Pop-Up Letters Set the ‘Alphabet in Motion’ in Kelli Anderson’s Playful Book

As a communication designer, Kelli Anderson began her career in information design. “The act of data visualization is all about bringing facts from the abstract and numerical realm into the sphere of perception, so you can see them,” she says in a video on Kickstarter. “And I thought, why stop there? What if you could also feel and experience those facts?”

Last year, Anderson launched a remarkable, five-years-in-the-making project called Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape, an ABC pop-up book about typography. She spent thousands of hours researching design archives and meticulously engineering kinetic and three-dimensional letters to show how type styles have evolved through the ages.

“If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world—from the Bronze Age to the Information Age,” Anderson says. “But because many of these methods, tools, and machines are now obsolete, this history is challenging to follow. Alphabet in Motion leverages tactile, interactive features to help clarify how letters have transformed alongside technological upheavals and shifting aesthetic moods.”

The project is composed of two conjoined, detachable books. The pop-up section includes an interactive, seven-segment display cover that changes from A to Z, 17 moveable paper elements, and hands-on activities. The accompanying 128-page section contains an essay diving into the history and concept of each pop-up, plus 300 color images from the history of type design.

Anderson’s book originally funded on Kickstarter and is now being released more widely. Secure your copy in the Colossal Shop. Follow along with her work on Instagram, and you might also enjoy another of her projects, This Book Is a Camera.

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Antique Writing Desks Converge with African Masks in Sonia E. Barrett’s Sculptures

When we think of the European colonization of Africa, one period that comes to mind is an era during the mid- to late-1800s known as the Scramble for Africa. The British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—predominantly—had already staked control of communities in coastal areas. It was during this time that inland regions became increasingly attractive for resource extraction and the promise of further economic gain. But the so-called Scramble for Africa was far from the beginning.

By the 1870s, Europeans controlled one-tenth of the continent, mostly in the north, along the Mediterranean, and in the far south. The Dutch East India Company had established the first European settlement in Africa in Cape Town in 1652. But the transatlantic slave trade had already been active for nearly a century and would continue for nearly two more, during which a staggering 12.5 million or more people were put on ships—mostly to the New World.

During this time, colonists wrote and conveyed all messages by hand. Small, portable, wooden desks made it possible to send letters from virtually anywhere, with fold-out surfaces covered in leather and storage areas for holding pens, nibs, and ink.

For artist Sonia E. Barrett, these antique desks are a tangible connection to a protracted era of cultural clashes fraught with greed, violence, and usually a one-sided telling of history. “These were the laptops of the day,” Barrett says of the portable tools that form her Desk series. “On them, they ‘wrote Africa’ in letters home, journals, and reports that now form the archives in Europe of Africa.”

Using pieces of reclaimed wood, leather, velvet, pens, ink, and wicker in addition to the found Edwardian writing surfaces, Barrett animates her sculptures with expressive faces redolent of African ceremonial masks. “I thought (the desks) could be a way of speaking back to Empire beyond the archived letters written on them.”

While different regions and cultures across the African continent created unique masks reflective of their beliefs and traditions since time immemorial, the European fashion for collecting these objects gave rise to a commercial industry that continues today. Similar to the wooden desks covered in leather or velvet, the carved African masks were whittled from timber and embellished with leather. The mahogany used in the manufacture of the writing desk would have matured in a tropical climate, “shipped in much the same way as we were,” the artist says, referring to the international African slave trade.

Barrett adds wicker structures to the bases of the desks, which suggest shoulders and bodies and can also be donned loosely, as one would wear a ceremonial costume. In a sense, the pieces are like conduits or metaphysical transporters. “These heads can join with African diasporan bodies and enable us to reach back, as they enabled our ancestors,” the artist says.

