to all in society. Given the importance of archives to art and art history, the book truly captured my imagination in terms of what a truly comprehensive archive can look like and how access to information shapes culture and society.