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by George Melrod March 28, 2026 Los Angeles, California “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner William D. McPherson and A.J. Oliver, “The Scourged Back,” 1863, photograph. Originally published in Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863. Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois. What exactly does it   mean to make America great again? Apparently, it has a lot to do with actively whitewashing its past. The crusade kicked in exactly a year ago, in March 2025, when the White House issued its executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Accusing the Smithsonian of promoting a “divisive, race-centered ideology,” it directed the Interior Department to enact a broad review, and revise — or remove — any materials that cast American history in a negative or disparaging light. The names of Confederate generals were gleefully restored to army bases, using disingenuous logic. Descriptions of slavery, including the famous “The Scourged Back” photograph of the back of a slave crisscrossed by welts from whipping, were removed from signage, to historians’ dismay. Even positive tributes to admired icons like Harriet Tubman and deceased Black WWII veterans began to disappear. Jim Crow? Forget about it! We’re all just one big happy family! Tavares Strachan’s show at LACMA includes a room of whimsical ceramic sculptures from his “Inner Elder” series that are positioned in a field of fragrant rice grass. Courtesy of Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times. In striking synchronicity, two powerhouse Los Angeles museum shows now engage this issue of historical erasure and remembrance head-on. Even in ‘normal’ times they’d be profoundly moving, but given the moment, they feel bracingly vital. Tavares Strachan’s exuberant solo exhibition at LACMA, titled “The Day Tomorrow Began,”  mines unlikely joy and hope from the annals of neglect. Encompassing a staggering panoply of disparate mediums, the show offers an “excavation of histories that have been rendered invisible within mainstream narratives, particularly in relation to the Black diaspora.” The show opens with Strachan’s quixotic attempt at inclusion, his “Encyclopedia of Invisibility” which catalogs over 17,000 entries on people, places and events that the artist sees as unjustly ignored. It fills a giant volume set in a vitrine, while collaged pages swathe the walls in an effusive patchwork of photos, facts and artworks. The Encyclopedia’s foreword includes the warning: “Ralph Ellison reminded us that invisibility comes from a refusal to see.” Tavares Strachan poses with his installation “Six Thousand Years,” which is made up of 2,000 panels from his “Encyclopedia of Invisibility.” The leather-bound tome contains 17,000 entries that the artist wrote to bring attention to little-known facts and Black trailblazers. Courtesy of Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times. Among Strachan’s pantheon of forgotten pioneers is Matthew Henson, the African American polar explorer who joined Robert Peary on seven journeys to the North Pole. He is represented by two tapestries. In homage to Henson, Strachan himself journeyed to the Pole in 2013, and planted a Bahamian flag sewn by his mother. Another is Robert Henry Lawrence, the first Black American Astronaut, who was selected for the Manned Orbital Laboratory program, but died in an accident in 1967. He’s depicted here by a small golden urn with a likeness of Lawrence’s head doubling as its cap. But it’s more than just an effigy; working with SpaceX, the artist launched a version of the piece into orbit in 2018, symbolically fulfilling Lawrence’s dream. Although the works themselves are modest, the aspirational vision informing them feels breathtaking. The exhibition finds its magic in a garden of fantastical ceramic vessels with portraits of figures like vocalist Nina Simone and Andrea Crabtree, the first Black female sea diver in the U.S. army, that are set amid a bed of fragrant rice grass, which sensually evokes scents and symbols from Ghana. Elsewhere, installations depicting a barbershop and laundromat, both centers of Black social life in America, are brought to life by costumed performers through spoken word and song — a form of oral history. Meanwhile, a gallery of char-black statues, setting colonial conquerors and freedom fighters against one another, are presented fused at their bases. Half of them hang upside down, the implicit critiques seasoned by a giddy dose of surrealism. Martin Puryear, “Tabernacle,” 2019, steel, red cedar, American cypress, pine, makore veneer, canvas, printed cotton fabric, glass, stainless steel, 74 x 90 x 96”. Courtesy of MOCA, Los Angeles. If Strachan’s work seems imbued with hopeful hints of transcendence, MOCA’s ambitious exhibition titled “Monuments”  confronts us with the relentless legacy of the past. Co-curated by Hamza Walker of The Brick and MOCA’s Bennett Simpson, along with Hannah Burstein, Paula Kroll and artist Kara Walker, this weighty survey juxtaposes actual decommissioned statuary with works by African American artists, some pre-existing and some created for the show. The dialogues are poetic, jarring, and often deeply sobering. From the get-go the show grounds viewers in the conflict, with hunks of the graffiti-covered pedestal of the Robert E. Lee statue from Richmond, VA, and just beyond, an allegorical figure of the Confederacy holding up a dying soldier and a laurel wreath. Flanking it are works by two paragons of historically resonant abstract sculpture: Martin Puryear, whose refined, cagey work hides a cannon inside a Civil War kepi hat, and Leonardo Drew, who gathered massive blocks of cotton into a towering minimalist wall. A statue of oceanic scientist Matthew Maury, seated before a giant globe, dominates the center of the room. An ardent Confederate loyalist, he dreamed of expanding slavery southward into a vast Pan-American empire. Leonardo Drew, “Number 363,” 2023, cotton and matte medium, 115 x 138 x 52”. Commissioned by The Brick. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. An anxious hush hovers over the gallery presenting the Jefferson Davis statue, laid out on its side, spattered with paint, and surrounded by Andres Serrano’s looming Ku Klux Klan portraits peering out from within their hoods at the fallen idol. The most poignant face-off aligns statues of Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the infamous 1857 Dred Scot decision, and the obscure Wilmington, North Carolina publisher who stoked a murderous 1898 insurrection which overthrew the city’s elected biracial government. They stand opposite a wall of B&W photos from the early 1900s, by roving portrait photographer Hugh Mangum, of various anonymous Southerners, both Black and white, some overlaid atop each other on the irregular glass plate prints, gazing out in silent dignity. The caliber of contemporary African American art in this show is impressive, whether it’s the elegiac pieta-like photographs of Jon Henry, an update of the racist cinematic opus “Birth of a Nation” by Stan Douglas, or cast bronze landscapes of Ferguson, Missouri by Khalil Robert Irving. Installation view of “MONUMENTS,” October 23, 2025–May 3, 2026 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Brick. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. But the disparity in scale is formidable. Even off its pedestal, a giant double equestrian of Lee and Jackson manages to face down its counterpart, a full-sized copy of the fabled Dodge from “Dukes of Hazzard” that’s been puckishly set on end to parade the Stars and Bars on its roof. The asymmetry between these bombastic public statues, embodying the collective weight of civic authority, and the quirky visions of the individual artists selected to refute them echoes across the show. The contrast makes it clear how these monuments were not so much wistful memorials as symbols of power. The equestrian monuments of Generals Robert. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Virginia were already slated for removal when the “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 rendered them toxic. The Lee statue was melted down into ingots, but the Jackson statue had a more interesting fate. It was obtained for artist Kara Walker to reimagine, which she does to stunning effect. Displayed separately at The Brick, the resulting work, titled “Unmanned Drone,” is perhaps the show’s most potent response to the trove of pro-Confederate iconography. Kara Walker, “Unmanned Drone,” 2025, bronze statue made from Charles Keck’s 1921 statue of Stonewall Jackson, which stood in Charlottesville, Virginia and was decommissioned in 2021, 156 x 132 x 56”. Courtesy of MOCA, Los Angeles. Photo: George Melrod. After mapping out various options Walker ultimately chose to disassemble and rebuild the statue, merging the figures of the famed Confederate general and his beloved horse, Little Sorrel. In the final work, the general’s stoic face is absent as the hulking, haunted beast rises up on its hooved legs, striding forward with the lifeless body of the fallen general laid out on its back. Exemplifying the baggage, and horror, of the Lost Cause legacy, with its Confederate nostalgia and all it stands for, the undead creature lurches forward like a reanimated Frankenstein. Now part of MOCA’s permanent collection, “Unmanned Drone” will remain in Los Angeles, where it will continue to provoke reaction and debate for years to come. As well it should. Much as we might yearn to exorcise the anguished specter of the past and put it behind us, it clearly stalks among us still. George Melrod has written hundreds of articles on contemporary art and culture for such publications as ARTnews, Art in America, World Art, American Ceramics, Details, and Vogue, among others. In the 1990s, he was the New York critic for Sculpture magazine, and wrote a regular contemporary art column for Art & Antiques, for whom he worked as a Contributing Editor. A native New Yorker, he moved to LA in 1998, and has since contributed to websites such as artcritical and artillery. From 2007-2017 he served as editor-in-chief of art ltd. magazine.

