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Thresholds. Liudmila Velasco’s Long Road Home

Starting June 17 at The Annex Gallery

June 9th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Although I am an avowed admirer of her solo work and have known her for nearly twenty-five years, I do not remember ever having spoken in person with Liudmila Velasco. About her work, about the weather, about how unbearable this or that artist can become. When I left the island, Liudmila was already practically an institution within Cuban women’s photography...

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Before the Flood: Tim Harrier’s Spirit Guides

June 8th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

When we first came across Tim Harrier’s Shaman Spirit Guides, we dismissed them without mercy as the product of artificial intelligence. The mud-covered faces, the animals emerging from the background, and an unbroken frontal force produced, almost at once, a malignant suspicion. Suspicion ran far ahead of the work. And we are right to suspect almost everything in life. This series, no...

art review

Gee Horton and the Construction of a Mythology of African American Mourning

June 7th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

There is a book. Before the exhibition, before the charcoal drawings spread across the galleries of the Contemporary Arts Center, before the viewer crosses the blue thresholds into the dreamworld of Freeman Little...

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Odd Man Out

May 15th, 2011 | By Jane Durrell

Quite a lot is going on in the engrossing exhibition of Melvin Grier’s photographs at Kennedy Heights Arts Center.. One narrative line is this city, reflected in a daily newspaper over a period of more than thirty years. Another has to do with the photographer himself, a black man recording the affairs of a city that never lost sight of itself as white. The show’s title, White People: A Retrospective, comes from Grier’s...

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Narrative Figuration

May 15th, 2011 | By Sheldon Tapley

Late Modernism, the last and least worthy phase of a wonderfully creative 150-year movement, petered out before the births of most of the painters in this show. In its wake, the art world, then mostly western in emphasis, embraced a new pluralism that has since come to include a vast international range of stylistic choices. These artists, raised in that environment, made...

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2 Artists/2 Perspectives

May 15th, 2011 | By Karen Chambers

Although the exhibition at the Thomas J. Funké Gallery is named “2 Artists/2 Perspectives: Jeff Shapiro and Don Reitz,” the “perspectives” of these two ceramic artists seem more aligned than not.
Visually Reitz’s and Shapiro’s work shares a roughness that borders on crude. It rudely slaps the refinement of much of traditional ceramics in the face. Their vessels...

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82 Pence a Minute

May 24th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodríguez

A few months ago I wondered in these pages what Macron was getting out of lending the Bayeux Tapestry to the English. Forty thousand French citizens signed a petition to block it, citing textile fragility and, I suspect, a touch of cross-Channel rancour as well. The other question remained: what would the British Museum get out of it.

art review

Zugunruhe: Stylianos Schicho and the Mutual Gaze

May 24th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Now and again, chance weaves a concurrence of circumstances that places us before a window opening onto the past. The opportunity to converse, undistracted, with the Austrian artist Stylianos Schicho was a privilege, since what most interests me in art are the sinews that bind it to whoever produces it.

art review

The Everyday Objects of Anomaly

May 23th, 2026 | By Ahmel Echevarría

As a worthy walk-on, more than once I have stood inside a still life: the living scene of a dead nature staged with everyday objects. Between Morandi and Chirico — take your pick of Giorgios — lit by the fierce Miami sun or beneath the drizzle of a summer afternoon, I have slipped into the heart of the anomaly, into the "temple of otherness."

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The Self-Blocking Model
June 12th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The US government has ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 for any foreign national, even those living inside the United States and even foreign employees of Anthropic itself. These were among the most powerful AI models ever shown to the public. Anthropic's response was to remove both models automatically for all users. The move is highly unusual, and in the public history of commercial AI releases, nearly without precedent. Fable 5 had just been released as Anthropic's most powerful widely available model, with safeguards around cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillation. Mythos 5 used the same underlying system with some safeguards lifted for trusted cyberdefenders.

The order exposes a strategic contradiction. Washington appears to be trying to keep the most capable American systems away from adversaries, yet the immediate effect is to remove an American model from the market. Anthropic says the government cited a possible way to bypass Fable's safety protections, but the company argues the example was of lesser importance, involved minor known vulnerabilities, and showed capabilities already available in other public models. AI is advancing at an exponential and vertiginous pace, which raises the chance that other countries may soon reveal models stronger than anything they have shown publicly so far, including Chinese systems developed outside American controls. If that happens while US models remain trapped behind emergency restrictions, the advantage shifts from technical superiority to commercial availability. Measures like this could even push frontier AI companies to ask whether remaining inside the United States has become a strategic liability. In AI, power belongs partly to whoever builds the strongest model, and partly to whoever can keep it usable.

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The Arresting Face
June 12th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

A Florida man was arrested after police treated a face-recognition result as a lead strong enough to help carry a warrant. According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and reported by WIRED, Robert Dillon lived over 300 miles from the Jacksonville Beach McDonald's where a man had allegedly tried to lure a child. A police system called FACES returned a 93 percent facial match from a poor image taken off surveillance footage. That number measured similarity between images. It did not say the two faces belonged to the same person.

The damage came from the institution around the software. License plate searches reportedly placed Dillon's vehicles nowhere near the county, a restaurant manager said the suspect was a regular customer, and six months passed before the warrant was submitted. The arrest still happened. Dillon was taken from his home, spent a night in jail, pledged his truck title for bond, lost work during crab season, and watched his mug shot remain online after charges were dropped. The machine supplied a resemblance, then the paperwork gave it weight. In cases like this, the face becomes a shortcut through doubt, and the person has to spend months proving that a score was only a score.

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The Metered Chat
June 11th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

OpenAI is preparing a major redesign of ChatGPT that would move the product beyond the blank chat box and into a place where people do things. According to The Verge, which summarized reporting from the Financial Times, the company wants ChatGPT to handle coding, image creation, agents, and outside apps inside a broader interface. One senior OpenAI employee reportedly described the old chat format as dead. The phrase sounds dramatic, but the point is practical. OpenAI has built one of the most familiar interfaces on the internet, and now it needs that habit to produce steadier revenue as it moves toward a public listing.

The current chat box is easy to understand. A person types, the system replies, and the exchange feels almost free even when the computing cost is large. A redesigned ChatGPT would change that routine by placing more paid actions around the conversation. A request could become a coding session, a generated file, a booking, a workflow run by an agent, or a task completed through a partner app. The user may still begin with a sentence, but the product can guide that sentence toward services with prices, subscriptions, limits, and commissions. OpenAI is polishing the interface while trying to turn ChatGPT from a habit people visit into a business people pay through.

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