For Glossy Magazines, Black Art Now Matters

For the past decade, Vogue covers have followed an overall formula: dress up a celebrity or model in flowing designer fashion, arrange them into an angular pose, and then center their face on the magazine for maximum newsstand visibility. The results look like so many repetitive royal portraits in a museum wing. But for this year’s September issue, always the year’s biggest, the magazine worked with two painters to create a pair of covers. Kerry James Marshall’s imagined m