by Mark Van Proyen March 28, 2026 Oakland, California Faith Ringgold, “Freedom the Grow (from the Story Quilt tradition),” c. 1990s, acrylic on canvas with fabric border (quilt), 72 x 72”. On February 23, the USS Gerald Ford made an unscheduled stop at Souda Bay on the island of Crete while on its way to rendezvous with a strike force in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ford, the most advanced aircraft carrier in the US Navy and the world, was previously deployed in the operation to support the “exfiltration” (read: kidnapping) of Nicholás Maduro in Venezuela. It can launch up to 75 advanced aircraft, while its support vessels include several guided missile destroyers capable of firing long-range Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. It was reported that the reason for the stop was to repair a problem with the ship’s plumbing system that caused its 4,500 crew members to wait in long lines before relieving themselves. One report claimed that the cause of the plumbing problem was sailors flushing undergarments into the ship’s toilets to undermine or delay what would be called Operation Epic Fury, scheduled to commence a few days later. At its outset Israeli and American military assets attacked over a thousand targets in Iran, killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other members of his inner circle. But make no mistake: the theocratic government in Iran has a number of deep layers of succession, meaning that its system is resilient to such decapitation. “What could possibly go wrong?” The Ford’s plumbing incident represents one of hundreds of potential answers to that question, reminding us of the many things that went awry in similar operations conducted against Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan during the past three decades. But, even more than those previous misadventures there was no time to think it through because the hasty timing of the operation had to work on a very tight schedule. President Trump gave his State of the Union address on February 24, making scant mention of any plans to attack Iran. Alan Sekula, “Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993” from “Fish Story,” 1989-95, chromogenic color print, dimensions variable (installation format). Poll numbers currently project that his party will lose at least two dozen seats in the House of Representatives and two seats or more in the Senate (a four seat switch would give Democrats majorities in both houses) in November’s mid-term elections, tying Trump’s hands for the remaining two years of his Presidency unless he can convince the country to rally around him as a wartime president. The initiation of hostilities that took place on February 28 fits that timeline perfectly, corresponding with the Jewish holiday of Purim while also taking place near the beginning of Ramadan to add insult to injury. To this add the distraction from the ever-worsening Epstein files controversy, which is still peeling away a steady stream of the president’s rank-and-file Republican supporters. Certainly, the situation in Iran had grown dire in January, with the unpopular government’s mass killing of dissident protestors by the tens of thousands. Estimates about the exact number of those murders vary widely, running from 20,000 to 50,000, with a government-imposed internet blackout accounting for the discrepancy. But Iran posed no imminent threat to the American homeland. Negotiations about Iran’s future nuclear capability were proceeding apace, with progress being reported by both sides, which might be one of the underlying reasons for the attack. Think back to the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration (the JCPOA) and ratified by the Senate in 2015. It was subsequently torn up by the Trump administration in 2018. Would a new nuclear deal be equally unacceptable to an already nuclear-armed Israel? And even if so, why should American foreign policy be beholden to that position at the risk of a wider regional war and major disruption of international petroleum commerce? Laura Aguilar, “Grounded # 114” from the “Grounded” series, 2006, inkjet print, 22 x 17”. Courtesy © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016. Make no mistake: immanent threat is the key criterion for any presidential use of military force undertaken without Congressional approval, one of three enumerated by the 1973 War Powers Act. The other two require 48 hours notification to Congress after undertaking hostilities, and a limit of 60-90 days should any conflict last that long. In 1973, President Nixon vetoed that legislation, only to have his veto overruled by an overwhelming vote in Congress. To go beyond the parameters of that act would and should be an impeachable offense, if the quislings in Congress had any regard for their Constitutional oaths, which they clearly do not. This even holds true for some Democrats. In the Senate vote that took place on March 4, John Fetterman (D-PA) sided with the Republican majority to endorse the attacks, while Rand Paul (R-KY) voted with the minority. On March 5, the House of Representatives voted 219 to 212 to endorse the attacks six days after the fact. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spilled the tea on March 2. Addressing questions from the press, he stated that the rationale for the American attack was that we “knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, and we anticipated that Iran would retaliate against U.S. forces in the Gulf, and therefore we hit first to reduce American casualties.” Note the fuzzy logic of Rubio’s declaration. The next day, President Trump made a mealy-mouthed claim that it was he who convinced Israeli leadership to join the campaign, no doubt after some late-night telephone communication with Benjamin Netanyahu about dogs and the tails that wag them. Soon after that, it was revealed that it was Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff who had an evidence-free intuition that Iran was two weeks away from launching a nuclear attack on Israel — this after Iran’s nascent nuclear capabilities had been “obliterated” by last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer. Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison, “Fourth Lagoon, On Mapping, Mixing, and Territory.” Courtesy of the Harrison Family Trust. As always, we need to look at who benefits at whose expense. The first beneficiary will be the defense contractors who will make generous profits by replacing the armament stockpiles expended in the conflict. The second beneficiary will be the financial institutions who will gain from the debt incurred by the conflict, yet another case of public money going into private hands. Because the conflict has already spiked oil prices (as of publication it is running in the $110 range in a volatile market, up from about $60 at the start of the year) you can bet that the so-called energy sector will benefit, not from any direct government subsidy, but from rising fuel costs that have already been showing up at the gas pump, adding additional inflationary pressure to tariff-strapped consumers. Will the Trump administration benefit politically? If the conflict goes well, yes, although not enough to change its imploding poll numbers before the upcoming mid-term elections. If the conflict becomes a long-term quagmire like other recent Middle East military adventures, you can stick a fork into Trump’s global grift club, because it will be done. The fact that Trump is willing to gamble everything on the outcome of Operation Epic Fury indicates just how desperate he is, or how confident about nullifying the results of the mid-term elections in November. This latter point should be concerning, to say the least. The legislative battle over Trump’s Save America Act is worth watching, because it is a poorly disguised voter suppression bill intended to disenfranchise a large portion of the electorate who would be disinclined to support Trump. It also rests on shaky Constitutional grounds, as Article 1, Section 4 gives States the authority over the administrations of elections. If the so-called Save America Act fails congressional passage, the prospect of the Trump administration executing a pre-election false flag operation should not be dismissed. Harun Farocki, “Serious Games 1, Watson Is Down,” 2010, still from two-channel video, color, 8 minutes. Courtesy of Artforum, artforum.com . And so, a return to our initial consideration about what might go wrong. For example, what if China were to provide weapons to the Iranians? The Iranians have already used Chinese-made hypersonic cruise missiles to devastating effect on Israel and other Gulf States. Could medium range ballistic missiles be far behind? In the short term, the People’s Republic (PRC) benefits no matter which way the conflict goes, especially since China-flagged oil tankers are allowed to pass through the same Strait of Hormuz that has been blockaded by Iran to all other commercial traffic. Prior to that closure, Chinese oil tankers were already the largest plurality of maritime visitors traveling to and from the Gulf, inviting speculation about what might happen if the U.S. chose to blockade their passage. Would China use that as an opportunity to attack Taiwan? Given that 35 percent of U.S. Naval strike capabilities are in or near the Persian Gulf, close attention needs to be focused on the Taiwan situation, especially since Taiwanese petroleum reserves are running dangerously low because of the blockade. The same holds true for Japan and South Korea. In Korea, American air defense missile systems are being disassembled for transport to the Persian Gulf, creating a dangerous vulnerability.  U.S. strategic petroleum reserves are also running low, but Canadian production and oil stolen from Venezuela mitigates the risk of all-out fuel shortages. Because pump prices run about 5 weeks behind barrel spot prices, don’t be surprised if you see seven dollar-a-gallon gas by July 4th. The economic chain-reaction stemming from this will not be a good one. Walid Raad, “My Neck is thinner than a hair: Engines,” 1996-2001, one of 100 inkjet prints, 9 7/16 x 13 3/8”. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York. Russia, however, is the major beneficiary of Operation Epic Fury. The precipitous spike in oil prices puts a lot of money into Russia’s coffers, and Trump’s easing of sanctions on Russian oil makes it possible for India and other countries to purchase their energy needs from Vladimir Putin at a significant mark-up. Europe will soon have no choice but to follow suit. On March 6th it was reported that Russia has been providing targeting information about U.S. Mid-East deployments to the Iranians, adding additional risk to US military personnel. Trump’s foreign policy team has been suspiciously mute about this embarrassing fly in the geopolitical ointment. Another factor worth considering is what China could do with the $684 billion of U.S. Treasury bonds that it currently holds, down from the peak 1.4 trillion that it held in 2013, but still a relatively significant portion of the $35 trillion public debt that we carry, amounting to $230,000 per household. If China dumped its Treasury Bond holdings, significant economic stress could result, because other bond holders would very likely follow suit, especially since we are spending in excess of a billion dollars a day on this war of choice. While thinking about all of this, we should always remember that in war, truth is always the first casualty. [Note: Images in this article are drawn from contemporary and historical works that examine war, systems, and the instability of evidence. — Ed.] Mark Van Proyen  has written commentaries emphasize the tragic consequences of blind faith placed in economies of narcissistic reward. In 2020, he retired from the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught Painting and Art History. From 2003 to 2018, he was a corresponding editor for  Art in America . In 2025 he relaunched Square Cylinder with Bill Lasarow and DeWitt Cheng. Photo credit: Mary Ijichi

