Category: visual

This is a great discovery because it’s of a young, casually seated Tubman, wearing elegant clothing. Obviously, there’s wrong with a freedom fighter looking older and more pensive when she’s older, but it’s good to have new information about her. – The New York Times

Basically, you gain the trust of, to put it politely, some shady folks. “There comes a point, you know, when a stolen artwork that’s circulating in the criminal community – security in a drugs deal here, part-payment in an arms deal there – just becomes a burden. Something to be got rid of. ” – The Guardian (UK)

Susan Tallman: “The claim for af Klint as an inventor of abstract art runs into two serious problems. The first is that it doesn’t seem to match how she thought the work should function. The second is that abstraction was ‘invented’ in the same sense that the Western Hemisphere was ‘discovered.'” – The New York Review of Books

I.M. Pei’s glass structure may be a beloved icon now, but from the time the design was revealed to opening day, the resistance was ferocious. “A foreign body, showing such disregard for history.” “It’s not Dallas here!” One Académie Française member wrote an “appeal for insurrection.” And when Pei showed his design to the relevant national commission, his interpreter burst into tears. – The Art Newspaper

We’ve moved far beyond the DYI days of tech-integrated engagement with audiences. As the technology becomes higher level and more complex, it moves further way from the art. – The Art Newspaper

Like all architecture, abandoned and ruined spaces are animated by what people want from them. They can be massive economic boons or cynical attempts to cloak a neighborhood’s rapid socioeconomic transformation. They can also be powerful symbols and drivers of community engagement. – Fast Company

“In its sprawling nearly mile-long loop of galleries, the museum tells the story of how this tiny nation of nomadic Bedouins and pearl divers became, with the discovery of natural gas, the most wealthy country per capita on Earth in just 50 years.” But without a single entirely vertical surface in the place, none of the exhibits hang on the walls. (For a larger selection of exterior and interior photos, click here.) – The Guardian

The Autry will put out a call for proposals for the “revitalization and creative reuse” of L.A.’s oldest museum, a 12-acre campus near the Mount Washington-Highland Park border, plus the museum’s nearby adobe building, a 1917 replica of a Spanish California ranch house from the 19th century. – Los Angeles Times

When conservators at the Tate Britain removed the frame on The Oise at Auvers, a corner of the canvas that hadn’t faded from exposure to light revealed what color van Gogh meant that sky to be when he painted it. – The Guardian