This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about about art that surprises us, about the works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

It started with a blast of static that faded away to reveal a gentle pulse of animal sounds: a serene reprise from seemingly alien birds and bugs going about their business on a planet other than our own. An enormous 60-foot screen showed aerial views of former forest land, where trees—or what remains of them—blaze in otherworldly colors. Then a jarring jump cut shifts to close-up footage of young Indigenous people in feathers and face-paint excoriating disgraced Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (“You filth!” “Parasite!”) for damage done to the Amazon.

All of that is part of Broken Spectre (2021), a bracing video work by Irish artist Richard Mosse currently on view in a new space for Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The show’s setting is itself a story, as the 1898 Italian Renaissance Revival building by the architecture firm McKim, Mead & White will soon play home to a new Shainman space when it opens officially after further renovation later this year.

But the setting of the Amazon is of far more immediate and urgent concern here. Broken Spectre draws from travels that Mosse undertook to the Amazon Basin between 2018 and 2020, when he captured still and moving images of environmental destruction on a scale that boggles the mind. Wall text at the entry to the exhibition—which continues through March 16—states that more than one-fifth of the original rainforest has been destroyed in the last 50 years. The 74-minute video documenting the ongoing decimation shows no signs of that slowing any time soon.

As in work that Mosse has made in other neglected locales including the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of Congo and cast-out refugee encampments in hostile parts of Europe, Broken Spectre is a documentary that doubles as a call-to-action. It’s slow and poetic but also visceral and intense, mostly wordless and bolstered by a score that includes music and field-recordings of wild nature. The soundtrack is the work of Ben Frost, a musician and composer—and previous collaborator with Mosse—who mines fertile realms between contemporary classical music, dark ambience, and noise pushed to voluminous extremes. (The current show is a rare gallery happening for which earplugs wouldn’t be unadvisable.)

After a period of controversy, the Istanbul Biennial, one of the world’s top recurring art exhibitions, will completely redo its forthcoming edition, delaying its opening date by a year and bringing on a new curator to mount it.

On Friday, the Art Newspaper reported that Iwona Blazwick will no longer serve as the curator of the next Istanbul Biennial. That exhibition was initially expected to open this year. It will now open in 2025—a move that the biennial said would allow for time to rethink the show.

Blazwick, the chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel in Saudi Arabia, had been the subject of scrutiny because she was also formerly a member of the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory committee.

The Art Newspaper had previously reported that despite that committee having recommended Defne Ayas to curate this edition of the biennial, Blazwick was selected instead. The foundation that manages the biennial, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), had reportedly not gone with Ayas because of her 2015 Turkish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, devoted to the artist Sarkis. Her catalogue for the show had initially mentioned the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government denies having happened; the book was subsequently taken out of circulation.

Around the time of the Art Newspaper report, Blazwick and three other members resigned from the committee. Afterward, a period of tumult followed at the biennial: artists said they would no longer participate in the show, the IKSV announced that it was going to overhaul the curatorial selection process, and the foundation’s longtime director, Bige Örer, resigned, only to be replaced earlier this year by Kevser Güler.

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The Headlines

INVESTIGATION NARROWS: A suspect was arrested by Brazilian police in connection to the death of the prominent New York dealer Brent Sikkema this week. Local TV Globo reported police detained a 30-year-old Cuban man named Alegandro Triana Trevez, who was in possession of $3,000 and a gold chain allegedly stolen from Sikkema. Trevez also appears to be seen on security footage entering Sikkema’s apartment on Sunday. Meanwhile, local media quoted unnamed sources who discussed a child-custody conflict between Sikkema and his Cuban husband. Sikkema, 75, was found dead Monday with 18 stab wounds in his Rio de Janeiro apartment. He founded Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in 1991. The gallery announced a memorial service will be held in his honor.

LOYAL TILL THE END: The courtroom saga continues between Accent Delight International, owned by Russian billionaire, Dmitry Ryboloviev, and Sotheby’s. Yesterday, the auction house’s head of private sales, Samuel Valette, was back on stand, questioned by the lawyer representing Sotheby’s, who attempted to undermine Ryboloviev’s accusation that the auction house aided the Swiss art dealer, Yves Bouvier, in overcharging him some $1 billion. ARTnews Senior Reporter Daniel Cassady said the testimony unfolded more like a conversation than an inquisition, aiming to show Valette’s principal, contracted client was Bouvier, not Rybolovlev. Pursuing Rybolovlev further, at that time, “would be like stabbing my client [Bouvier] in the back,” said Valette, though he hoped to business with Rybolovlev in future. Meanwhile, Bouvier, the elephant in the room, who is not a party to the current trial, released a statement insisting on his innocence. “Following the debates made in the New York courtroom, and the media coverage they have caused, is like a surreal charade in which people argue over a fraud that was proven to have never happened,” Bouvier said.