by Margaret Hawkins Chicago, Illinois March 28, 2026 Approximately one in 20 Americans suffers from severe mental illness. That comes to around 17 million. Multiply that number by three or four to represent each ill person’s closest family members and you begin to get an idea of how many Americans are impacted in life-changing ways by these devastating diseases. For many, mental illness is a final, unspeakable stain. Barb's high school graduation portrait, 1961. I spent much of my early life anticipating and, frankly, dreading the moment when I would assume responsibility for my older sister. Not that we spoke of it. Although Barb hadn’t been formally diagnosed and wouldn’t be for years, my family realized sometime in her late twenties that she was severely mentally ill. It didn’t take much research to conclude that she suffered from schizophrenia. But my parents were afraid and ashamed, and they didn’t discuss it openly. When Barb refused their early offers of gentle forms of help, they, already suspicious of the medical and psychiatric establishment, were at a loss as to what more to do.  So they kept to themselves, kept stiff upper lips, and took care of her at home. Barb was never treated, never medicated, never hospitalized. My parents were understandably terrified of relinquishing her to a notoriously cruel system that seemed the only recourse for families of the mentally ill in the 1970s. And they didn’t reach out for other kinds of support either. Shame, stigma, and fear kept my parents silent. This went on for over thirty years. I spent decades thinking and worrying about what to do when my turn came. The author and her sister Barb,  1959. Those decades went by, and my parents died, first my mother, then, ten years later, my father. Suddenly I was legal guardian to my 63-year-old sister, who now lived alone in the crumbling house we’d grown up in, which she refused to leave, even to carry the garbage from the back door to the alley. Nor would she answer the phone or make a call. She had no way of getting groceries, no funds of her own and, even if she had, no inclination to pay the many bills that piled up. Our father had handled all this, and he would bristle at any suggested changes. Now it was my turn, but without a network of support any change felt impossible. My farfetched hope was to get Barb psychiatric help while somehow honoring her wish to stay at home. I’d read about drugs that might alleviate some of her symptoms, symptoms that appeared to torment her and isolate her from even the most rudimentary human interactions. But how to connect her with a psychiatrist and get these drugs prescribed? How to get her to take them? That these things could in fact happen still feels like a miracle. Vincent Van Gogh, “Old Man in Sorrow (At Eternity’s Gate),” 1890, oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 25 3/4”. Courtesy of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterio, The Netherlands. But it’s not a miracle available to most who suffer this type of condition. My sister had a place to stay, an advocate when she couldn’t advocate for herself, and a team of dedicated professionals — social worker Wendy Trafny, psychiatrist Dr. Steven Weinstein, and caregiver Yvonne Flowers — who stepped forward and went above and beyond their conventional duties to help Barb achieve a fuller life. Barb was lucky. People with severe mental illness are among the most marginalized people in America. Many of them land in prison or are otherwise institutionalized and forgotten; others live on the street. All of them deserve care and respect. Shelter and food. It shouldn’t be so difficult to ensure a decent life for these, our neighbors and fellow human beings, and it shouldn’t depend on luck but on well-conceived public policy. William Hogarth, “Scene in Bedlam,” 1835 , etching and engraving, 4 1/16 x 16”. Courtesy of the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. My book,  “At Home with Schizophrenia,”  is a revised and updated version of my earlier book, “How We Got Barb Back.” It tells my family’s story, beginning with Barb’s promising early life. Part One takes the reader through the inexplicable changes we observed in Barb, the climate of shame that surrounded mental illness when it struck my sister, my parents’ fears and the hopelessness that resulted in the stasis of their life with Barb over many years. Part Two describes what happened next. This book is an homage to people everywhere who suffer from severe mental illness, to those who care for and about them, and in particular to those who helped my family. It is also a plea to collectively shuck off the shame, stigma, and silence that surrounds mental illness. It is evidence that help and change are possible. But much work remains. Families caring for mentally ill loved ones still face terrible choices — medical, financial, and personal. Open discussion, better laws, community mental health care, a kinder and more compassionate public policy will all help. Simple respect for our fellow travelers is the heart of it. The Netherlands and the UK are light years ahead of the United States in how they handle this particularly human form of illness. Here we valorize independence and individualism, but it’s past time to embrace less selfish values.  I have seen that it is possible to reach someone who seems to be locked out of the world by this mysterious condition we know as schizophrenia. With a small dose of antipsychotics and the respect and help of many, my sister is now living a life my parents could hardly have imagined for her. It’s still not easy, but it’s possible.  Margaret Hawkins  is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.  Visit  Margaret Hawkins’ website.

by Bill Lasarow “We live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” — Presidential aide Stephen Miller, New York Times , 01/06/26 The current president’s pardons issue this message: “If you break the law to protect me, you will be supported, and if you uphold the law to restrain me, you will be persecuted.” — New York Times   Editorial , 01/01/26 Molly Crabapple, “George Floyd protests,” 2020. Courtesy of the New York Review of Books. Kudos to the citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Kudos to the now-adult victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Kudos to Marc Elias. Kudos to Canadian PM Mark Carney. Kudos to Rachel Maddow’s ongoing survey of citizen resistance around the country and her team’s transition to MS NOW. Maybe the most important point is that these kudos barely scratch the surface. The national backlash continues to build, as it must, and will for years to come. Right through the mid-terms and then on to the next cycle. The very public Congressional testimony of Jack Smith made this abundantly clear, just as sub-zero weather hit much of the country. In Thousand Oaks I picked my wife a bouquet of fresh roses (yes, we will prune them … next week; lots of plants mistook our January as the arrival of spring) that have been fresh on our table for more than a week. These are not late season stragglers, and our millions of demonstrators are not holdovers from an earlier era. It is fair to say that, speaking as a proud Boomer, this is our kids (and grandkids’) world. But the year 2026 is one that has long concerned me. We will celebrate the 250th Fourth of July, hooray. Taryn Simon, “The White House Pen,” 2015, photograph. © Taryn Simon courtesy of the artist and the New York Times. Now some reality: what we have seen entering the second year of the Fascist Party of America’s rule enters its first full year with a Fascist Party-designed budget. Indeed, this commentary on what is to come in 2026 began taking shape well before the end of 2025. The stories of rapid expansion of what is to be the concentration camp system, or gulag if you will, designed not for immigrants but American citizens are now multiplying. It is easy to dispose of those voters if you know how. The murder of Renee Good (a last name, as some say, from central casting) summed it up when Caligula, at his most lying evil, without having so much as the victim’s name, declared her to be a radical domestic terrorist. Naturally, as the truth-telling videos emerged, he proceeded to instruct his willingly compliant AG to launch DOJ inquiries into the dead victim … oh, and her spouse. “Fucking bitch” indeed. As for the killer, nada . Such a joke, especially as Good’s dad was  a MAGA voter. Now we must process Alex Pretti, a bolder warning shot at us American citizens. Native born. An ICU nurse. White. And Liberal, liberal, liberal. You betcha’. Hey, my name is Spartacus. Alejandro Cartagena, “Carpooler #21” from the series “Carpoolers,” 2014 photograph. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Do not flinch from the malevolent, mafia-driven actions taken by Caligula’s networkers. And don’t assume that their current move is of any tactical value other than to seize attention and to provoke. And tease. They know their boss. They let him be  the boss. He alone wields the power of the pardon. Where will the polls be in three or six months? What will they look like after Labor Day? How positively enormous, not forgetting the already enormous appeal of Nancy Pelosi’s purposive, relentlessly for-the-children brand of liberalism. Not forgetting the organization Indivisible’s essential role. Not forgetting a whole national network of more localized organizations, all dedicated to the very principles of the American Founders, to the progressive reforms of the administrations from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR to Johnson. I made this point a long time ago: Stephen Miller for the first fiscal year has the vastly increased budget control that allows for a continuing influx of new ICE agents and a large network of concentration camps intended to harbor not just non-citizen immigrants, but tens of thousands of white American liberals. David Deweerdt, “Untitled (06),” ink and acrylic on mylar, 39 3/8 x 27 1/2”. Courtesy of Ryan Graff Contemporary, San Francisco. The shootings could become mass events (to our eyes; mass demonstrations in Iran have so far led to over 6,000 killings and 40,000 incarcerations) as the November elections draw close. Add together the budgets overseen by Miller, Noem, and Patel their group of annual budgets leap from about $9 Billion to over $40 Billion. This is the very definition ofjj big and intrusive government, not exactly the conservative idea of small government. The corruption of certain officers of the law is rooted in their racism and sexism, a return to the era preceding the success of the Civil Rights movement. The descendants of the Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society have been there all along, never gone away, but never before had they seized control of the US government. Now we are dealing with the worst American crisis since the Civil War, and the year of State Terror  Has Arrived. Bill Lasarow , Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the  Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles  (1987); and  Visual Art Source  (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain . In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder  with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.

