Anya Ulinich is the author of the graphic novel “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel.” She is currently making art about the war. You can contact her on Instagram @mindcaptive
Anya Ulinich
By Anya Ulinich
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Culture As Putin lays siege to Ukraine, memories of life between wars
If you aren’t thinking about a place at all, and then a war starts there, it seems like it came out of the blue — a maniac starts the war; a bunch of people die; the rest of us post on our social media. But wars don’t “break out.” They ripen in plain sight until…
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Culture Painting ‘Birkenau’ — and our collective oblivion
On one of the last days of the “before” era, I went to the Met Breuer to see “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All” — an extraordinary show that you can now see in a video tour online. As I walked to the museum, I saw groups of teenagers hanging out on Madison Avenue — while…
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Culture Escape from New York — a third-generation migration tale
On March 7, I took a picture of a “child pile” in my Brooklyn apartment. Ten of my daughter’s friends had spent the night, celebrating the closing of a school play they’d worked on. The floor was a mess of sleeping bags, pillows, backpacks, soda bottles and empty bags of Doritos. A Happy Birthday banner…
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Culture Remembering Jason Polan, the Jewish, Taco Bell-loving artist who captured New York
Possibly the most quintessentially New York artist of this century was a Jewish millennial from Michigan. Jason Polan, who died of cancer on January 27 at the age of 37, didn’t just make the city’s people his subjects, and its streets his studio. The city was also the spirit animating his work. Polan’s best-known project…
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Culture What we talk about when we talk about Holocaust drawings
What are we looking at when we look at drawings? The art critic John Berger said that drawing was like discovery. “Each mark you make on paper is a stepping stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river.” In other words, drawing is…
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Culture Seven Centuries Later, A Jewish Treasure Trove Tells A Tragic Tale
Getting to The Colmar Treasure, a fourteenth century time capsule now on view at the Met Cloisters, is an adventure in itself, no matter how many times you have walked up the steep curving path through Fort Tryon Park with its picturesque cliffs and views of the Palisades. The Cloisters, a 1938 complex that incorporates…
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Culture At Riveting Auschwitz Exhibition, Troubling Lessons For Today’s America
Before I went to see “Auschwitz, Not Long Ago, Not Far Away,” a massive show at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, I had never set foot in a Holocaust exhibit. I didn’t want the inevitable manipulative clichés of exhibit design — dramatically lit artifacts set against wall-sized photo murals of emaciated people in striped pajamas…
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Art How Sex And Power Collude — The Uncompromising Art Of Nancy Spero
In a civilization neurotic with branding, some artists are identified as simply “artists,” while others get qualified. Nancy Spero, whose wonderful work is now a subject of a major show at MOMA PS1, is often called a “political artist,” or “artist and activist.” Even as they attempt to be merely descriptive, or even honorific, such…
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