Criticism
The Portrait Gallery by Malik Wilson
December 15, 2025
The first edition of a three year triad, The Portrait Gallery muses on the import, value, and beauty of the Smithsonian's great gem. Hidden within Chinatown's hustle and bustle, the Portrait Gallery is a staid sanctuary of ongoing rest, muted civic history, and restrained portraiture. In this monoscript, Malik reflects on the aesthetic poetics of the Portrait Gallery, and makes a case that in the coming and going of museums lies a modern form of the ancient and sacred - offering an opportunity of sanctuary, passage, and reform. His argument is that such realities emerge whole cloth as it were, as a kind of ascendant moral and even spiritual conscience greater than the sum of its parts. The great gift of the Smithsonian, and of the Portrait Gallery in particular, stands unique among human accomplishment - rendering the beauty of the age, and of the ages before, to anyone, and everyone.
Criticism
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye by Malik Wilson
December 15, 2025
Malik Wilson's first monoscript of art criticism puzzles through the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, its quiet and bold humility, its lush and restrained painterliness. Portraiture as a kind of subdued rhythmic and aesthetic assertion collapses the length between imagery, imagination, and ideas of the soul, and the puzzling nature of LYB's accomplishment in blurred and delayed envelopes of color and form remain mysterious. A thought-piece about the nature of "effective" art itself, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye presents a kind of phenomenological artistic induction, treating art, and its journey to the soul, as a kind of Large Hadron Collider of moral and physical beauty, aesthetic and artistic pleasure.
Criticism
The Museum Voice by Malik Wilson
December 15, 2025
What is the role of museums in the first few decades of the 21st century? How should museums respond to seismic change outside their doors? In this brief monoscript, Malik Wilson makes a bold, somewhat counterintuitive claim that in times of great upheaval, the steady, sure hand of museums and their centuries old voice - stoic, solemn, restrained - is needed more than ever. By appealing to museums' function as "sanctuaries of the soul", The Museum Voice describes how beauty, and artistic pleasure exists on an ontological plane fully apart from material notions of sex, race, and nationality. Restraint, in this vein, isn't moral cowardice but spiritual courage - it imports, and imparts to the viewer a vast and settled trust, an implicit belief that he or she possesses the requisite ability to ford his or her way home.
Criticism
The Beauty of Preservation by Malik Wilson
October 15, 2025
What we decide to keep, and what we let go of - culturally, materially, spiritually, and socially, frames human effort and human endurance. In the art world, those who toil at preservation - both on buildings and in the broader material culture of artwork and textiles - perform a kind of holy yeomanship. Unseen, often unknown, their work carries a kind of salutary passage that allows others to partake in the common good. In The Beauty of Preservation, Malik Wilson advances the notion that the Grand Questions of preservation are soulful ones, and that it is in imposing them that we have the best chance to arise at a qualified end.