by Margaret Hawkins ICE agent smashing a car window. Photo courtesy of ProPublica. On a recent Sunday I was sitting in my 20-year-old car, waiting to merge into traffic, when I heard a loud bang next to my face. My side window had exploded and suddenly I was covered in broken glass. I thought I’d been shot. I felt myself for blood, waited for pain. Later my mechanic told me the regulator arm had snapped when I depressed the button to open the electric window. I was lucky it was safety glass that had rained down on me. Ben Von Wong, “Turn Off the Plastic Tap,” 2021, garbage and mixed media. It became a funny story about bad things being not so bad compared to what they might have been, but that first thought lingers. Something that previously wouldn’t have occurred to me now seemed quite possible, the way planes ramming into buildings became possible in September, 2001. Three days before my window blew up, Renee Good had been shot in the face, execution-style, by an ICE agent while sitting in her car in a residential neighborhood of Minneapolis. The sight, played over and over on CNN, was impossible to forget. Now it’s happened again. ICE agents fired ten shots into protester Alex Pretti while he lay restrained on the ground. In both cases, government officials are defending the killers. People of color may be mumbling “so what’s new,” but to many this feels like an announcement: The violent unraveling of American democracy is officially underway. Nicholas Poussin, "The Massacre of the Innocents," ca. 1628-29, oil on canvas, 41 x 54". Courtesy of Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. The American government is starting fights, like a drunk in a bar, at home and around the world. Citizens are dragged out of their homes and deported. Protesters peacefully exercising our First Amendment rights are restrained and thrown on the ground. A foreign country is invaded. An international student emailed to say she expected to miss my first class because her passport had been questioned and she couldn’t reenter the country. Our government is blowing up boats in neutral waters. In places where our interventions are most needed, we side with the bullies. Back home, retribution for disloyalty to the established power is becoming routine. And all the while, the economy booms, for some at least. The president and his family have made over a billion dollars since his reelection; so much for the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. People say it all comes down to money. But money confers power, and power, ultimately, is about vanity, about being admired, loved, feared. Our president, who renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War, was so insulted that he didn’t receive a Nobel Peace Prize that he threatened to invade Greenland. Which sounds like a late-night punchline, except it’s not. Image of baby hawk, courtesy of Daily Birder, dailybirder.com . Meanwhile, our planet is flooding and burning. Microplastics have invaded all our bodies. Eighty thousand tons of plastic trash floats in the Pacific Ocean, having formed its own island, which is three times the size of France. Probably the planet will figure out a way to recover, possibly by expunging us, although it may not need to. The human world feels like it’s about to sink under the weight of its own awfulness. Violence, chaos, greed, lawlessness, and outright cruelty are tipping the ship. No one knows what will happen next, but it doesn’t look good. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, recently announced at 85 seconds to midnight, has never been closer. There is no safety glass. Artists, scientists, and a few honest politicians have predicted end times for a while. Ian McEwan’s latest novel, “What We Can Know,” imagines our decline from the perspective of literary historians in the future. They look back on us from the twenty-second century with nostalgia and envy. In McEwan’s vision of the future, war and environmental catastrophe have flattened Europe and North America. Both continents are half under water and what’s left is controlled by gangs. It’s a dangerous and bland world that he envisions. The rich variety of life we now take for granted — travel, food, culture, nature – has all but disappeared. Most bird and wildflower species have gone extinct. People eat laboratory food. George Saunders video interview , New York Times, January, 2026. George Saunders, an American Buddhist who speaks like a regular guy and is famous for his philosophical kindness, offers another perspective. He says he believes in karma but that since we can’t understand it we must try to do our best not to judge each other. He urges us to remember three things: We are not permanent. We are not the most important thing. We are not separate. Imagine if this administration took his advice. Beauty, at least for now, still abounds. Nature, when it’s not killing us, is reliably spectacular. It dazzles daily. Snow blankets the world softly today in Chicago. A fluffy baby hawk landed on our fence and sat there for a while. No doubt she’d arrived to kill something, but her feathery anatomy was gorgeous. Even humans do beautiful things. I’m not a rabid sports fan but I can’t stop thinking about Caleb Williams’ seemingly impossible touchdown pass in the Bears’ playoff game against the Rams, tying the game with 18 seconds to go. The sportscasters described it as the best play they’d ever seen. Nobody would have predicted it was even possible. Nobody else would have tried it. But sometimes a long shot is all you’ve got. The survival of civilization as we know it is beginning to seem like it depends on a similarly impossible-seeming Hail Mary, some mix of crazy hope, poise, and urgency. I can’t even imagine what that would be. I try not to think about the fact that, in the end, the Bears still lost. Frank Piatek, “Osiris the Deadman’s Starry Tree,” 1972, oil and alkyd on canvas. Addendum, on beauty: On January 7 Chicago artist Frank Piatek died . He was a beautiful painter, and beloved professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He’d survived childhood polio and been selected for the Whitney Biennial at the age of 24. At 81, he was still teaching full time. Frank held unpopular political opinions in the artist community in which he traveled, and often prefaced his opinions with the phrase “On the other hand.” He was an unusually thoughtful man, a philosopher. Three weeks before he died, he told me in his typically modest way that he was thinking of asking the school to “let” him teach part-time. It was getting hard for him to get around, he said, in his characteristically uncomplaining way. He wanted to keep teaching The Spiritual in Art, a course he’d created. Frank, a religious man open to many forms of mysticism and faith, was ushered out of the earthly realm by a Catholic priest. Frank’s wife, artist Judith Geichman, said it best. “He led a beautiful life.” Margaret Hawkins  is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. Visit  Margaret Hawkins’ website.

