This is a transcript of The Object podcast, episode seven, first broadcast in June 2019. You can listen, subscribe, and find all-new episodes here, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In 2009, the painter Kehinde Wiley flies to Brazil. He’s there to make some portraits, in his signature style: painting brown-bodied men in the heroic  ...

By Gabriel Ritter The work of Kenneth Tam takes shape as video, sculpture, and photography that challenges our received ideas and societal norms regarding the male body as it relates to physical intimacy, sexuality, vulnerability, and private ritual. His practice involves the participation of strangers—often recruited through online message boards and forums such as Craigslist  ...

By Tim Gihring On October 12, 1846, William Spencer Cavendish dropped by the studio of Raffaelle Monti, in Milan, Italy, to inquire about a lady. Cavendish was the 6th Duke of Devonshire, widely known in England as the “bachelor duke.” He had eight of the finest homes in Britain. He had 200,000 acres of British  ...

By Nicole LaBouff Maybe you are still getting through this pandemic by distractibaking. Or maybe you have decided that bread is over and have turned to knitting, crochet, and other crafts as a way to calm your nerves. If either—or none—of these applies, you might want to consider braiding challah, a practice that brings the  ...

By Diane Richard I grew up on Butternut, the spongy white sandwich stuff that’s as far from artisanal bread as Tang (which I also grew up with) is from fresh-squeezed orange juice. So why did I just spend good hard cash to order flour from a local mill (thanks, Sunrise Flour Mill)? And why does  ...

By Tim Gihring In February 2007, a UNESCO official named Alain Godonou gave a speech in which he concluded, with some back-of-the-envelope math, that “90 to 95 percent of African heritage is to be found outside the continent in the major world museums.” Godonou is now the national director of museums in Benin, and his  ...

By Natalia Choi On the morning of the museum’s staff photo shoot, I wore my favorite bright yellow skirt. I joked with my boyfriend that it was my “yellow power” symbol, a way of drawing visibility to my Asian self so that I did not become invisible in the sea of whiteness. Growing up Asian  ...

By Diane Richard The Frankfurt Kitchen is an icon of modernist domestic architecture, a 75-square-foot ode to efficiency. It was designed in 1926, by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, as an attempt to simplify the chores of cooking and cleaning up afterward, freeing women—whose chores they were and largely remain—to pursue their own economic and personal  ...

By Tim Gihring Erika Lee’s grandfather came to the United States from China in 1918, sailing into the harbor of San Francisco. He was 16, a farmer’s son. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which was designed to stop nearly all Chinese immigrants from entering the country, had been in place for 36 years. But he had  ...

By Alyssa Machida “Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time…. So any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible—and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people—must be prepared to ‘go for broke.’ Or to put it another way, you must  ...