Reading Time: 6 minutes


‣ Leonora Carrington’s dreamy paintings began to gain mainstream traction in recent years, but author Chloe Aridjis remembers working with her long before she was a household name. Aridjis writes about the artist’s life in Mexico City for the Yale Review:

I still vividly remember the coffee-brown door to Leonora’s house on Calle de Chihuahua in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma, and the number 194 that floated just above eye level. A few moments after we’d ring the bell, her face would appear from behind the door, at first opened only a crack, then fully. With horror and fascination, she would cast a glance at the wreckage across the street, at those collapsed concrete slabs, impromptu doors that were a permanent aftermath of the 1985 earthquake. And then, once she’d taken stock of the unchanging situation outside, she’d let us in.

Inside were more doors, not only to rooms but to bronze sculptures like Ing (which doubled as an oven) and Albino Hogg (a pig with long, slender legs), both of which had secret compartments. Remembering her house now, I think, too, of the paintings of her closest friend, the Spanish artist Remedios Varo, who invented dream-powered vehicles that steamed around like mental processes. Varo’s contraptions, which also had unusual doors in unusual places, possessed a convincing logic, bordering on the scientific, and looked like a cross between a child’s toy and an allegory.

What does a door signify for an émigré who has fled, or decisively left, their homeland? Leonora arrived in Mexico in 1942, riding the wave of European artists who had started arriving in the late 1930s, displaced by war. Once in Mexico, both she and Varo fell under the sway of its quotidian scenes, the spells and sorcery of the markets, the pre-Hispanic ruins in the center of town. Gérard de Nerval, who’d wandered the streets of Paris in search of a hidden magic and meaning in everything, would have been overwhelmed.

‣ Each week, the Pan-African Sisterhood Health Initiative gets together to sew reusable period pads. The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Valerie Russ reports on their sewing circle, which has distributed pads in over 50 countries so far:

Last year, in November 2023, nine P.A.S.H.I. members traveled to Zimbabwe for an international conference on how artists can use their art for social transformation. Sullivan-Ongoza was the keynote speaker.

“I focused on self-sufficiency, because that’s how we started,” she said of her talk in Zimbabwe. “We started small, with no funding. Just goodwill. We became our own resource development. Our resources were our own good intentions.”

The group traveled around Zimbabwe for more than two weeks to teach women in several communities how to make reusable pads by hand, since many don’t have access to sewing machines.

P.A.S.H.I. is not interested in sending commercially produced pads like ones used in the United States because of the “forever chemicals” in them, Sullivan-Ongoza said.

“The same chemical that’s in Pampers is inside a lot of disposable pads and tampons. We don’t know what those chemicals will do when they are that close to your reproduction system. Now, we have healthy, organic pads.”

She’s also worried about the environmental impact of commercially produced pads and tampons.

Already known as an artist, woodworker, quilt-maker, and jewelry designer, Sullivan-Ongoza added: “I’m an environmentalist, too.”

‣ Native groups in California have successfully pressured the Biden administration to institute two national monuments to protect tribal land, CNN‘s Ella Nilsen explains:

The Sáttítla National Monument in Northern California will comprise more than 220,000 acres of the Medicine Lake Highlands, sitting close to Mount Shasta and preserving a key watershed and plants native to the region.

The monument will encompass the massive and dormant Medicine Lake Volcano, and the highland’s landscape is dotted with remnants of past eruptions – including lava tubes and volcanic craters.

Both monument areas are sacred to several Native tribes that have been actively pushing the administration to protect the land from energy development. The designation will prohibit fossil fuel drilling and mining, and the area has been deemed not suitable for solar energy development, according to the Interior Department.

‣ As wildfires rage across Southern California, the historically Black community of Altadena faces displacement and cultural loss. Yeha Callahan writes for BET:

Altadena has long served as a refuge forBlack families seeking asylum from systemic racism, a sanctuary where they can thrive. The Great Migration, a movement in the early 20th century, where many African Americans moved west to escape the Jim Crow South. Altadena’s open spaces and relative affordability compared with neighboring Pasadena made it an attractive destination. By the 1920s and 1930s, a thriving Black community had taken root and flourished, overcoming redlining and restrictive housing covenants to create a rich cultural and social network.

Altadena developed a reputation as a haven for Black professionals, educators and creatives. Altadena became home to notable figures such as Willa Beatrice Brown, the first Black woman in the United States to receive a commercial pilot’s license, and cemented Altadena’s status as a center of Black excellence. Essential institutions emerged, such as churches like Altadena Baptist Church, community organizations and cultural events that instilled a sense of togetherness and pride.

The Eaton Fire hit near the center of this historic Black community, shattering homes and businesses that are more than financial investments but also cultural heritage. For generations, Black families have struggled to hold their ground in Altadena as systemic racism has threatened their place in society, cultivating strong familial and social ties. The loss of these homes is not just a private tragedy, but a loss to a community history.

Unlike reports of celebrity losses in Malibu, the devastation in Altadena illustrates how wildfires magnify inequalities, leaving poorer neighborhoods, often communities of color, with fewer resources to recover. Black churches, local organizations and neighbors have also filled the gap to provide relief, including shelter, supplies and emotional support for those displaced.

‣ The “men don’t read enough fiction” debate has reared its ugly head online again. Constance Grady explores this alleged phenomenon, our panic surrounding it, and the gendered undercurrents of reading itself for Vox:

Reading fiction has assumed the same role as therapy in public discourse: something good for one’s mental and emotional health that we should all do in order to be better citizens, and something that men — particularly straight men — are simply choosing not to do, to the detriment of society. Essayists and critics have been hitting this note for several years, but it has acquired a new darkness since the 2024 election, when men seemed to break decisively for Trump. If men had been willing to read novels, the idea is, perhaps Kamala Harris would be preparing her inaugural address right now.

These observers are pointing at something real. Men did appear to favor Trump by a significant margin in November, although we’re still waiting on data more concrete than exit polls to tell us how far that trend really goes. Many men do seem to have found themselves isolated in a media silo full of toxic visions of masculinity, one that probably helped radicalize them toward Trump and his acolytes this past election season. They also seem to read fewer books in general than women do, and they probably read less fiction than women as well.

Yet the idea of men who need new stories but refuse to read them is also exaggerated and hyperbolic. It has become its own kind of story. It’s a legend, one that’s been repeated for years, haunted by zombie statistics and dubious facts. Its continued flourishing says a lot about what our culture worries about and all the things we hope will heal us.

‣ Donald Trump has declared a desire to purchase Greenland, and the Danish king is not having it. He redesigned the royal coat of arms in response, reports Miranda Bryant for the Guardian, though I was honestly today years old when I found out that Greenland is, in fact, not independent but under Danish rule:

For 500 years, previous Danish royal coats of arms have featured three crowns, the symbol of the Kalmar Union between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which was led from Denmark between 1397 and 1523. They are also an important symbol of its neighbour Sweden.

But in the updated version, the crowns have been removed and replaced with a more prominent polar bear and ram than previously, to symbolise Greenland and the Faroe Islands respectively.

‣ Wired has started tracking every AI copyright lawsuit in the United States through this handy data visualization. Artists, writers, and anyone who creates can browse the full log here.

‣ Mark Zuckerberg just announced that Meta is getting rid of fact-checking … weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Shocker! A new Nature study disproves his claim that anti-conservative bias is causing censorship across platforms, explaining that suspended conservative accounts share quantifiably more misinformation:

(screenshot Hyperallergic via @dgrand on Blue Sky)

‣ Nobody was doing it like her:

‣ Bing-bop-booming into 2025!

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.





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