Some of Barrett’s sculptures are on display as part of The Ground Beneath: Material Memory and the Resilience of Hope at Messums London, which continues through November 15. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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Dive into the Painstaking Process of Restoring an 18th-Century Fan

Armed with tweezers, a porcupine quill, and more patience than most of us could fathom, the senior paper conservator of the Victoria & Albert Museum tackles a finicky restoration project in a new video. Susan Catcher walks us through her impeccably precise process as she restores a damaged fan dating back 200 years. She shares insights into her techniques and materials, all of which have to be reversible should the project need to be redone.

This video is one of many within the V&A’s series on conservation, which includes restoring Shakespearean costumes, a portrait of Marie Antoinette, and a Samurai figure. Watch more on YouTube.

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What Do Astronomy and Jewelry Have in Common? In the Late Renaissance, Look to the Stars

In the famous first stanza of the 17th-century poem “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake writes:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Perhaps Blake didn’t intend us to literally hold infinity in our hands, but he may have been aware that there was, in a manner of speaking, a way to don the entire known universe.

Combining the elegance of gold jewelry with the meticulous craftsmanship of intricate timepieces, a unique style of ring emerged from a fashion for the cosmos during the 16th and 17th centuries. Known as armillary rings, these deceptively simple gold creations can be worn on the finger like any other band, but when removed, they open up into a sphere made of several interconnecting circular bands operated by delicate hinges.

Examples of armillary rings in the British Museum and the Swedish National Museums of History have been traced to Germany, made during the Late Renaissance as the study of astronomy reached new heights. In 1543, Copernicus essentially launched the scientific revolution when he claimed that the Earth rotates around the Sun, not the other way around.

A few years later, Italian polymath Galileo Galilei, known as a pioneer of observational astronomy, built a telescope powerful enough to, for the first time, observe the stars of the Milky Way, see Jupiter’s four largest satellites, and make out Saturn’s rings, among other discoveries.

The historic gold rings are based on ancient astronomical instruments called armillary spheres, which emerged from the long-disproven theory that everything in the cosmos revolved around Earth. The designs, which were used since at least the 2nd century, place our planet at the center. A group of rings rotates on an axis, providing reference points for locating other celestial bodies. Separate bands correlate to the equator, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the revolution of the Sun—a ring which also represents the constellations of the Zodiac.

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Spanning 120 Years and 55 Countries, ‘The Family of Migrants’ Portrays a Broad Story of Human Movement

In 2022, twenty-one-year-old Tanya choked back tears as she held her boyfriend’s hand for what could be the last time. Crouching down to reach her, the military fatigue-clad Volodimir stands on a train headed for the city of Kramatorsk in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. He’s on his way to the battlefield to fight Russia’s invasion.

Taken by Ilvy Nijokiktijen, the photo capturing this heartwrenching moment is one of nearly 200 included in a book and large-scale exhibition at Fenix, a new art museum in Rotterdam that focuses entirely on migration. The Family of Migrants takes a broad look at human movement from 1905 to the present day, citing a wide array of reasons someone might relocate from war and economic crises to exile and internment to a search for opportunities abroad.

Spanning documentary, portraits, and photojournalism, the included images emerge from 136 photographers in 55 countries across 120 years. Providing such an expansive perspective of movement connects myriad experiences—from a Ukrainian soldier off to war to a young Afghan refugee to a poverty-stricken mother and her children—and is an attempt to broaden how we think of migration.

“In every era, there has been movement of people, be it out of free will, out of necessity, or under pressure. Migration shapes the world, separating and connecting people, but when we talk about migration, the focus all too quickly shifts to figures or politics,” curator Hanneke Mantel says.

The title references the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, The Family of Man. Curated by Edward Steichen, the bold exhibition included hundreds of photos that presented a narrative of global solidarity after World War II. Steichan wanted to depict “the gamut of life from birth to death,” a task Mantel seems to take on at Fenix by sharing a fuller story of migration today.

The Family of Migrants, published by Hannibal Books, includes photos by icons like Dorothea Lange and Ernest Cole, along with those working today like Alejandro Cegarra. Find your copy on Bookshop.