by Liz Goldner Illustration by Edel Rodriguez. In March 2025 I wrote about  The Coming Replay of “Degenerate Art”  in the TDC eJournal. My motivation was that the Trump administration’s cultural dictatorship is striving to trivialize Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution — what the Atlantic Magazine  called our “country’s narrative.” The January 22, 2026 Atlantic  article explains, “George Brown Goode … wanted it to consist of ‘museums of record’ — cultural institutions that tell canonical stories about the history of the nation — and today, it does. Its museums do far more than any privately funded ones to shape and crystallize our country’s narrative.” The Smithsonian, which has resisted White House efforts to oversee its operations, is facing a deadline to turn over records about its programming and other matters to the Trump administration. Photograph courtesy of Salwan Georges/ The Washington Post  via Getty Images. There were many indications 10 months ago that the Trump administration was already disparaging Smithsonian exhibitions while affecting other Washington D.C. museums and cultural institutions, including the Kennedy Center. Trump had ordered the Art Museum of the Americas to cancel two shows, one featuring black artists, the other presenting queer artists. The National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian had already closed their offices supporting work by racial minorities. I referenced Hitler’s 1937 “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition, held in Munich and throughout Germany, which “was a blatant political attack on culture,” as I wrote. “It revealed Hitler’s revenge against the modern art world, which had earlier rejected his own artistic efforts.” I compared that deranged sentiment to Trump’s growing denigration of fine and documentary art today. National Museum of the American Indian, “Unbound, A Warrior’s Story, Honoring Grandpa Blue Bird.” I recently published an article with a similar theme, “When Power Attacks Art ,” in LMU Magazine. The article addresses the Nazis’ seizure of their nation’s culture in the 1930s and 40s. Their goal was to suppress the work of leading modernist painters, and to force their art and art institutions to conform to the Nazi definitions of “authentic” German art. While my article concentrates on the Nazis’ heinous acts, one sentence refers to our current era: “That effort (by the Nazis) provides a cautionary tale for our times, as museums nationwide are having their funds cut, and their collections are under attack for representing ‘woke’ themes, deemed politically unacceptable.” The New York Times  on January 8th reported that the Trump administration is pressuring the Smithsonian into presenting “a primarily positive” view of America. This article explains that the Smithsonian received an ultimatum from the White House that, if they did not “clean up” their act, Vice-President J.D. Vance would ensure that new appointees to the Smithsonian board are aligned with the Trump agenda. Historians, it reported, are concerned in the wake of Trump's directive that the administration is striving to rewrite history and to compromise the truth. Also in January, The Guardian  wrote that Trump “wanted museums to reflect a Maga vision of American history that was nationalist and triumphalist, and downplayed reflection on darker aspects of its past, specifically its history of slavery.” Hyperallergic  reported in “House Votes to Fund the Arts, Despite Trump Threats” that the House of Representatives voted in favor of full or near-full funding for the nation’s federal cultural agencies in spite of threats from the Trump administration. That funding included an $1.08 billion appropriation for the Smithsonian. A protester holds up a sign in support of the Smithsonian Institution at a Hands Off rally in Washington, D.C., April 2025. Photo: Amaury Laporte via Flickr , CC BY 2.0 . And MSNOW  reported that freedom of intellectual expression is at stake at several Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of the American Indian. Concerned about NMAI, I recently visited the museum, aware that the venue, which opened in 2004, was an effect of the Smithsonian acknowledging that Native Americans have played a significant role in our culture and history — even as our government has historically targeted them for removal and genocide. NMAI, designed and run by Indigenous people, represents numerous Native American nations. My visit there revealed that NMAI’s mission is intact and that it remains dedicated to telling the historical truth about our country. Among the many exhibitions on view, the expansive “Americans” is a bold installation demonstrating how Indian images, iconography, names and stories are infused into our country’s history and contemporary life. A display on the museum’s third floor describes “The Indian Removal Act of 1830.” Spearheaded by President Andrew Jackson, the Act focused on Indian nations that were regarded as obstacles to economic development, including settlers’ expansionist plans, and a threat to national security. National Gallery of Art, January 26, 2026. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The Removal Act provided "for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.” As the display explains, many Native leaders and government officials maintained that the act went against democratic values. “Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations” makes clear that treaties are essential to Native history and contemporary tribal life and identity. Yet most of the 368 treaties signed by U.S. commissioners and tribal leaders were not honored by the U.S. government, resulting in the devastating treatment of Native Americans. That these NMAI installations, several accompanied by moving videos narrated by Robert Redford are still in place is a hopeful sign for the fate of the Smithsonian, and a reflection of the public’s ardent desire to preserve the nation’s history. Considering the numerous people nationwide who persist in protesting the Trump administration’s deleterious policies and actions, our Smithsonian museums will hopefully continue to tell the nuanced stories of America’s history and culture, and will not suffer the fate of Hitler’s 1937 “Entartete Kunst.” Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by Liz Goldner Laguna Art Museum , Laguna Beach Continuing through January 18, 2026 The Legacy Project, “The Great Picture,” 2006, the world's largest photograph on a single seamless muslin canvas, 32 x 111 feet. Courtesy of The Legacy Project. “Eternal Construction” is a group exhibition of photographers who examine California’s constantly evolving landscape. Through the eyes of 13 individuals and one consortium of six artists, the show traverses the nexus of fine art and documentary photography, while exploring our state’s evolving relationship to land, architecture and infrastructure. The title of the exhibition reflects California’s continually built, decaying and reinvented environment. The show lends insight to the vastly versatile aesthetic aspects of recent photography even as it strives to convey optimism about the human capacity to evolve and rebuild. That versatility encompasses images inspired by Impressionist landscape painting, the Hudson River School of painting, modern art movements ranging from minimalism, hard-edge and abstraction, meticulously staged and photographed abstract scenarios, and more. Jacques Garnier, “At the Crossroad,” 2015, gelatin silver print, 20 x 30”. Courtesy of the artist. A contact print of the original “The Great Picture” (2006) by The Legacy Project (Jerry Burchfield, Mark Chamberlain, Jacques Garnier, Rob Johnson, Douglas McCulloh and Clayton Spada) is perhaps the most important work here. The original 3,375 square foot photo portrays the control tower, structures and runways of the original El Toro Marine Air Station in Irvine, viewed against a backdrop of the San Joaquin Hills. To create the picture, the six photographers and 400 volunteers converted a jet-fighter hangar into a camera obscura and made their exposure through a 6-millimeter aperture onto a single seamless muslin canvas. The original fuzzy black and white photograph, depicting the decommissioned marine base, flanked by hi-tech Irvine, California and the undulating hills beyond, bears resemblance in subject matter and style to California’s Impressionist landscapes, especially with its cross hatching. When The Legacy Project was formed more than two decades ago, Irvine Mayor Larry Agran and his supporters were hopeful that the burgeoning Great Park would become a world class development to rival New York City’s Central Park. But as an example of human-led environmental decline, conservative Irvine politics unfortunately shut down those plans, enabling the parkland to be built into several bland housing developments.  Tom Lamb, “Green36, 2019,” aerial color photograph, printed by the artist on Arches BFK with pigment inks, 50 x 50.” Courtesy of the artist. The contrasting black and white photos by Jacques Garnier (who was part of the Legacy Project), portraying the pared down exteriors of Southern California buildings, formally reflect Minimalism and Hard-edge abstraction. They also display skillful use of contrasting light and dark, while reflecting on our experience with the built environment. His gelatin silver print “At the Crossroad” (2015) contrasts the exterior of a large industrial building against a stark black background. The architecture is reduced to an austere brutalist design that conveys not menace but profound harmony and grace. Garnier's “Hymns to Silence” (2021) series expressed his passion for architecture, art history and poetry. As he explained in the “Hymns” catalog, “The negative space of these deconstructed images is the pause between the notes of the music, a disruption, to make you create your own interpretation and to enjoy the silence. This emptiness allows for potential.” Tom Lamb, a landscape, architectural and aerial photographer, contributes images shot from a helicopter. He refers to these urban landscapes, including airfields as seen from above, as “Marks on the Land.” In them, virgin land is woven among the built structures and intersections.  An excellent example is “Green36” (2019) of the Ontario International Airport. The photograph transforms the airfield into an attractive interpretation of abstract expressionism. The maneuvering of the aircraft was crucial to producing a result that appears deceptively effortless. Lamb explains, “Looking toward earth, directing the pilot to spin around, dip the nose, fly sideways or backwards, and even cut the engines to float downward, all to capture the right image.” Jeremy Kidd, “Big Horn Palm Desert,” 2014, archival print on aluminum, 35 x 84 1/8”. Courtesy of the artist. Jeremy Kidd’s “Big Horn Palm Desert” (2014), an archival print on aluminum, presents a panoramic view of the desert town at dusk. As the most painterly visual in this exhibition, it is inspired by the Hudson River School, and includes a rocky vista with cacti in the foreground and Palm Desert in the background. The finely wrought print is actually a composite of four individual photos taken over the course of the day and evening. The show’s curator Tyler Stallings explains, “Kidd’s digitally fused landscapes contrast with more austere or documentary approaches, presenting perception itself as a constructed environment shaped through accumulation and editing.” The architectural photos of Julius Shulman, known as “Case Studies,” contrast dramatically with the others that critically depict the built environment. Shulman’s photo of Richard Neutra’s classically modern von Sternberg House (1947) is one of several images that “are not mere records of buildings, but carefully composed celebrations of an aesthetic ethos — precision, openness, and control,” according to Stallings. The image elegantly captures the home’s sweeping lines, reflective water feature and the integration of structure and landscape. Schulman’s photographs express reverence for Neutra’s architecture, whose designs respected and harmonized with the land at a time when the boxy homes of Levittown and other manufactured communities were beginning to invade the country. Jeff Brouws, “Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations, Union 76, Ludlow, California 1986-88,” 1992, gelatin silver print, 20 x 16”. Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach. Robert von Sternberg’s colorful images of trailer parks, gas stations, and roadside structures, hung near those of Jeff Brouws’ black and white abandoned gas stations, are the virtual opposite of Schulman’s polished beauty. Theirs is a gritty hyper-realism that gropes for beauty where the rest of us only see ruin. Barbara Kasten, “Construction A&A,” 1984, Polacor ER Photograph, 28 x 21 ½”. Courtesy of the Richard H. Mumper Trust. Barbara Kasten’s photos are the most colorful and abstract of the group. Using mirrors, colored lights and a variety of props to construct her conceptually driven pieces, Kasten achieves the visual effect of stage sets that mimic abstract paintings. If she was aiming to capture our constructed environment, the central premise of the exhibition, that scenario becomes a purely fictional exercise of imagination. Her photos serve to affirm the aesthetic versatility of photography in a way that activates and reveals the creative inventiveness of this wide-ranging exhibition. Liz Goldner  is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009.  Liz Goldner’s Website .

