67. New Year, New Reliquary
As we face a terrifying future in 2025, let’s begin the new year by taking a look back.
I have a little tradition: my first newsletter of the new year always features my favorites from the year before. Namely, the gems that never made into my themed monthly newsletters, but that I adored nonetheless.
It wasn’t until I started writing this that I realized how much I did in 2024. I finished grad school, applied to do more, and got a design criticism fellowship. I also embarked on a bunch of writing projects that enabled me to interview artists I love, publish my first academic book review and journal article, get back into art criticism, and revisit my poetry practice. I learned how to crochet, got more tattoos, and picked up a new obsession with perfume along the way. I have more gratitude than I can put into words for the friends, old and new, who guided me, inspired me, and saved me from one too many bouts of burnout. Sustaining that kind of creative community feels more important than ever.
As we face a terrifying future in 2025, let’s begin the new year by taking a look back.
TOUCH
When I finished Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, I spent the rest of the afternoon in a stunned silence. Don’t be fooled by its slim page count, this compact novel takes you through nearly 75 years of history, beginning with the brutal rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in the Negev Desert in 1949 to the present day, when a young Palestinian woman learns about her story and decides to embark on her own investigation. Shibli’s precise, unnerving prose reckons with this historical haunting, as well as constricted life under occupation as her protagonist evades Israeli travel restrictions in her journey to uncover this erased wrong.
I always include an item of clothing I loved to wear, and this year’s fave goes to the Wooly Bonnet by sønderhaus. I never thought I’d be a big wearer of pink, but this bubblegum blush tone has felt so cute since the temperature dropped and keeps me so cozy. Makes me feel like an adorable little medieval peasant-slash-Slavic-babushka.
A. Laurie Palmer’s The Lichen Museum was one of those books that completely reframed the way I thought about my academic writing. Blending her personal observations during field research with philosophical, historical, and scientific musings, Palmer invites us to pay closer attention to lichens and discover what they can teach us about adaptation, survival, and resilience. I especially love how Palmer uses the unique biology and morphology of lichens to explore alternative relations to time, economic systems of commodification and consumption, and each other.
2024 was definitely the year of the blind box for me. If you’re not familiar, blind boxes are collectible figurines. Each time you open one, it’s a mystery as to which one you’ll get. My personal favorite series is Nyota’s Fluffy Life from Pop Mart. The art style for these is so whimsical and delightful and I love how they look on my desk. These were the best motivators every time I finished a grad school deadline or writing project.
LOOK
Virginia Hanusik’s photography practice first got on my radar after I saw her document Louisiana’s bayou stilted architectures, attempts by communities to adapt to rising waters and rapid land loss. Hanusik captures the raw, precarious edges at the frontlines of the climate crisis, where built environments and changing ecosystems get all tangled up in each other. Being from Florida myself, I’m always moved by the poignant care that comes across in the composition of her scenes and the framing of her images, capturing moments, sites, and communities on the verge of disappearing.
Vues/Views by Amie Siegel was an artwork that resonated profoundly with me in 2024. Maybe I’m a little biased since this currently being exhibited at the museum I work at, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this piece since it was installed. The suspended panel presents fragments of the Zuber 1834 wallpaper Les vues d’Amérique du Nord (Views of North America) on one side and, on the other, a film that takes us to different sites where the wallpaper remains. Over the course of the movie, we observe tourists, empty rooms, and performers invited by Siegel, whose presence provide critical interventions into the colonial pastiche the wallpaper originally presented. A continuation of Siegel’s practice of revealing hidden narratives in architecture, this work grapples deeply with issues of race, privilege, class, and cultural exploitation.
And then there’s the work of design studio, Wretched Flowers. Ever since I encountered their frames inspired by Depression-era Tramp Art, I’ve been obsessed with the practice that draws from rich art histories in America and beyond. Their beaded chainmail riffs on Medieval aesthetics. They use laser-cut steel to create their ‘Crown of Thorns’ joinery. They’ve also pulled inspiration from the Met’s Japanese art collection. Archives of material culture are their opportunities for experimentation.