The Digest

Sotheby’s head of private sales Samuel Valette was back on the witness stand Thursday in the civil suit brought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, in which he accuses the auction house of helping bleed him of $1 billion dollars by providing Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier with bloated estimates for blue-chip works. This time, however, it was Sotheby’s attorney Marcus Asner’s turn to question.

Among the more interesting things one notices during the hours spent watching lawyers question witnesses is how two people vibe. On Wednesday, when Valette was questioned by Rybolovlev’s counsel, Daniel Kornstein, the exchange quickly turned antagonistic. Of course, if would be. They are on opposing teams. Valette says he and Sotheby’s are innocent of the accusations brought against them. 

In Asner’s hands, Thursday’s testimony was a conversation, not an inquisition. During his questioning by Kornstein, Valette often seemed frustrated by the judge’s direction to keep his answers short. On Thursday, he was relaxed, as Asner prompted him to explain the details, like a contract between Sotheby’s and Bouvier’s company Blancaflor Investments, as well as multiple emails between Valette and his colleagues and superiors at the auction house.

Asner’s goal was untying, or at least loosening, the knots that Kornstein was trying to bind Valette down with the day before. This strategy involved walking Valette through many of the same questions Kornstein asked, but worded slightly differently or in a different tone. 

“During the time you spent with Mr. Rybolovlev did you ever tell him that you were his Key Client Manager?” Kornstein asked Valette on Wednesday, referring to an internal term Sotheby’s uses to designate specialists who are assigned to cultivate and manage specific collectors, regardless of whether the collector is aware or if Sotheby’s has ever done business with them.

District Judge Lewis Kaplan has said it multiple times: Donald Trump raped E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Kaplan wrote it in May 2023, when he presided over one of the trials against Trump. And he reminded jurors of the rape this week, during the latest proceedings in the multi-layered, winding rape and defamation cases brought against Trump by Carroll.  

Last spring, author and journalist Carroll sued Trump, testifying that he had raped her decades ago and had defamed her since by denying the accusations. Carroll won that suit. The jury found Trump liable for sexual assault and said he must pay $5 million—but they came short of saying he had raped her due to the legal scope of New York State’s penal code.  

In New York, someone can only be convicted of rape if they can prove vaginal penetration by a penis. In Carroll’s testimony, which mirrored what she had described privately for decades and publicly for the first time in 2019, she said Trump used both his fingers and his penis in the assault. But during the trial, the jury had only concluded that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” Kaplan’s decision from last year reads.   

That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” 

Federally, rape is defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This broader explanation, while still dependent on penetration, would include assaults using fingers.  

The police response to the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which killed two teachers and 19 elementary school students at Robb Elementary School, was significantly botched by “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training,” a damning review from the Justice Department found on Thursday.

The long-awaited report detailed systemic failures by both state and local law enforcement surrounding the massacre, one of the worst school shootings in US history, including the events that contributed to the 77-minute delay between the arrival of first responders and when the shooter was killed.

“The victims and survivors should’ve never been trapped with that shooter for more than an hour as they waited for their rescue,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a Thursday press conference discussing the contents of the report. “The families of the victims deserved more than incomplete, inaccurate, and conflicting communications from officials of their loved ones.”

According to the DOJ, several failures laid the groundwork for the much-scrutinized delay, including officers spending more than 40 minutes searching for a key to a door that investigators say had likely been unlocked. Investigators wrote: “Though the entry team puts the key in the door, turns the key, and opens it, pulling the door toward them, the CIR Team concludes that the door is likely already unlocked, as the shooter gained entry through the door and it is unlikely that he locked it thereafter.”

The report, based on a review of more than 14,000 pieces of data and more than 260 interviews, also directly called out Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department officials, including former police chief Pete Arredondo for instructing officers not to enter some classrooms until keys had been secured.

Greg Johnson and Joyce Carol Oates have been corresponding since 1975, when he wrote her a letter about a professor of his who had committed suicide and she responded. He wrote to her occasionally over the following years, mostly about her writing, and then eventually his. Their back-and-forth became a friendship, led to a biography Johnson published in 1998, and continued after. “Inadvertently, unwittingly, through the years Greg and I seem to have composed a kind of double portrait that, at the outset, in 1975, neither of us could possibly have imagined; nor could I have imagined that Greg would be my primary correspondent through most of my adult life,” Oates writes in her introduction to a selection of these letters, which will be published in March. The letters provide, as the best ones do, flashes of dailiness that build up over decades into something more substantive. The Review is publishing several,  from 1995, below.