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Explore Trailblazing Street Photography in ‘Faces in the Crowd’ at MFA Boston

When playwright Tennessee Williams reflected on the oeuvre of photographer Stephen Shore in 1982, he said, “His work is Nabokovian for me: Exposing so much and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will.” The sentiment mirrors not only the power of Shore’s work but the capacity of street photography, more broadly, to provoke wonder and curiosity where we least expect it: the everyday.

Shore was among the first to adopt color photography as an artistic medium, traveling throughout America to document quotidian scenes of life in rural towns and big cities alike. His work followed behemoths of the medium like Walker Evans and Robert Frank and set the stage for others who emerged in his footsteps, including Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, and Martin Parr, among many others.

Shore is included in Faces in the Crowd: Street Photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which explores the ever-evolving techniques and approaches that photographers use to document people and daily life. Seminal works from the 1970s to the 1990s by Shore, Garry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, Dawoud Bey, and Yolanda Andrade, among others, are complemented by more recent contributions to the genre by artists like Parr, Luc Delahaye, Katy Grannan, Amani Willett, and Zoe Strauss.

Today, smartphones with powerful digital cameras have made photography more accessible than ever—and also completely transformed the medium. With people always unabashedly filming—taking photos, making videos, posting to social media—in the city, “photographers are now less concerned with surreptitiously capturing an image and much more likely to collaborate with their subjects in the street,” the MFA says.

The difference between snapshots and art is perhaps partly in intention, although that line is often purposely blurred. Bey’s striking “A Man and Two Women After a Church Service,” for example, captures a seemingly simple scene, yet the composition and clarity are a testament to timing and technical expertise. In what feels like simultaneously a public and private moment, the 1976 image glimpses both a particular scene and an American historical period.

Whether taken decades ago or snapped within the past few years, the images in Faces in the Crowd invite us into each experience. Luc Delahaye’s “Taxi,” for example, captures a solemn, intimate, enigmatic moment as a mother holds her young son in her arms in the back of a vehicle.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto’s crowd photo, taken from the hip, immerses us in the thrum of a city thoroughfare. And Yolanda Andrade captures an uncanny blip when a street performer disappears behind the unsettlingly large head of a puppet. The MFA says, “Drawn to photography’s narrative potential, many employ the camera as a tool of transformation, taking everyday pictures from the ordinary to the strangely beautiful or even ominous.”

Faces in the Crowd opens on October 11 and runs through July 13, 2026. Find more on the museum’s website. You might also enjoy A Sense of Wonder, a monograph of the work of Joel Meyerowitz that was just released by SKIRA.

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World War II Journal Entries Float in a Web of Blood-Red Yarn in Chiharu Shiota’s ‘Diary’

Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota presents a poignant suite of large-scale works in Two Home Countries at Japan Society Gallery. That artist is known for her immersive string installations, inviting us into emotive, atmospheric experiences that tap into both universal and deeply personal narratives.

In Two Home Countries, viewers enter a vivid world shaped by red thread, redolent of intertwined veins and blood vessels that attach to the floor, take on the shapes of houses, and spread through an entire room with a cloud-like aura of red—filled with written pages. Themes of memory, mortality, connection, identity, and belonging weave through Shiota’s pieces, exploring “how pain, displacement, boundaries, and existential uncertainty shape the human condition and our understanding of self,” the gallery says.

An expansive, room-sized work titled “Diary,” which is based on an earlier installation and commissioned anew for Two Home Countries, incorporates a dense web of yarn in which float pages of journals that once belonged to Japanese soldiers. Some were also penned by German civilians in the post-war era. “The accumulated pages reveal an expansive record of shared human existence across national boundaries,” the gallery says.

“When the body is gone, the objects which surrounded them remain behind,” Shiota says in a statement. “As I wander the stalls of the markets in Berlin, I find especially personal items like photographs, old passports, and personal diaries. Once, I found a diary from 1946, which was an intimate insight into the person’s life and experiences.” For Shiota, the power of these objects are revealed in how she feels the presence of writer’s “inner self.”

Two Home Countries is on view through January 11 in New York City. Plan your visit on the Japan Society’s website, and find more on Shiota’s site and Instagram.

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