LISTEN
My first favorite album of the year goes to Charm by Clairo. This was what I’d put on when I’d lounge around the house all day or when I wanted to slow dance in my living room. Delightfully daydreamy and softly tender, each song feels like a little hug, enveloping you into a lovesick warmth. This is one of those albums that you should listen to from start to finish each time, but I have a few highlights: “Thank You,” “Terrapin,” “Second Nature,” and “Juna.”
Mix of the year was, without a doubt, “Iranian music by women” curated by DJs Nesa Azadikhah and AIDA for Crack Magazine. Released in 2023 for International Women’s Day amid women-led, anti-government protests across the country, this mix seamlessly blends together so many different genres and performance styles to uplift the talented female artists making music in Iran and across the global diaspora.
Among the many podcasts I listened to in 2024, I still think about Blowback. With 5 seasons spanning topics like the Cuban Revolution and the Iraq War, this show explores histories of covert U.S. political and military intervention and the impact of the American empire on the world today. Each season reveals stunning histories with a ruthlessly thorough attention to research, introducing us to the behind-the-scenes actors, schemes, and conflicts that shaped the outcome of these global events.
I would be remiss if I didn’t name Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk as another fave. They’ve always been so underrated, and I’m glad their weird and wonderful sound is finally getting time to shine. Like many, I got “Image” stuck in my head, and I think “She Looked Like Me!,” “Death & Romance,” and “Vampire in the Corner” are also worth checking out. Sci-fi electronica that kept me company on my daily commutes.
LICK
If there is one recommendation you take from this newsletter, it should be to watch Scavengers Reign. This science fiction series transports us to a mysterious planet where a spaceship has crash landed. Split up across the landscape, we follow different crew members as they try to survive in this lush, yet hostile, alien ecosystem. With a Moebius-esque animation style, we get immersed into this surreal, vibrant world with some of the most beautiful visuals I’ve ever encountered on television.
While I didn’t do a whole lot of dining out in 2024, one of my most memorable meals was when I finally got to try Little Grenjai’s Krapow Smash Burger. Pad Krapow is one of my favorite Thai dishes so I absolutely ate up their Thai-American interpretation (extra runny egg and all). I went there during lunch and loved every attention to detail in the decor and ambiance. Even just writing about it now makes my mouth water.
One of the coolest events I went to last year was the preview of a new lecture performance by Mindy Seu about the history of sex on the Internet. As we all sat in the dark gallery of HEART, our faces lit up with the glow of our phone screens as we followed along with Seu’s talk through Instagram stories. From the cool experimental format to its fascinating subject matter, Seu invited us to reflect on the online sex work infrastructures that shaped the development of the early Internet and how our devices become sex toys, giving us digital access to pleasure.
If I could pick one piece of architecture I saw and loved in 2024, it would be the new offices of Socrates Sculpture Park. Located on the Queens waterfront, this structure was meant to provide new space for staff, while also channeling the outdoor museum’s unique ethos of mindful reclamation. This series of stacked shipping containers, designed by LOT-EK, add a sculptural, modern industrial edge to the park’s expansive greenscape. I especially love the diagonal window cuts along each side, balancing the need for workplace privacy with constant connection to the outside.
CLICK
As Elizabeth Goodspeed wrote for It’s Nice That, 2024 was the year of the Future Medieval. Personally, this was the aesthetic I gravitated to the most when it came to curating my style and home decor. I love how Goodspeed unpacked this graphic design trend of aesthetic Renaissance whimsy and Blackletter typography, whose intricate ornamental flourishes and calligraphic script reflect greater desire to challenge societal design norms of clean minimalism. Ye Olde Vibe Check, indeed.
If I could pick a single poem to sum up my year, it would be Ayisha Siddiqa’s “On Another Panel About Climate Change, They Ask Me To Sell The Future And All I’ve Got Is A Love Poem.” Siddiqa is a climate justice and human rights activist, known for her work consulting for the United Nations and mobilizing young people to climate action through activist training. In this moment when everything feels so bleak and it’s one horror and tragedy after another, Siddiqa’s words radiate with an endearing collective hope for the future. I still ruminate on these particular lines: “Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.” and “What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.”