I’m Robin, Editor of Misstropolis.
I hope this site brings you some joy and some knowledge (or at least a nice distraction) during this surreal, enlightening and historic time.
I like to write about art, style and purpose. If you have ideas for stories or would like to contribute, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading!
Misstropolis
Spirit & Style, Inside & Out
The 59th Venice Biennale assembles artists from all over the world to address the greatest concerns of our age. Under the shadow of the climate crisis, weaponized communication technology and the war in Ukraine, women artists and curators dominated, addressing contemporary issues of representation, history, labor, dreams and our responsibility to the planet and each other.
Multi million dollar art sales at Christies, collaborations with musicians like Snoop Dogg and Madonna, collections of GOAT athletes like Tom Brady, and ongoing crowdsourced fundraising for Ukraine's military defense prove at last that NFTs are serious business.
Ukrainian artists are using their work and platforms to defy Putin’s attempt to destroy their homeland, seize their country and erase their culture.
On every front, astounding courage. Now the upcoming Venice Biennale has become a meaningful stage on which to exhibit the immense solidarity, courage and pride of the Ukrainian people, as a small but mighty team transports a treasured sculpture to Venice, against impossible odds.
Almost seventeen years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, causing almost 1,800 deaths and over a billion dollars in damages, the impact is still evident. Add a global pandemic, a racial reckoning and a tumultuous political climate and New Orleans becomes a national site of change, creativity and invention. Prospect New Orleans, the Art Triennial which debuted in 2008 in response to Hurricane Katrina, seeks to address the racial, political, ideological and historical issues surfaced by the devastation and its aftermath. This year, after a year’s hiatus due to Covid-19, Prospect was back for its fifth iteration, titled Yesterday we said tomorrow.
Happy Day 1 of 2022. It’s a great day to reflect on the art that helped carry me through this tumultuous past year, art that cracked my head open and filled it with new ideas and new lenses through which to view our world. Enjoy this brief tour of my year in art pictures. I look forward to sharing more ideas, beauty and creativity with you in the year ahead!
Warning: This is not a guide with “something for everyone.” This is a guide to help you find the right thing for the people you care about most. After all not everyone gets a present, just the ones who have been very, very good.
Sand T Kalloch utilizes expressive materials, a disciplined vocabulary of line, point, surface and color and repetitive motion to create her mesmerizing, energetic canvases. But her greatest resource of all might be the element of surprise - that and her willingness to embrace it.
From Tel Aviv to New York, Bucharest to Rotterdam, a cadre of rockstar, multi-hyphenate artists are working in the space between fine art and interior design, creating sculptural lighting inspired by nature. Abstract yet familiar, technically advanced yet always handcrafted, the work of these female artists bring the joys of natural light inside.
In her huge body of work, Walker confronts the way culturally constructed myths deliberately whitewash historical truths and reframe events to benefit existing power structures. She shocks, prods, explodes, confronts and challenges.
Kara Walker’s work helps me see history as a swirling, unfurling, voracious cacophony rather than one long, drawn out note.
“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.” So said Douglas Adams in the 80’s cult classic, Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Misstropolis contributor Jim Baldwin has a thing for sunrise. Channeling Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide, Jim shares his thoughts and stunning images of sunrise through the seasons. And lucky us, we look, holding our breath.
Sculptor Karen LaMonte gives shape and weight to subjects as amorphous as female identity and stratospheric phenomenon. With her cloud sculptures cast in marble and iron, she brings the consequential weight of climate change down to earth with a unique, material honesty.
But manifesting the weather is not the most complicated thing the Prague-based, multidisciplinary artist has done. She did something even more complex during COVID, which she hopes will be a model other artists can follow. She made her international artistic practice carbon negative.
Happy Earth Day, 2021.
At the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Eva LeWitt’s Untitled (Mesh Circles)’ bold simplicity, grand scale and sultry, unexpected colors announce to the city that beauty is back and everyone is welcome.
This year during Women’s History Month, I’ve thought a lot about women and anger. Throughout history and around the world, women have been socialized to doubt, fear and repress their anger, especially in periods of hyper masculinity or aggression. But in recent years women have shown incredible courage and creativity in honoring and channeling their anger and turning it into a catalyst for social justice.
Valentines Day is as good an excuse as any to binge on love-inspired art. This year for Valentines Day, give yourself the gift of enjoying some passionate, obsessive, transporting, heady, gorgeous and sexy works of art that make you feel something or learn something or do something that may come close to love.
With more and more companies announcing permanent work from home options for employees, what will this mean for American personal style? Will sweatpants bring the end of dignity or the beginning of acceptance and empathy?
The optimistic paintings of Madrid-based artist Eva Navarro portray a color packed landscape of common experience through resilience, solitude and sunlight.
If you go, you may never want to leave. Welcome to Campo, the innovative Creative Arts Institute in tucked away Garzón, Uruguay. Founder Heidi Lender has built a haven for connection, quiet and creativity, drawing artists and art enthusiasts from all over the world. Campo’s Artfest takes place December 28, 29. it just might be the answer to how to exit 2020 and start all over again.
She’s speaking. Simone Leigh will be the first black woman ever to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 2022. In collaboration with the ICA Boston who commissioned and will organize the show Leigh will bring her powerful unapologetic voice to issues of authorship, agency and understanding America through a black female lens.
Jay Calderin, second in our new Visionary Series, founded Boston Fashion Week 26 years ago to champion the local community of diverse, creative talent. This year, BFW will be entirely virtual, and will celebrate the next generation of fashion visionaries.
More than one of the world’s best tennis players, more than the world’s highest paid female athlete, Naomi Osaka is a force for social justice and a quiet style icon on the rise.
