Arthur Lubow considers if Robert Mapplethorpe’s moment has passed. It’s an interesting argument that is growing on me:

Mapplethorpe’s most prescient move may have been his dedication to staged studio work. That practice is now prevalent among younger photographers, but when he was coming up, street photography ruled in artistic circles. John Szarkowski, the influential photography director at the Museum of Modern Art, did much to enforce that bias. He considered Garry Winogrand, whose compressed, off-kilter pictures found poetry in chaos, to be “the central photographer of his generation.” As Mapplethorpe noted, his own pictures were “the opposite of Garry Winogrand’s.” In 2003, Mr. Szarkowski told me that Mapplethorpe “was a pretty good commercial photographer who photographed things people weren’t accustomed to seeing in mixed company.” “It’s not photographically interesting,” he added.

Ancient Peruvians were dyeing textiles with indigo long before Egyptians:

Doreen St. Félix asks people in solitary confinement what they want to see:

In 2006, activists formed a poetry committee to mitigate the sensory deprivation that the prison inflicted on the people held there. They exchanged letters and poems with the inmates. Two years later, the committee transformed into Tamms Year Ten, a coalition that protested the conditions at the prison, with the goal of seeing it shuttered. The group also asked inmates to fill out a form describing a picture that they would like to receive. A volunteer would then create it. Laurie Jo Reynolds, the organizer of Tamms Year Ten, recently described to me, over the phone, the work that was done to fulfill Sterling’s request: “We got a caravan of sixteen family members. I got an a-cappella singer, one of our volunteers, to sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ And then we had to work it out with the proprietor of Bald Knob Cross that we would have dinner there, because it was dark by the time it was over.” In the wide-shot photo, the cross looms against a colorless sky as a crowd of people, dressed in white and black, huddles nearby, heads lowered. To Sterling, the image was an amulet, a prayer frozen in time. One year after Sterling received it, he was granted parole.

White Pube offers us a hilarious White girl art bingo card, and check out the “Are White Girls Capable of Making Art That’s Not About themselves??” post too, though it would’ve benefited from more extensive editing, which is the reality of working at a smaller site with little or no funding (been there, done that). I hope they can eventually develop that editorial process, but regardless The White Pube is always fascinating, so follow it):

I’ve made u a White Girl Art bingo to accompany this week’s text: https://t.co/6BuUsAq1j0 pic.twitter.com/4O8k5fWn97 — The White Pube (@thewhitepube) July 6, 2019

A good discussion of the concept of “Western civilization” and how it is being used by white nationalists (Sarah Bond, who is a regular Hyperallergic contributor is on this episode, so you know it’s going to be good):

Are Facebook and other social media companies outsourcing trauma? I can’t imagine doing this job and now being impacted in serious ways:

The technology hardware industry has long operated by amassing armies of outsourced factory workers, who make the world’s smartphones and laptops under stressful working conditions, with sometimes fatal consequences. The software industry also increasingly leans on cheap and expendable labor, the unseen human toil that helps ensure that artificial intelligence voice assistants respond accurately, that self-driving systems can spot pedestrians and other objects, and that violent sex acts don’t appear in social media feeds. The vulnerability of content moderators is most acute in the Philippines, one of the biggest and fastest-growing hubs of such work and an outgrowth of the country’s decades-old call center industry. Unlike moderators in other major hubs, such as those in India or the United States, who mostly screen content that is shared by people in those countries, workers in offices around Manila evaluate images, videos and posts from all over the world. The work places enormous burdens on them to understand foreign cultures and to moderate content in up to 10 languages that they don’t speak, while making several hundred decisions a day about what can remain online.

This Russian art film version of The Simpsons is hilariously dark:

East Jackson, Ohio, has very complicated history of racial identification and one family tells their story:

There is this little girl at my moms house that walks by every other day with some random animal combo following her around. pic.twitter.com/xhjBrrPdFN — feline (@yagirlbaylo) July 2, 2019

Found that nigga from spongebob pic.twitter.com/xLv1TfGJfd — Job (@Jobbehh) July 6, 2019

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