Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's best-known work is currently out of print. Cha was murdered in 1982, and while foundations and archives preserve her work, and critics continue to trace out her multiple influences, this writer and multimedia Performance artist can only be explored by the average person throug
The spiritual, the sublime, infinity itself: all seem to hover beneath the translucent surfaces of Mark Rothko's blurred and veil-like rectangles. The brilliantly colored blocks of his best-known works, distillations of all that this Lithuanian-born immigrant had learned during his first 15 years of
How can we explain the incredible talent that rises clear as a bell off the scratchy old recordings of bluesman Robert Johnson? If we believe the legends, Johnson got his gift on a lonely Mississippi road when he met up with Beelzebub himself. The devil offered Johnson a musical genius that would tea
Viewing the human condition as a "confused impurity," Pablo Neruda wrote what he called "impure poetry." His childhood in remote Temuco, Chile, was spent voraciously reading Spanish and French literature. The boy "hunted poems" in the mountains and forests nearby, and published several pieces in Te