by Bill Lasarow “The desecration is not a broken façade. It’s a broken covenant.” —Rick Wilson, 10/24/25 Anselm Kiefer, “Sülamith,” 1983, oil, emulsion, shellac, acrylic paint, woodcut, and straw on linen, 113 1/2 x 146”. Courtesy of SFMOMA, San Francisco. The tearing down of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom — one among other acts of cultural and architectural vandalism — is emblematic of the monopoly on power that the American Dictator aspires to. He is his own Albert Speer, an aesthetic monotone that knows one color and one size. In his own mind, one plus one equals great, and the rest of you are as decadent as Stephen Miller and Adolf Ziegler insist we are. George Grosz, “The Pillars of Society,” 1926 oil on canvas. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society/Estate of George Grosz. The bond it violates is that the elected president assumes responsibility for the good of all Americans. Caligula’s violation is rooted in the pleasure he takes in humiliating and silencing all of us who have devoted our careers, indeed our lives, to the pursuit of aesthetic meaning and any other form of dissent. He has declared his war on the First Amendment and on the first of FDR’s four most basic rights: to free speech and free expression. The larger impact he mirrors is the violation of the economic security of about 15% of American citizens, forget about  immigrants lacking citizenship status. Many of these folks voted for the strongman not because of his fascism or the mafia tactics he most authentically understands. They voted for his promise of relief from the increased cost of living. Not two weeks before the East Wing was abruptly torn down, Caligula extolled his love for the building, saying he would build his ballroom without touching the White House itself. The lie was as gross as ever, and so predictable. The running count during this character’s first term was both a national concern and a running joke. Given this second term, it’s barely a point of discussion. How many during this past ten months? Is anyone keeping count? Do we even care anymore? Trevor Paglen, “The Salt Pit, Northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan” from “The Black Sites,” 2006, C-Print, 24 x 36”. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most persistent falsehoods during the campaign, when we expect candidates to exaggerate routinely, was his routine assurance that the cost of living would go down, that inflation would be tamed (as though during the Biden Democratic administration it had not already come down from the post-pandemic spike of close to 9% to 2.5% already), and that tariffs would bring in trillions of dollars. No one alive recalls Smoot-Hawley anyway, and enough voters were seduced by the theater of grievance into believing Caligula was truly their champion. The White House, hey, just a building. Bricks and mortar. The devil’s bargain behind the Potemkin facade was always the extortionist’s racket: “I’ll keep you safe, but it will cost you.” The mafia family has breezed past the Emoluments Clause like it was a minor footnote. And each round of the führer’s signing orders has demanded submission in return for rescue from a crisis that he and his lieutenants have only deepened. The trivial and profound have been stirred into a toxic brew that has brought us to the new fiscal year. November First, 2025. Sue Coe, “The Pentagon Wound Lab,” 1985, mixed media and collage on canvas, 71 1/2 x 83 1/2”. Courtesy © of the artist. The government shutdown has served the purpose of shifting attention away from what this November First is really about, a national budget now designed to lock America into servitude to the Predator in Chief and his inner circle of conspirators, fanatics, thugs, and lackeys. The politics must of necessity be risky, rooted as they are in a radical break with our history, not to mention Caligula’s advanced age and deteriorating mental and physical health. So this transition has to go fast, even as around 40 million Americans are being reduced to a state of economic panic. More than half the country gets this, since much has had to be done in broad daylight. Everyone who names this treason for what it is gets lumped into a separate basket called “radical,” “socialist,” “communist,” and most importantly “the enemy within.” However the situation is resolved, want to guess who will declare himself our knight on a white horse? And don’t cross him, or next year it will be worse. It’s easy, from my position, to sit back and write about the coming totalitarian horrors, and how recovering or giving up on American democracy is the central issue of our time. Many of the very people for whom the Democratic Party successfully won a real share of what was once called the American Dream have turned their backs on the moral and policy formula that made for an economy and middle class of unprecedented size and strength. The empty promises, false claims, and menacing allure of the fascist siren are there for all to see, and around 60% of voters can now see it according to current polls. But for around 40 million Americans, that clarity does not put food on the table. Poor quality food at that. Kara Walker, “Unmanned Drone,” 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Photo: Ruben Diaz. That still leaves people like myself and my family among the majority who are making out pretty well, thank you. We may be a bit put out by a new round of inflation and health care costs. We have our savings, sure, but we’ve owned our home for decades and have a treasure chest of equity, our own private safety net should we ever need it. We bought insurance on our life, our home and our health care, and now that my wife and I are senior citizens we have our retirement benefits, that monthly Social Security check, and Medicare, all in this regime’s crosshairs. Let me tell you, I know that me and my family will be fine for as long as I draw breath. Shutdown? We are virtually untouched. And my senior friends? Doin’ fine. What I vote on first is the break from the moral and political foundations of democracy. I was born just five years after we shut down the German Holocaust, close enough to that history to still feel its deep chill — and to sense its return. I can also see why so many fellow Americans feel that same chill and can only trace it as far as their kitchen table, or a visit to the doctor, or a missed paycheck. November First is the first day of the 2025-26 fiscal year. The first day in which $170 billion starts pouring into ICE to spend on rounding up far more than just “the worst of the worst,” another Big Lie, to turn its primary focus on “the enemy within.” It’s the first day in which Stephen Miller gets to fulfill his fantasy of building a national network of concentration camps designed to render citizens from the most prominent to the most ordinary invisible. The first day towards a nation in which many will be free to dine out, attend concerts and museums, take vacations, have families … under the first commandment of a fearful age: “be nice to me.” How very innocuous. Customers watch the Dodgers’ final World Series game against the New York Yankees on October 30, 2024, at Distrito Catorce in Boyle Heights. Photo Courtesy of Jessica Perez/Boyle Heights Beat. And the price of disobedience? Detention for anyone who asks the impertinent question, who participates in a future No Kings Day, who writes or even jokes critically about the price of eggs or the collapse of the Founders’ guardrails. November First, 2025 is the date on which the game is truly on. It also happens to be the day of Game 7 of the World Series. My home team? The Dodgers. I’m a native Angeleno who as a boy used to go to sleep listening to the great Vin Scully. I grew up privileged to fulfill my own dreams of personal freedom and autonomy. Baseball Game 7s are both rare and exhilarating, and whether my team wins or loses the real significance of the day will be relegated to the background for a few more hours. All I want for every kid in America and all around the world is to be in a position to enjoy such things. So the coming defeat, as a matter not of sport but history, of the mafia model of fascism masquerading as governance is my top priority as a voter because I can afford that luxury. A luxury that around 40 million Americans haven’t got. Bill Lasarow , Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the  Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles  (1987); and  Visual Art Source  (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain .  In 2025 he relaunched Square Cylinder  with Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.