January 25, 1995

Dear Greg,

I’m enclosing the London Review since they’ve sent me several extra copies, and I thought you might find the publication attractive. It’s a junior version of New York Review—each review much shorter, but approximately the same quality. Elaine [Showalter] often publishes here.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Puerto Rico has begun using batteries connected to residents’ rooftop solar panels to provide backup power for its grid, helping prevent blackouts and offering an alternative to fossil fuel-burning peaker plants. It could be the first step toward building one of the largest virtual power plants of its kind.

The yearlong pilot, launched late last year by Puerto Rico’s utility Luma Energy, will pull power from up to 6,500 households during energy shortages. It is part of a transformational effort to modernize a deteriorating grid and transition to clean energy. 

If the program is successful, it could lead to a much larger virtual power plant with the potential to make peaker plants, which run only when demand spikes, unnecessary. “It could be really significant,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, a grid expert at the research firm Wood Mackenzie, adding that if it were expanded to include all home batteries on the island, it would be larger than any residential-storage virtual power plant in North America.  

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, are networks of distributed energy resources—like home batteries, electric water heaters, or heat pumps—that can help the grid. They can manage energy demand, such as by adjusting smart thermostats during peak hours. Some can also supply power to the grid, by drawing from home or even EV batteries.

Read Diane Oliver’s short story “No Brown Sugar in Anybody’s Milk,” published in the Summer 2023 issue of the Review.

A year ago, I had never heard of the astounding short story artist Diane Oliver. This admission is embarrassing, as I am a novelist and professor. Furthermore, Oliver and I have a number of shared characteristics. We both are Black, Southern, daughters of educators, graduates of women’s colleges, and we both attended the University of Iowa. Born in 1943—the same year as my mother—she was a generation ahead of me, paving the way. Yet, somehow, I had never come across her work, not even at Spelman College, where Black women’s writing is the core of the English major. Initially, I blamed myself. Why had I not been more diligent as a graduate student? Oliver published four stories in her lifetime, and two posthumously. Her work appeared in Negro Digest, Sewanee Review, and was reprinted in the anthology Right On!. In other words, Neighbors was hiding in plain sight. After more thinking, I faulted the gatekeepers—whoever they may be—for not including Oliver in the anthologies that form the curriculum of writing programs. But after a while I grew tired of wondering why and chose to celebrate the discovery.

I encountered Neighbors in a most unusual manner. I received a copy printed on plain paper, no intriguing cover, no laudatory blurbs from great writers, not even a paragraph from the publisher providing context or summary. I knew only that the author was a Black woman and the manuscript was slated for publication. The bound stack was simply labeled “Neighbors.” I could have asked for more information or done a quick Google search. Instead, I recognized the opportunity for what it was: a chance to let the words introduce me to the work of Diane Oliver.

This breathtaking collection of short stories is a marvel. When I was a young writer, I remember receiving this advice from one of my peers: “Imagine that the world as we know it is over. Now imagine the people of the future trying to sort out the wreckage. Well, that’s what books are for—to let the new people know what the hell happened.” I had almost forgotten that scrap of undergraduate wisdom until I read the first few pages of this book. Neighbors evokes the feeling of sorting through a time capsule sealed and buried in the yard of a Southern African Methodist Episcopal church in the early sixties. The political issues of the day—namely racial integration—permeate the narratives, as this is this most significant social shift since emancipation. Oliver explores the changing America while beautifully documenting the culture of Black Americans living in the South. She remembers the domestic workers who leave their own children home alone to keep house for rich white folks. Boy coats with raccoon collars were all the rage for the wealthy, while poor folks took pride that their simple clothes were cleaned and ironed. “Up North” and “Chicago” are both shorthand for a promised land where a person could earn a decent wage and send her children to college. This is Oliver’s world, and she shines a light in every corner.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets,” translated by Aimee Chor, appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246. Here, we asked both Küchenmeister and Chor to reflect on their work.

1. Nadja Küchenmeister

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The poem began, as it often does for me, with an image (“sugar, stirred into cream”) and at the same time a rhythmic set of sounds that, ideally, make a phrase into verse. I like tonal neighborhoods that are not immediately apparent but rather reveal themselves in the writing of a poem (in German, the words Einkaufsnetz [shopping bag] and Bett [bed] make a tonal connection, as do, more distantly, Netz [net] and Fuchs [fox]—at least to my ear). However, these resonances, these rhymes, have to emerge on their own—I cannot force them. They establish themselves on the basis of something that was already present in the poem. You could also say that something only comes to be because something else came into being before it. This is true for images and motifs and for sounds as well. In this sense, a poem always also creates itself, although of course I am the one who gives it its order.