Several places in Italy and Great Britain are considering the question, and a few memorials have already gone up. " are not intended as sweeping monuments to the historical moment, but simple places to grieve and reflect." - The New York Times
"A nearly-life-size depiction of a kangaroo — realistic genitalia included — is the oldest known rock painting in Australia. Scientists recently pinpointed its age to 17,300 years ago with a technique that had never been used on Australian ancient art before: measuring radioactive carbon in wasp nests from rocks near the artwork." - Live Science
To Musa Mayer’s dismay, her father, an antiracist and the son of immigrants who had fled antisemitic persecution, was now having his complex images misrepresented and their subject matter rendered simplistically provocative. - The Guardian
The museum in Washington, DC, founded by Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, was a sensation when it opened as a museum of modern art, and it's been a refuge and inspiration since, including, at times, during the pandemic. "Dorothy Kosinski, director of the museum, tells a story: 'I was standing outside of the Phillips in the fall when we were...
Dalí, art historians say, was "very deliberate" in his art - and sketches of unfinished works also show how he combined complex mathematical calculations with artistic license in his finished paintings. - The Observer (UK)
Looks like the mystery's been solved - and the writer was (drumroll) ... the artist himself. "The text, 'Could only have been painted by a madman,' isn’t large enough for most people to notice, especially when it’s presented in the museum behind glass, Guleng said. To study it, the researchers needed to use infrared photography to make it more...
Pretty much, yes. "Downtown Christchurch isn’t empty because of COVID. It’s empty because of twin catastrophes: Ten years ago an earthquake leveled much of the city—and then the local and national government botched the rebuild, squandering a golden opportunity to transform Christchurch." Here's what happened. - Slate
Juliet Ames couldn't resist decorating her first salt box, back in December. Then she got permission from the city. "In the past two months, more than 100 of the decorated salt boxes have appeared around Baltimore, including more than 25 adorned by Ames herself. The boxes celebrate such iconic Baltimore figures as the filmmaker John Waters, the Natty Boh...
Before she burst onto the art scene with performance art with an edge, O'Grady "had worked for the Labor and State Departments, including as an intelligence analyst in the period leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis; attempted a novel in Europe; dropped out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; run a translation agency in Chicago; been a New York...
York was enslaved by William Clark and remained enslaved after the expedition returned. The memorial bust, which is on a pedestal where a statue of a conservative newspaper editor used to stand until it was torn down last summer, was a surprised to Portland's Parks & Recreation Department. The city's Parks Commissioner, Carmen Rubio: "We should regard this installation...
The register of Jewish burials in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca between 1836 and 1899, is one of very few documents left after more than 18,000 Hungarian-speaking Jews were deported from the city and murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Their homes and synagogues were ransacked, leaving almost no record of their lives and existence; the presence of this book on the...
A new emphasis has also changed how design firms feel about commissions. "For the new guard of playground design, the boundary between play equipment and public sculpture is blurring. ... Playgrounds are increasingly seen as 'some of the top projects to get' – public projects which are on full display and allow landscape architects and designers to test their...
Issues: "Change will feel snail-like as long as white organizational leaders, tenured professors, board members, and funders control and dictate, the pace of inclusion and the adoption of anti-racist practices." So it's time, says one nonprofit leader, to change the game entirely. - Hyperallergic
Consider, for instance, the new, widely derided "For Mary Wollstonecraft" monument in London. "Why couldn't a statue of Wollstonecraft, the individual woman, be seen as universally inspiring and iconic? It was hard not to view the monument as a victim of its own good intentions, inadvertently becoming yet another example of a female form as emblem of an abstract...
"Plans to mark the 800th anniversary of Burgos's magnificent Gothic cathedral with three enormous new bronze doors have ushered in an unholy row, with UNESCO advising against the project and critics attacking the €1.2m portals as an 'artistic outrage'. … More than 31,000 people have signed an angry petition attacking the new doors as 'an eyesore however you look...