by Margaret Hawkins Paul Cezanne, “The Cardplayers,” 1893-1896, oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 22 1/4”. Courtesy of the Musée D’Orsay, Paris. As if Americans weren’t already polarized by the messes we’re entrenched in, Charlie Kirk’s assassination took it to a new level. Politicians and religious leaders spoke about rising above our differences, but that’s not at all what happened. If anything, trash talking intensified. Everybody doubled down on their side. What happened: A twenty-two-year-old climbed onto a rooftop with his grandpa’s decades-old military rifle and aimed at an incendiary right-wing pundit speaking to a crowd of college kids. He dropped the speaker with one shot to the neck. On camera. The ensuing public discourse focused not on gun control or better mental health care — we seem to have abandoned those ideals as even possible — but about whether it’s OK to mourn the killing of someone you disagree with. Whether it’s OK to commit violence against someone whose ideas you consider repugnant. And if Kirk isn’t your flashpoint, pick another. On either side. Two weeks after Kirk’s murder, the beachfront house of a liberal South Carolina circuit court judge and her Democratic ex-senator husband was blown up and burned to the ground. And it’s not just here and not just about politics. In London, people were shot coming out of a synagogue on Yom Kippur. Name your own horrible adventure. Everywhere, people are withdrawing to insular pods of self-righteous certainty. Political violence is terrifying no matter where it originates. For many on the left, especially those for whom the peace sign was once a universal greeting, it’s also disorienting. The recent trend in blowing up and burning down public servants’ houses — think Josh Shapiro, the sitting Governor of Pennsylvania — proves that the problem goes deeper than guns. The quaint idea that being on the left means favoring kindness, or at least tolerance, has all but vanished. What seems undeniable now is that meanness and violence and philosophical rigidity are not only the norm, they’re the ideal the emanates from the very core of the Trump regime and spreads from there like an invasive weed.  Martin Engelbrecht after Charles Le Brun, A man glowering, expressing hatred or jealousy, 1732, engraving. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. Fortunately, that is not nearly always the case. The orderly No Kings Day protests of October 18th proved the left can be peaceful, even en masse, even when goaded with a coarse and absurd meme showing the president wearing a crown and dropping feces bombs on a crowd of protestors. But day-to- day discourse between disagreeing parties has continued to deteriorate. The self-righteousness of the left has calcified into something even colder than anger: contempt. This rigid certainty may be the ultimate result of the very principles the country was built on — self-reliance, individualism, exceptionalism. For better and worse, this is how we’ve gotten where we are. To look at it from another perspective, consider British psychiatrist Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s groundbreaking brain research. In “The Matter with Things” (2021, Perspectiva Press) he argues that his study of brain hemisphere asymmetry in schizophrenics reveals a parallel disintegration in Western society. Societies that begin with flexibility, imagination, and creativity lose these qualities as they become more hierarchical and less wholistic. He says this decline mimics the way schizophrenia affects the brain, causing it to perceive the world in pieces rather than as a whole in which unlike parts can still fit together. He refers to the Western world’s current state as one in which “people aren’t trained to think critically about their own opinions.” We only see the small parts of the world we’re comfortable seeing and fail to notice, he says, that “things that look like opposites may cohere.”  Video still / Interview with Dr. Iain McGilchrist A few years ago I started getting emails from something or someone that calls itself DeepDharma. I didn’t recognize the name and sometimes weeks passed without a message. Then a couple would show up in close proximity. They appeared to be condensed principles of Zen Buddhism and they never asked for money or for me to attend meetings or events, or do anything at all. No ads, no product endorsements. No music, memes, jokes or barbs. No political endorsements. Just thoughts, often quite brief. When I finally started to open and read them, they always felt oddly pertinent. The messages come in appetizing little thought-bits, sometimes as short as a sentence, perfectly suited to the shrunken attention span most of us, increasingly, suffer from. Sometimes they end with a surprising twist, like a koan. They appear, I read them, I forward some to a childhood friend, then let them subside into the vast cloud of email never to be looked at again. Zen brushstroke that serves as DeepDharma logo. But sometimes the ideas linger. Maybe that’s because lately the messages that stick in my head are the best reply I’ve heard to what’s going on in the world. Maybe they are the only remedy. Allow me to share a few; I believe that’s the intention. A recent one was titled “Arrogance.” It ended this way:  We are not inferior to anyone We are not superior to anyone We are not equal to everyone.    Easily understood, until that last tricky line alluding to individuality.    Another line that stuck in my mind:   We are not punished for our anger.  We are punished by our anger.     Dharma is a term in Buddhism and Hinduism that refers to the nature of reality. I like the simplicity of that definition. Simple, not easy. Here’s my favorite, titled “Believe Only This.” It lists the 10 sources of information the Buddha recommends dismissing, an idea that seems strikingly modern and proves that disinformation is an age-old problem. It’s the best advice I’ve seen for how to approach our current news cycles. Roughly categorizable as “religious,” the ideas put forth in DeepDharma are the opposite of dogma. In fact, they support critical thinking, a practice that seems to have gone out of fashion. Here is the post: “Believe Only This” The Buddha provides ten specific sources that should not be used to accept a specific teaching as true, without further verification: Oral history Tradition News sources Scriptures or other official texts Logical reasoning Philosophical reasoning Common sense One’s own opinions Authorities or experts One’s own teacher Leshan Giant Buddha, Sichuan Province, China, carved 713-803 (Tang Dynasty) from cliff face onto red bed sandstone, ca. 71 meters tall. Courtesy of UNESCO World Heritage. Instead, the Buddha says, only when one personally knows that a certain teaching is skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness, and that it is praised by the wise, should one then accept it as true and practice it. The emphasis remains on one's personal knowledge of whether a particular teaching reduces or eliminates the defilements of greed, hatred and ignorance, or increases them, in which case it should be rejected. Margaret Hawkins  is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. Visit  Margaret Hawkins’ website.

by DeWitt Cheng August 30, 2025 It’s a Perfect Administration The best people, hired by a stable genius, make perfect calls. Until they don’t, and then … OUT! Zelenskyy Just Doesn’t Have the Cards Inspired by the second memorable red carpet summit with Putin and the May Oval-Office “ingrate” ambush of Ukraine’s leader by Trump, Vance, and MTG’s current beau. The Roberts Barons Club Our gang of six injudicious MAGA judicial giants will go down in history as cartoon characters. Americam Iteram Magnam Fac A Make America Great Again Relic from last days of Pax Americana, as United States unilaterally surrenders global pre-eminence in exchange for a racial fantasy world. Escape From Epstein Island Alcatraz Because Trump apparently conceived of restoring Alcatraz to active prison duty after watching a Clint Eastwood movie, the idea of combining Alligator Alcatraz with an Epsteinized version of the Jurassic Park sequel islands — and Trump’s famous souped-up golf carts — seemed inescapable,. By the way, Trump’s 3 hour 7 minute silence in the Oval Office kitchenette on January 6 is exactly the length of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film,  King Kong . Someone should look into that, strongly. No Voting Accident The 50th anniversary of JAWS, reminding us of Trump's well-known fear of sharks (and stated preference for death by electrocution to chart stack). Together they prompted my fantasy about moral regeneration from former MAGA confederates, now pardoned of their crimes. Reddy Kilowatt observes the tragedy from Robert Maxwell’s boat, while his daughter luxuriates and her victims commit suicide. DeWitt Cheng  is an art writer/critic based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has written for more than twenty years for regional and national publications, in print and online, He has written dozens of catalogue essays for artists, galleries and museums, and is the author of “Inside Out: The Paintings of William Harsh.” In addition, he served as the curator at Stanford Art Spaces from 2013 to 2016, and later Peninsula Museum of Art, from 2017 to 2020. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and Bill Lasarow.

