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This week: how to make art with a full-time job, portraits of Black marronage, artists vs. algorithms, US men’s hockey team acts up (again), snow sculptures in NYC, and more.

The ever astute Colony Little considers the ecological portraits of Claire Alexandre, who uses natural materials to explore Black diasporic history. In Burnaway, she reviews the artist’s show in Raleigh:

Harriet Jacobs was an enslaved woman from Edenton, North Carolina, who fled her abusive enslaver in 1835. After hiding within a small garret in the attic of her grandmother’s home for seven years, Jacobs escaped north and lived in fugitivity as a writer and abolitionist until she was manumitted in 1852. When she first fled, she sought temporary refuge in the southern flank of the Great Dismal Swamp, likely with the aid of maroons living in the region.

Alexandre, in her exhibition, also evokes the concept of marronage—a form of survivalist self-emancipation where enslaved Africans escaped plantations and sought refuge in remote environments, including swamps and wetlands that were notoriously inaccessible due to the terrain and dangerous wildlife. Maroons developed communities built on the subsistence of the land, using their knowledge of the terrain to facilitate the escape and refuge of other enslaved people. The artist represents these liberatory practices in many of her pieces through plant materials known in Indigenous cultures for their medicinal and healing properties.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Scholar Sarah Brouillette considers a new release by Sophie Bishop, who explores how social media and algorithmic appeal influence the way artists do (or don’t) engage online:

Bishop is working in the tradition of Howard S. Becker, who argued that making art is always shaped by “art worlds,” the networks and institutions involved in artworks’ production, distribution, and evaluation. She is not interested in moralizing or claiming that influencers are ruining art; her goal instead is to understand how “influencer creep affects artistic production and how art becomes visible to audiences.” But a chasm clearly separates a Jen Stark from a newly emerging artist trying to make her Instagram account discoverable, and Bishop’s interviews with artists reveal that many judge influencer culture as beneath them and only reluctantly participate due to economic exigency. Their own ambivalence about social media is important information and grounds for a more pointed critique—not of what people do because they feel they have little choice, but of the very circumscription of their options and the nature of required compliance.

Madeleine Schwartz recounts her visit to a show in Paris composed of artifacts and treasures from Gaza, whose ancient history is routinely overlooked and understudied, in the New York Review of Books:

In the basement of the Institut du Monde Arabe, the displaced pieces of this centuries-long history sat on wheeled tables that resembled storage carts; even the benches had wheels. The labels were simple, with no translation from the French and relatively little information. The first time I went I found it hard to see what I was looking at amid the dark lighting and large crowds. Only when I returned one morning did I feel I could take in the objects and understand the history that connected them.

It

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