Art

For a millennium starting in the 4th century, traders and travelers met in grottoes carved into cliffs near the Dunhuang oasis, leaving behind artwork that was preserved thanks to the desert climate. But the region’s summers are no longer so calm or dry. In the Jinta Temple Grotto, over 300 miles from the Mogao Caves, atmospheric humidity levels reached as …

Cinema is often thought of as a passively received art form; a film projects on a screen, and an audience absorbs the image and sound. A great deal of mainstream movies treat viewers in precisely such a way, demanding and expecting little of them. But then there are works that actively encourage engagement by making viewers consciously aware of their …

 Photography #Anthimos Ntagkas #humor #street photography July 20, 2023 Grace Ebert Tel Aviv, 2018. All images © Anthimos Ntagkas, shared with permission One of the joys of street photography is that it reveals just how often unexpected, serendipitous juxtapositions are happening around us. Whether in Tel Aviv, New York, or Athens, Anthimos Ntagkas has a keen eye for these …

With newly commissioned works from Michael Sandford and Antonia Nannt “In the Night Time Bloom” places a magnifying lens over the cityscape building façade—the thin but loaded site which clothes the interior in decor. Thus, through the language of design, the contents of the building are intuitable to the outside observer. Yet, simultaneously, caked in surveillance equipment, this membrane keeps …

In the vast universe of artistic mediums, this post highlights one unsung hero: colored pencils. Often overlooked in junk drawers and craft bins, the colored pencil is a tool capable of creating amazingly beautiful art. Some people see colored pencils as a “beginner drawing tool” – a kind of big brother to the crayon. But that’s far from true. Skilled …

 Art Colossal Design Documentary #climate crisis July 20, 2023 Grace Ebert “Build Me a Platform, High in the Trees” by Nathalie Miebach. Photo by Eric Lu At the Precipice: Responses to the Climate Crisis opened last week at the Design Museum of Chicago with a vibrant collection of works considering what it feels like to live amid a global …

A selection of paintings by self-taught artist Glenn Hardy Jr. Born and raised in Maryland, Hardy composes idyllic scenes and portraits of black figures in moments of relaxation, contemplation, and celebration. Heavily influenced by Kerry James Marshall whose interrogations of Western art history works to correct the omission of black figures, Hardy constructs a compendium of universal moments that stand …

A collective labor of memory “One never begins in a pure space, but rather on a surface saturated with images and unexpressed thoughts.” —Seloua Luste Boulbina 1 Stratum in geology are those striated layers of exposed rock often worked and eroded by passing waters across the slow flowing of time. These surfaces expose what is mostly unseen, buried within the …

Last spring, the city stopped the iconic “Alamo” (1967) sculpture — the 1,800-pound cube in Astor Place that can perform a slow-motion pirouette — when the Department of Transportation (DOT) locked down the steel block with a metal support frame. The strangely hypnotic artwork at the boundary of Noho and the East Village had been broken for a while, and …

Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus” (1920) (all images courtesy University of Chicago Press) Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920) is the Mona Lisa of early modernism, a celebrated work whose history grants it a fabulous mystique. It was purchased by Walter Benjamin, who hung it in his German study, and then in his Parisian study when he was in exile, and discussed it …