If you’re going to argue against the “status quo” of your field, especially if you’re really mad about it, I do expect you to cite the main offenders, the people you think are f’n wrong about your topic. No vague posting in scholarship.

Commentary: The culture in state agencies tends to starve the administrative infrastructure needed to uphold programs' integrity. minnesotareformer.com/2026/04/14/y...

important news:

Feeling nostalgic for the late 2000s Google Search/Google Books rabbit hole, where instead of just asking AI, you could wind up in bonkers places like this: a blog that uses Rosalind Krauss' "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" to interpret Star Wars. starwarsmodern.blogspot.com/2010/06/futu...

this is a good explainer of Google's latest enclosure of the commons. winbuzzer.com/2026/01/28/g...

Clara Mairs, Halloween, c. 1920 collections.artsmia.org/art/17128/ha...

Yours is actually less insane than what's written now.

I fucking love buying books.

5. Historians cannot be restrained by the rigidity of citation management software

always reposting, it's the rules, like the best lipsynch

Lovely essay from my dear friend and former colleague, Maggie Adler, about Texas, art, and the challenges of curation. glasstire.com/2025/07/01/t...

God hasn’t completely abandoned us www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316427...

West Saint Paul vibes

I know its only March, but Anthony McCann's Shadowlands might be the best book I read all year. An insightful and empathetic study of right-wing radicalization that is as much a work of political philosophy as it is journalism. It's simply lovely and warrants much wider attention.

A panel from my forthcoming comic on Charles M Russell from the Amon Carter Museum, edited by @mnarth.bsky.social

There's a tendency within the discipline of American art history to focus on unraveling/deconstructing the very definition of what constitutes American art. This is an essential, maybe even foundational component of our work. But I'm often frustrated with how it's approached. 🧵

Today I finally got to see Christian Marclay's "The Clock" (or at least two hours of it), which was near the very top of my art bucket list. It was absolutely extraordinary.

I'm not arguing for a tendentious bothsideism. If anything, I’m even more annoyed. But I think this type of work has made me a somewhat better writer.

It’s been fun (or as fun as writing ever gets) to try to articulate precisely what is annoying about scholarship on so-called cowboy painters, while also trying to describe the aspects of this scholarship that are still quite useful.

When you write about cowboy painters, you have to read a lot of annoying scholarship. But you can read this scholarship against itself. You can (and should) point out the jingoism, whitewashing, and mythologizing that it contains. But you can go a step further.

2024 was a year of significant growth for me as a writer, and I think the primary reason was because of how much time I spent trying to accurately summarize scholarship that I found annoying.

One of the great joys of academic life has been watching former peers from grad school come into their own as established scholars with a unique voice and perspective.

Cozy Cricket

Detail of Pao Houa Her's "Smoke in the Prairie" (2017), and inkjet print from her extraordinary series "My Grandfather Turned Into a Tiger." It's one of six of Her's works in the MNHS fine art collection.

David Lefkowitz, "Accomodation," 1999, oil on canvas. A fun fav from the MNHS collection.