In 2012, Hank Willis Thomas saw a poster of Norman Rockwell’s painting of a family seated around a holiday table, the matriarch presenting a turkey to her guests. For Mr. Thomas, a 42-year-old black artist raised in Manhattan, the pale complexions in Mr. Rockwell’s 1943 masterpiece did little to represent his experience of a diverse America. So he decided to create a tableau of his own.

Read the full article by Laura M. Holson here.

Traces of Distant Culture

South of New Orleans This arrangement of buildings along a narrow spit of land on either side of a Louisiana bayou shows the imprint of the region’s history under France: “long lot” development, which stretched skinny holdings laterally away from important waterways. Geography shapes settlement, but culture does, as well.