art

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• SOURCE: Architectural Digest
  5/5/2020
  

  A New Public Art Installation in Alexandria Confronts the City’s Ties to the Slave Trade

  Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan Jeyifous examines an oft-overlooked aspect of the Virginia port community’s history.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/30/2020
  

  This is how Bad Things are for Museums: They Now Have a Green Light to Sell Off Their Art

  The Association of Art Museum Directors has relaxed its guidelines against selling works of art for operating funds. Now, the notion of selling off a Claude Monet or two to plug a budgetary hole—or to fend off a total financial meltdown—is suddenly something to contemplate.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/17/2020
  

  She Tracked Nazi-Looted Art. She Quit When No One Returned It.

  A researcher stopped working for a German museum after she says she lost faith in its commitment to return works with tainted provenances.

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• 2/11/20
  

  How Somalis Use Theatre to Rebuild Culturally

  by Farah M. Omer

  Modern Somali theatre rose to prominence in the 1960s, the period following the independence and the subsequent unification of Somaliland and Somalia. By the 1970s, there were multiple shows a night in any given city and the average Somali adult was considered a regular theatre goer regardless of socioeconomic status.

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  1/6/20
  

  Nell Irvin Painter Featured in Boston Review

  After retiring from Princeton, celebrated historian Nell Irvin Painter decided to go to art school. In this interview with Walter Johnson, she discusses what it’s like to be an old student, and how art lets her tell truths about history that she couldn’t as an academic.

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• SOURCE: Hyperallergic
  8/28/19
  

  A History of Holocaust Denial Comes Under Scrutiny in The Evidence Room

  The Hirshhorn Museum exhibition, filled with reproductions and plaster casts of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, works through the wounds and scars of a gruesome history.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  8/25/19
  

  George Washington owned slaves and ordered Indians killed. Will a mural of that history be hidden?

  by Gillian Brockell

  This is the story of the layers of history that will continue to exist underneath, whether the murals are covered by curtains, panels or paint.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/5/2019
  

  The Exhibit Lauded Freedom of Expression. It Was Silenced.

  Statues of so-called comfort women have long been an irritant to Japanese nationalists who dispute that the women were forced into servitude.

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• SOURCE: Frieze
  June 24, 2019
  

  The Untold Queer History of California

  by Bryony White

  Vital indigenous perspectives are highlighted in an exhibition of art and activism at the Oakland Museum, which spans the state’s colonial past to the present.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  June 19, 2019
  

  The Photographer Who Captured 20th-Century Queer Life

  by Hannah Giorgis

  Joan E. Biren’s images from the ’70s and ’80s—which appear in the new exhibit “Art After Stonewall”—reflect an effort to document and encourage lesbian love.

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/9/19
  

  Now for Sale on Facebook: Looted Middle Eastern Antiquities

  Artifacts said to have been taken from the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria have been offered for sale on Facebook.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  3/19/19
  

  A half-century before the hashtag, artists were on the front lines of #MeToo

  by Vivien G. Fryd

  The cultural prominence of rape and sexual assault might be new. Efforts to bring attention to the issue, however, are not.

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• 3/17/19
  

  Why is the Mona Lisa not the Mona Lisa?

  by Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Christopher Brown

  New research suggests the famous painting in the Louvre does not depict Mona Lisa.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/6/19
  

  Are These Paintings Really by Hitler? German Authorities Are Investigating

  In the last 10 years, the niche market for art by Hitler has grown. But many, if not most, of these works are likely not by Hitler. 

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian.com
  1/10/19
  

  Why British Lawmakers Are Fighting Over a Bust of Oliver Cromwell

  Cromwell is alternately lauded as the “heroic military and political leader” who defended Parliament and vilified as a ruthless war criminal responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Catholics.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  1-2-2019
  

  Uffizi Prods Germans to Return Painting Stolen in World War II

  A German family has the artwork, and refuses to give it back. The Italian museum has mounted a publicity campaign in an effort to get German authorities to intervene.

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• SOURCE: Colossal
  12-28-2018
  

  Google Builds a Digital Reproduction of the National Museum of Brazil After its Tragic Destruction

  The digital recreation is presented by Museum View (which uses the same functionality as Google Street View), and allows visitors to explore the institution’s key artifacts as they were displayed before this year’s tragic destruction.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  12-27-2018
  

  For Italy’s Populists, Everything Is a Nationalist Cause. Even Leonardo.

  The hard-right government has accused the French of disrespect and of trying to culturally appropriate the artist in a dispute over loaning his works.

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• SOURCE: Artsy
  12-26-2018
  

  The 15 Biggest Art Historical Discoveries of 2018

  From cave paintings to Caravaggio, our understanding of the art of the past—and its relationship to the present—became much more nuanced thanks to the dramatic discoveries of 2018.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  11-26-18
  

  Five Countries Slow to Address Nazi-Looted Art, U.S. Expert Says

  An estimated 600,000 paintings had been stolen during the war and 100,000 remain missing.