Category: visual

Children’s book illustrator Loren Long, whose mother told him immediately after he learned he was colorblind that he should still pursue the art he loved: “In general, I can’t tell the difference between the many shades of brown and green or blue and purple. They’re very similar to me. Light blue and lavender look the same, and tan and pale green are almost impossible to tell apart. My living room is a shade of gray, but if my wife had told me it was green I would have taken her word all these years.”

It’s almost mind-blowing that what the Guerilla Girls have been saying for years is finally filtering to the places it needs to be: “Eike Schmidt, who became the Uffizi’s director in 2015 after a stint at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, says he drew inspiration from the Guerilla Girls, a group of feminist art activists, who told him that many museums have the works of women artists, but they’re kept in storage.”

Artist Kader Attia, who won 2016’s Prize Marcel Duchamp, has quite a lot to say (and create) about the topic – and it’s a timely discussion, timely art. “What ultimately makes the question of reparation so compelling is not its recalcitrance, but its urgency. In Europe, and France in particular, long-strained differences of culture are now bound up in a complex web of alarming social crises — systemic poverty, racism, extremism, and terrible violence — which offer no hope of simplistic conclusion.”

Artist Bridget Quinn and a friend were getting ready to do some improvisational singing in abandoned tunnels when they noticed something seriously wrong. “The smell was really bad. And I’m familiar with non-point-source pollution, which is, like, oil coming off of the street after the rain, but this seemed like a constant flow.” Then a fire department tested the water …

The artist is L.A.-based painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Crosby “is known for depicting intimate familial settings with layers of paint, photographs and found images — the latter of which are often drawn from news clippings and Nigerian lifestyle magazines. These she frequently bathes in tinted washes, giving the images a nostalgic feel.”

“This new school of public sculptures, monuments and plaques range from lifelike portraits of millennial rappers to boulders honouring the lives lost in the Orlando massacre. It proves a new vision is under way to commemorate America’s updated values.”

“The museum, which opened to the public in February, has been at the centre of an ongoing battle over national memory. The right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS), elected to government in Poland in 2015, is determined to use the museum displays to present the “Polish point of view” while its critics argue for the autonomy of historians and museums.”

“Museums aren’t just working to cultivate new audiences because inclusiveness is a moral imperative — there’s also a strong business case for widening their nets. In an era of Snapchat videos and Instagram art, American cultural institutions are also trying to figure out how to cultivate the next generation of museum goers. 23 percent of the U.S. population is under the age of 18, according to census data — a generation that’s not particularly white, and not particularly wealthy. By 2020, more than half of all American children will be members of a minority population.”

“In 2017, we gained new insight on the early years of Leonardo da Vinci and the final ones of Andy Warhol; amateur archaeologists were rewarded with major finds; and several masterpieces were discovered, simply hiding in plain sight. From newly mapped Venezuelan petroglyphs to a long-lost Magritte, these are 10 of the most notable art-historical discoveries of the year.”

“For archaeologists, Afghanistan is virtually off-limits for fieldwork, as Taliban forces battle the Kabul government in far-flung provinces and security remains tenuous even in the capital. Yet U.S. and Afghan researchers are now finding thousands of never-before-cataloged ancient sites in the country, which for more than a millennium served as a crucial crossroads linking East and West. The discoveries promise to expand scholars’ view of long-vanished empires while giving the battered nation a desperately needed chance to protect its trove of cultural heritage.”