by Bill Lasarow August 30, 2025 Valerie Hegarty, “Stove with 4th of July Cake and Teapot (The Covid Diaries Series), 2020, foamcore, cardboard, paper-maché, magic-sculpt, wire, acrylic mediums, acrylic paint, 55 x 36 x 27”. Courtesy of the artist. America, the beating heart of the democracy revolution for 250 years, is rapidly forming a secret police force — a gestapo if you will — and constructing a network — a gulag — of detention centers. Let’s call them what they are: concentration camps. A word to the not-so Supreme Court, since nearly all lower court judges do seem to understand this not very complicated truth. Things like gestapos  and concentration camps  are not consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Not remotely close to it. Not in its plain language, not legalistically, not nuttin’. Yet the 2025/26 fiscal year budget for the federal government has been funded by Congress to spend $170 billion on just such an anti-Contitutional system. Congress and the not-so Supreme Court have stepped aside as the dictator overtly politicizes the Pentagon with test runs in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with more assault plans waiting in the wings. With the new numbers dwarfing anything the evil empire of the Soviet Union ever spent on its system of totalitarian suppression, this will not be a system that anyone will return from once absorbed by it. Think these first several months have been troubling? The fun really gets started with the new fiscal year, November 1, 2025. Mark Bradford, “Amendment #8,” 2014, mixed media, 48 1⁄4 × 60”. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and © 2014, Mark Bradford. Test to the 8th Amendment: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Are you a high school student writing a column for the school paper? Are you a successful attorney who volunteers some of your free time to the ACLU? Perhaps you are a celebrity accustomed to the applause and accolades of a vast public? Maybe you publish a nice little art platform like SquareCylinder ? Constitutional rights today exist only on paper. No mater how innocent, good hearted, or publicly known you may be, once you are delivered into this system you will be released from it only at the pleasure of those who run that system, and ultimately only if the dictator points his thumb up. Most likely you will disappear into it, never to be seen again. Miranda rights, due process, cruel and unusual punishment, even a call to your attorney? Inconveniences now dispensed with. So while most (no, not all) media discussion revolves around the Big Bad Bill’s tax provisions going mostly to the 1% and shrinkage of Medicaid for the 50%, both topics legitimately important, that oppression-funding $170 billion detail remains too abstract and radical for most Americans to come to grips with. No matter what happens in next year’s mid-term elections the die has been cast. It will take more, far more, than a resistant Democratic House majority to prevent it from happening. Such a majority can only slow it down and, with sufficient political will, begin the process of reversal. But that is the necessary starting point. Thomas Cole, “The Course of Empire: Destruction,” 1836, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 63 1/2”. Courtesy of the New York Historical. Without at least that, however, the glide path will remain open no matter what the majority of American voters think. And within the three years leading up to 2028 the Founders’ vision will not be blurry but blinded, and the republic that they founded will be obliterated. Towards that end, the so-called Republican Party, today in fact the Fascist Party of America, is busy working to rig the upcoming 2026 mid-term and render elections for the foreseeable future moot and the America conceived by the Founders dead, dead, dead. Bill Lasarow , Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the  Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles  (1987); and  Visual Art Source  (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain . In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder  with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.

by Margaret Hawkins August 30, 2025 T he Kohler Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which opened in 2021, is one of my favorite places. For starters, I like the name. It suggests a mission. To preserve something is to protect it from encroachment, extinction, or rot, like fruit or a forest. “Preserve” is both a noun and a very active verb. A preserve maintains things. Exterior of The John Michael Kohler Art Preserve in Sheboygan. Courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Photo: Durston Saylor. This particular Preserve, especially dedicated to outsider art, is fittingly located in a peaceful spot outside the city proper, near a river. Visitors enter through a façade of tall beams that look like a pile of building materials waiting to become something. The place is dedicated to preserving not only art but also the environments in which it was made or displayed, and while not every object here comes with or in an environment, when artwork and context are paired the combination makes the often-inscrutable work more intelligible. Mary Baber, Ray Yoshida in his apartment, c. 1974, Chicago, photograph. Courtesy of Mary Baber and The Kohler Art Preserve. As a satellite campus to the John Michael Kohler Art Center (JMKAC), also in Sheboygan, the Preserve, like its mother ship, is free to the public, completely supported by Kohler family money. You may recognize that name. Old man Kohler got rich the old-fashioned way, by making good products everybody needs, in his case high quality ceramic sinks, toilets, and water fountains. His daughter, Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, a former art teacher, wanted to share the wealth and in 1967 she and her husband built the JMKAC to champion self-taught and folk artists. The Art Preserve opened 54 years later, less than a year after its founder’s death. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, “Untitled,” 1960-80, chicken bones and paint. Courtesy © Andrew Edin Gallery, New York. The place is both storage facility and exhibition venue, giving a feeling of accessibility rather than the standard preciousness of most museums. Visible racks of artworks line some of the walls. And the place is big. Artists get whole rooms rather than just wall space for one or two representative works. In 2012, JMKAC acquired Chicago artist Ray Yoshida’s collection, and has recreated Yoshida’s curation approximately as it appeared in his home. This intimately lit, densely hung exhibit at the heart of the Preserve is a mini-tour through one artist/curator’s psyche, a show within a show, a mix of ephemera, art, and artifact. Each of Yoshida’s choices highlights not only that object and its maker, but also the workings of the mind of the artist/collector who brought these works together and set them side by side. If the Yoshida Collection is tightly curated, The Art Preserve also makes room for sprawling, messy displays. Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, for instance, gets a huge expanse of real estate. Are there too many chicken bone sculptures, fashioned from what the Milwaukee-based art brutist culled from garbage bins at the fried chicken place next to his studio? Probably. But the excess makes a larger point about the obsessive nature of this artist, in fact artists in general. A side gallery with photographs of Van Bruenchenhein’s wife in various states of undress tells another part of the story. Levi Fisher Ames, untitled, c. 1900, gelatin silver print of L.F. Ames Museum of Art. Courtesy of Howard Jordan and Bonnie Cunningham. Animals are important here as they so often are to artists outside the mainstream. The creatures here are full of spirit and energy, unencumbered by the narrowing effects of language, as are so many artists. One of my favorites here is Levi Fisher Ames, an itinerant showman who traveled the Wisconsin countryside in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showing his hundreds of miniature carvings of real and imaginary animals, telling stories and singing songs about them. He stored the carved creatures, sometimes in sets and pairs, in homemade wooden travel cases. Ames’s commitment to his fantasy world will inspire any artist, or anyone else, who has found themselves on a path that leads away from accepted reality. As does so much at The Art Preserve. Another favorite discovery on my last visit was Nick Engelbert’s “Lion.” Two disconcertingly soulful eyes stare out of the beast’s rough concrete body. Somebody is in there and has something to say. If only he could break out and make himself heard; we want to listen because we want to be heard ourselves. Nick Engelbert, “Lion.” Courtesy of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. All this odd gorgeousness so well displayed wouldn’t be possible without a lot of private money. Even an art-friendly government, which we currently lack, would never fund as eccentric a mission as this, and popular demand is not sufficient to support hefty admission fees. There have been times I’ve visited when I’ve had the entire third floor to myself. I’m grateful to the toilet king and his wise, wealthy daughter. Art and capitalism have made friends in Sheboygan, and the world is better for it. Which begs the question — what is a good society? How does capital get rerouted from base greed and sweetened into generosity, as it has here? What, occasionally, inspires people such as the Kohlers to share the wealth? I recently read Aldous Huxley’s “Island,”  his last novel, from 1962. It’s about a utopian society and the religious system he invented for it, a quasi-Buddhist credo with lots of other stuff thrown in. I knew I had to buy the book when I opened it and this sentence popped up: “You cling, you crave, you assert yourself, and you live in a homemade hell.” Nicole Eisenman, “The Triumph of Poverty,” 2009, oil on canvas, 65 x 82”. Courtesy of ICA Philadelphia. “Island” is Huxley’s manifesto about how he thought people should live. Some of it is just wacky. He touts psychedelic enhancement via government-grown mushrooms, beginning in childhood, as a fast track to religious enlightenment. He advocates hands-on sex education for children, to be taught in schools by matronly women. But he also paints a picture of a world where acquisition isn’t the goal of wealth, shared prosperity and universal enhanced living is. In Huxley’s utopia everybody does physical labor every day and works at different jobs throughout their lives — inefficient for the economy, he points out, but highly efficient for people's happiness and overall education. Nobody’s poor or hungry. A booming economy is not the point of this society. Human fulfillment is. Pieter Breugel, “Greed,” c. 1556-1560, engraving on paper. Courtesy of Artchive online art gallery. Spoiler alert that will surprise no one: It doesn’t end well. A greedy, autocratic man-child takes over and figures out how to sell the island’s natural resources for great personal profit, and one hundred years of peace and rational living end in gunfire. Sound familiar? It’s simplistic to dismiss capitalism as bad. Or to say it’s bad but argue that with checks and balances it’s better than any other system humans have devised. Or to say that, like everything else in a free society, its badness is directly proportionate to the badness of its practitioners. The trick is to design a society in which successful people with good intentions together with the means and resolve to choose to act on them, the Kohlers for example, also acquire the most cultural and political capital. Margaret Hawkins is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University. Visit  Margaret Hawkins’ website.