art history

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• SOURCE: Forbes
  5/1/2022
  

  After COVID Delay, Controversial Philip Guston Exhibit Opens in Boston

  Guston's blunt imagery, including Ku Klux Klan figures, arguably interrogates his complicity as a white artist in ongoing racism. Is it offensive to contemporary museum audiences? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  4/7/2022
  

  "Is It Cake?" is Brain Candy for Pandemic-Weary, but also Part of Long History of Visual Illusion

  by Maggie Cao

  "At a time when we often don’t know if what we encounter on our screens can be trusted, it feels good to alleviate those anxieties with a show in which the only consequence of being fooled is cutting into a shoe that we assumed was a cake."

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/6/2022
  

  Winslow Homer: The Melville of American Panting

  by Susan Tallman

  A new exhibition reframes Homer, once seen as a visual poet of American innocence, as an artist who grappled with the bitter conflicts at the heart of the nation. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  3/12/2022
  

  Erin Thompson's "Smashing Statues": Tear 'Em All Down

  How does taking down a statue relate to the more complicated work of eliminating the racist ideas and structures that put it up? 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/8/2022
  

  Smithsonian to Return All Benin Bronzes

  The Smithsonian will return works that it has legal title to own but that are linked to an infamous British raid on Benin City in 1897.

• 
• SOURCE: Hyperallergic
  

  Mississippi Museum of Art Exhibition Opens on Legacies of Great Migration

  Opening April 9, this exhibition features newly commissioned works by 12 acclaimed Black contemporary artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Theaster Gates, and more.

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• SOURCE: Observer
  1/24/2022
  

  Art Historians Shake Up Narratives on TikTok

  "TikTok’s art historians are using the platform to explore points of view often excluded in more established spaces like galleries and museums."

• 
• SOURCE: Forward
  1/17/2022
  

  Will SCOTUS Uphold Claim of Heirs for Return of Pissarro Painting Stolen by Nazis?

  Lower courts have agreed with the Spanish government that US courts are not empowered to adjudicate claims of looted art; if the Supreme Court agrees it could chill further attempts to use American law to return artworks stolen from Europe's Jews by the Nazis. 

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• SOURCE: WGBH
  1/4/2022
  

  New Boston MFA Exhibit Shows Museum's Complex History of Censoring Queer Desire

  by Erin L. Thompson

  "When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes."

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• 12/12/2021
  

  Acquiring Eyes: The Unlikely Cross-Cultural Partnership Behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

  by Charles Dellheim

  The world of American art collecting was transformed by the unlikely partnership of the Boston Brahmin Isabella Stewart Gardner and the ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant Bernhard Berenson.

• 
• SOURCE: Diverse Education
  12/5/2021
  

  In Memoriam: Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, Pioneering African and Afro-Atlantic Art Historian

  Dr. Thompson's research pushed academics to consider African art as art, and developed important theories of Black aesthetic traditions in multiple art forms throughout the African diaspora. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  11/13/2021
  

  Discovering the World's Oldest Figurative Paintings

  The Sulawesi pig is estimated to be 10,000 years older than the Lascaux cave drawings and shows that figurative art didn't originate exclusively in Europe. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/26/2021
  

  France to Return Looted Artifacts to Benin

  At least 90,000 artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa are held by institutions in France, according to a 2018 report commissioned by the French government.

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  9/19/2021
  

  Art History Prof. Recognizes Lost Masterpiece in Local Church

  The painting, "Holy Family with the Infant St. John," is the third of a four-part series by Cesare Dandini and represents a continuation of Renaissance techniques in the Baroque period. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  9/16/2021
  

  The Ongoing Battle over Photographs of the Enslaved at Harvard

  Tamara Lanier has continued to fight Harvard over the ownership of photos of her enslaved ancestors, which were commissioned by the influential race scientist Louis Agassiz.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  9/7/2021
  

  Technology Enables the Exploration of the Work of the First Black American Painter with International Recognition

  "'Conservation never gets old,' says conservator Laura Hartman. There's always an aha! moment.' In this one, when the painting was turned horizontally, x-rays showed another composition underneath. Two draped figures in a landscape."

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  7/5/2021
  

  A Story Of War, Theft And A Beautiful Woman, Back In The U.S. After 70+ Years

  Botticelli's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci had a wild ride through World War II, including being stored in a Nazi salt mine. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/12/2021
  

  Opinion: If U.S. Museums Say Black Lives Matter, then they Should Return Africa’s Stolen Art

  "So far, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have not commented on whether their institutions will return the artifacts that were plundered from the Kingdom of Benin."

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• SOURCE: ArtNet
  5/10/2021
  

  Historians Say the Newark Museum’s Plan to Deaccession Art at Sotheby’s Will Inflict ‘Irreparable Damage’

  More than 60 scholars signed a letter demanding that the museum abandon its plans to sell works from its collection to recoup pandemic losses.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/30/2021
  

  Germany Sets Out Plans to Return Benin Bronzes

  “We are facing the historical and moral responsibility to bring Germany’s colonial past to light and to come to terms with it,” Monika Grütters, Germany’s culture minister, said in a news release.