Safe as Houses / Bodies Under Siege in American Art

Femme Maison
Louise Bourgeois

Safe as Houses

Bodies Under Siege in American Art

Laura Kolbe

Fall 2022

I did not yet know I was pregnant the day I saw Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the panels sat in the middle of the drably titled exhibition “Louise Bourgeois: Paintings.” In fact, I’d walked to the museum straight from the office of a doctor who had reviewed my prior lab tests and ultrasounds and told me that I’d have an awfully hard time getting pregnant without a series of technological interventions. I recalibrated the units of my mental timeline: from months to years to, possibly, never. On the way out of the office I had peed in a cup one more time, just in case, a kind of reverse party favor.

Translators and Alchemists / On the “Interpretive Style” in American Art

 

Translators and Alchemists

On the “Interpretive Style” in American Art

Laura Kolbe

Winter 2022

As a bookish child in the Pennsylvania suburbs, I won the school spelling bee without quite meaning to, startled and delighted to hear an adult with a microphone intoning aloud words I’d only read in books—it’s mis-led, not mizzled?—as though seeing in color for the first time. For my pains I was given a copy of Paideia, the workbook that formerly accompanied the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and told to start studying for regionals. (For the record, I never made it further than the state bee.) 

Once Bitten / Fighting Dengue Fever in Key West and San Juan

Illustration by Victo Ngai

Once Bitten

Fighting Dengue Fever in Key West and San Juan

By Laura Kolbe

Illustrations by Victo Ngai, Haisam Hussein

Summer 2016

Like many places of mixed or contested governance, parts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, abound in a superfluity of uniforms and titles. It is as though a critical mass of matching cloth and business cards could swaddle a territory into fixed status. On a muggy afternoon in October 2015 at La Ceiba, a panadería just north of the Río Piedras Medical Center and the VA Caribbean veterans’ hospital, east of the US Army’s Fort Buchanan and west of the leafy university district, diners wearing white coats, scrubs, fatigue pants, and the oversized blazers that seem to be pan-American for “teacher” all mingled under frigid air-conditioning vents. Counter attendants served lard- and cheese-centric fritters, sandwiches, and pastries with hot soup, coffee, and wine as I waited for Lieutenant Commander Tyler Sharp.