The term Americana refers, quite simply, to cultural artifacts related to the history of the United States. However, as American historian Hampton Sides wrote in Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier, “the United States is such a glorious mess of contradiction, such a crazy quilt of competing themes, such a fecund mishmash of people and ideas, that defining us is…
Art History
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Although the term ‘art history’ hardly evokes an image of masked bandits breaking into a museum or a mysterious disappearance of a priceless painting from a living room wall, art theft has always played an important role in the art world. Art is stolen for many reasons: sometimes for wealth, sometimes for power, sometimes for love and nostalgia. Whatever the…
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In Mexico’s National Sound Library, researchers may have discovered the world’s first voice recording of celebrated artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). If the recording is indeed authentic, it will be a major historical discovery. “We have been waiting for this for a long time,” said Pável Granados, Director of the Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico last Wednesday. And so, of course, has…
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Scream until your voice cracks. Dance until the point of exhaustion. Be present until you can’t stand it anymore. These are the principles of performance artist Marina Abramović: to seek out strange, new experiences and engage them with every sense. Her art is radical, ruthless, and uncomfortable. Again and again she casts herself into extreme situations – scratching herself with…
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On Thursday, June 13th, the art world lost a pillar of expressionist pop art. Since the mid-70s, Joy Pensato was re-imagining cartoon characters in her pop-y, acerbic, energetic, and sometimes sinister paintings. Her work combined influences from the likes of Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston. While she described her paintings as operating within the field of expressionism, it would…
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Architecture has long been a male dominated field – and still is today. At the beginning of 2018, female architects and urban planners in Germany made up just 34 percent of the field. The Pritzker Prize, which has been awarded to the world’s best architects since 1979, has been given to 41 men and only three women. Nonetheless, over the…
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“When we reflect on the question of cultural heritage objects, we must understand that it’s not simply objects that were taken, but reserves of energy, creative resources, reservoirs of potentials…and this loss is incommensurable”. -The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage On a mild day in November of 2017, the newly-elected French president Emmanuel Macron strode into the main amphitheater of…
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As another MET Gala passes, a record-breaking $15 million is raised for the museum’s Costume Institute, and your Instagram feed is flooded with sequins, rainbows, and a face-full of feathers. In the wake of the Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’ Gala and exhibition, whose theme was based on the 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’ by Susan Sontag, the internet…
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I.M. Pei, the renowned architect behind landmarks such as the Louvre Pyramid and Hong Kong’s Bank of China Tower, passed away Wednesday night in New York at the age of 102. A highly ambitious and adventurous visionary, Pei was known for blending inspiration from East and West and contrasting classic designs with modern twists. In celebration of his life’s work,…
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American art in the early 1960s, with Abstract Expressionism enjoying post-war popularity, was not exactly the sort of arena where one would expect to find 32 canvas paintings of soup cans and acknowledge themas fine art. This was the problem for Andy Warhol, when in 1962 he presented Campbell’s Soup Cans at Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Described…
