December 2025 Issue: Pink (Print Edition)
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Life as Art
The brilliant and beleaguered journey of Margaret C. Anderson
"Margaret C. Anderson was the first publisher of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” an act for which she was prosecuted and convicted of obscenity. The magazine she founded, The Little Review, was a pioneering arts journal that provoked transatlantic debate. Beautiful and lesbian, she had a complicated love life that included affairs with other beautiful and famous women. She lived in Chicago, New York and Paris at the height of their cultural renaissances, where she mixed with the leading figures of the day." (Keir Graff)
The Pink Factory Is Expanding
On the road with Yvette Mayorga and La Princesa
"Times Square, the icing that divorced the cake. If you look hard enough, though, there is an upside, which is that it is the perfect location, bar none, to enter, uniformed as a believer, and present something at such a precise point of pressure that it can disintegrate the notional foundations of the thing it stands on. On the face of it, “Magic Grasshopper,” Yvette Mayorga’s largest installation to date, a thirty-foot-long kinetic public sculpture, styled as an opulent, fantasy-like carriage, is a continuation of the visual language of America’s most venal public space." (Jon Bonfiglio)
Ever a City Surreal
How Chicago artists shaped a Whitney blockbuster
"Dan Nadel is renowned as a comics guru, as lately evidenced by the glowing reviews for his Robert Crumb biography. But back in the early 2000s, when he was in his mid-twenties, a legend of alternative comics broadened his view. 'I'm pretty sure that I became aware of the Hairy Who through Gary Panter,' he says. 'And it just made so much sense to me as a combination of the things I loved. It's the same feeling I had when I first saw Crumb when I was a teenager. Something just clicked in my brain receptors.'” (Joe Cothrel)
One Hand on the Sun
How the one-armed artist Eddie Balchowsky came to define the spirit of the legendary music club called the Quiet Knight
"The Quiet Knight music room was carved out of poetic lines. Between 1969 and 1979, owner Richard Harding booked young acts like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley and Lou Reed on the second floor of the brick building at 953 West Belmont. The Quiet Knight was filled with discarded pews from a church near Cabrini-Green, where unconventional voices came together as a joyous choir. And the club’s spirit was defined by artist, poet, musician and activist Eddie Balchowsky." (Dave Hoekstra)
Arts & Culture
Art: How Toshiko Takaezu brought the Abstract Expressionist ethos to ceramics
Dance: Mad Shak from the humane laboratory
Design: Anastasia Elektra’s sculptural menswear turns vulnerability into strength
+ Mood: Gifts
Film: Unhappy together in "Is This Thing On?"
Lit: How Kathleen and Beth Rooney conceived “Leaf Town Forever”
Music: Chanticleer’s winter journey from darkness to light
Stage: Manual Cinema's favorite puppets from their new Christmas classic
Reviews
The year might be winding down, but the culture is not.
Poetry
The Saint of Western Avenue: A new poem by Gregorio Gomez Aguayo