This Is the Story of My Resignation From the Queens Museum

Hyperallergic
June 2025

It’s a story about power, leverage, and fear during the first Trump administration, and also about the potential for solidarity and love in the second..

How to Be a Culture Worker in Times Like These

Art in America
May 2025

As a Gen Xer, I grew up with the mantra “think globally, act locally.” Today, however, the tsunami of antidemocratic and oligarchic actions inundating the United States and many other geographies is decidedly global, overwhelmingly so. The trickle-up potential that acting locally once promised has clearly failed.

To fight back, we will need a polyphony of divergent yet parallel efforts. This will require us to reinvent culture work, transforming it so that we might look closely at deeply held “truths,” even when they provide comfort, and at long-maintained methods and behaviors that no longer serve us.

To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways

The New York Times
February 2024

Co-authored with Laura Hanna

There is a better way to fund the arts in America. It requires a leap of faith and creative cultural and political organizing to achieve a change in mind-set.

Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech

Vera List Center for Art and Politics/Amherst College Press June 2022

There have been few times in American history when the very concept of freedom of speech—its promise and its contradictions—has been under greater scrutiny. Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech provides a practical and historical guide to free speech discourse and combines it with poetic responses to the  contemporary crises around free expression. Ultimately, this publication provocatively questions whether genuine communication is ever attainable.

Studies into Darkness emerged from a series of seminars guided by acclaimed artist, filmmaker, and activist Amar Kanwar at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School convened by the editors of this volume, Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich. This collection of newly commissioned texts, artist projects, and historic resources examines aspects of freedom of speech informed by recent debates around hate speech, censorship, sexism, and racism. “Darkness” here holds the promise of complexity, discovery and, in Kanwar’s words, “visions from within the depths.” Designed by Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Julia Novitch, the book itself plays with the concept of darkness as both a tonal variation and a factor of legibility, a space from which truth can be extracted or hindered.

With contributions from Zach Blas, Mark Bray, Gabriela López Dena, Natalie Diaz, Aruna D’Souza, Silvia Federici, Jeanne van Heeswijk, shawné michaelain holloway, Prathibha Kanakamedala, Amar Kanwar, Carin Kuoni, Lyndon, Debora, and Abou, Svetlana Mintcheva, Obden Mondésir, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Vanessa Place, Laura Raicovich, Michael Rakowitz, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Nabiha Syed.

Easter Rituals: Art that Brightens the Dark Times

ArtReview
March 2022

Laura Raicovich on Adrian Paci’s film U’ncuontru and learning how to be together again in an age of perpetual crisis

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest

Verso
June 2021

In an age of protest, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests against museum funding (like the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (such as the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders)—to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks—have roiled cultural institutions across the world, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. Meanwhile never have there been more calls for museums to work for social change.

In this book, Raicovich shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.

Museums Are Never Neutral

Frieze
March 2020

Neutrality is a veil for wielding power: this is the status quo that requires resistance.

Gauging the Possibilities of Impermanence at the New MoMA

Hyperallergic
January 2020

MoMA’s recent expansion embodies the tension between the ways in which cultural spaces can offer visitors comfortable narratives and on the other, how they can suggest the potential for radical inclusiveness by iteration, reinvention, and reinstallation. Photo: Jasmine Weber

Hans Haacke’s Sharp Metaphors and Maps of Power

Hyperallergic
December 2019

Exposing systems of injustice and how they operate is Haacke’s great skill. At the New Museum, the artist draws the connections, and we follow along, wondering what our role is in this circuit.

Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Sculptures Echo the Precariousness of Place

Hyperallergic
December 2019

Cruzvillegas’s forms embody the precariousness and hope, if not the danger, of contemporary notions of borders, and the forces at work that make them porous or impenetrable.

The Pioneering Painted Sculptures of Melvin Edwards

Hyperallergic
December 2019

Edwards’s sculptures, on display at Alexander Grey Associates in New York, establish him as a master of his various crafts with with an acute sense of rhythm and movement.

Jeffrey Gibson’s Artistic Remixes, From Song Lyrics to Indigenous Craft

Hyperallergic
December 2019

Gibson’s ongoing explorations of identity and art history have produced a dizzying range of forms over the course of his career.

LaToya Ruby Frazier Looks Beyond Blue-Collar Stereotypes

Hyperallergic
November 2019

In The Last Cruze, the artist hones in on the vast inequities that persist in US society, as well as the tender relationships that enable survival and persistence in spite of them.

Centering the Equator in Global Conversations About Art

Hyperallergic
November 2019

With its focus on art from Indonesia and Southeast Asia, this year’s edition of the Biennale Jogja offers a fresh take on discussions of centers and peripheries.

Janine Antoni Traces the Passage of Time in a Cemetery’s Catacombs

Hyperallergic
November 2019

The artist’s new commission leaves much to contemplate simultaneously — mortality, desire, and the ways in which absence and longing are such a fundamental part of life.

Why Libraries Have a Public Spirit That Most Museums Lack

Hyperallergic
November 2019

A broad swath of society seems to feel more welcome in a public library rather than a museum. I examined the Brooklyn Public Library as a model of heightened engagement through collective knowledge creation.

An Encyclopedia Connects Record Labels to Political Movements Around the World

Hyperallergic
October 2019

Graphic designer and activist Josh MacPhee’s third edition of Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels unlocks a whole world of political storytelling.

The Defiant Spirit of Wangechi Mutu’s Caryatids at the Metropolitan Museum

Hyperallergic
October 2019

In reflecting on Mutu’s recent commission for the Met’s façade one morning, I realized that her sculptures make space for excellences and joys that dominant Eurocentric histories have ignored and excluded.

What Properly Addressing the Migrant Crisis Might Look Like

Hyperallergic
October 2019

Artist Alicia Grullon performs the role of a UN representative for refugees to address the migration crisis at the southern US border.

Diary Entries From a Feminist Curator’s Encounters With Picasso

Hyperallergic
September 2019

A steadfast feminist in a male-dominated art world, Joanna Drew was among a handful of individuals who shaped contemporary visual art in Great Britain post-World War II.