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Featured on tauntongazette.com

For eight years, Handshouse Studio has worked to create stimulating toys for Emily and Ruth, two Asian elephants at the Buttonwood Park Zoo in New Bedford.

The founders of the studio, Rick and Laura Brown, are both teachers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and decided to create the “Toys for Elephants” program to give their students a challenge in making stimulating toys for Emily and Ruth.

Featured on omaha.com

As we grow older and look for ways to fortify our physical and mental health, study after study has painted a picture for us: It pays to get creative.

This time, we’re not talking about exploring a new Zumba Gold class or diving into a series of brain games. We’re talking about exercising actual creativity – painting, drawing, sculpting and otherwise engaging in art.

Featured on newyork.cbslocal.com

The art of neon lights is still alive and well.

You can call them glowing, luminous or even blazing, but you can’t call them in danger.

As CBSN New York’s John Dias reports, neon lights are far from flickering out.

“I love neon lights. I see them everywhere,” said Te-Asia Ivey, of Downtown Brooklyn.

“I actually enjoy them a lot. They are very trendy right now, but they make a beautiful photo,” Jordan Mauldin, of Propsect Park, said.

Now Peter Max’s associates are trading lurid allegations of kidnapping, hired goons, attempted murder by Brazil nut and art fraud on the high seas.

Featured on nytimes.com

Featured on washingtonpost.com

Twenty-seven years ago, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija began serving curry out of a makeshift kitchen in a New York gallery. The artwork was not only comprised of the curry and its environs, but also the people who came to the gallery, and the way they interacted with one other, and the conversations they had while they ate.

The anonymous artist set up a stall to showcase paintings of a cruise ship parked in the canal surrounding the city.

Featured on hyperallergic.com

British graffiti artist Banksy has made a surprise appearance in the Venice Biennale. The mysterious artist posted a video on Instagram this morning showing himself (all but his face, of course) installing a stall near St. Mark’s Square, where he disguised himself as a street vendor selling quaint oil paintings.

Fame sells: that’s the lesson in a survey revealing the world’s most popular exhibitions during a bumper year

Featured on theguardian.com

In Paris, it was Beyoncé and Jay-Z; in Washington, it was Barack and Michelle Obama; while, in London, visitors queued to look at Pablo Picasso’s erotic muse or Grayson Perry’s summer picks.

Featured on forbes.com

To help prepare children for the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs of the future, “we’re teaching them about design thinking, pattern recognition, problem solving, and innovation,” says Art in Action executive director Mizgon Darby. “We’re teaching them through drawing, painting, and sculpture.”

Featured on nytimes.com

The Metropolitan Museum of Art said on Wednesday that it would stop accepting gifts from members of the Sackler family linked to the maker of OxyContin, severing ties between one of the world’s most prestigious museums and one of its most prolific philanthropic dynasties.

Artists discuss how creative work plays a critical role in breaking through environmental overload.

Featured on crosscut.com

Since the time of cave paintings, artists have been translating the state of their environment. There are a ton of bison out there today, one such painting might convey. Archaeologists say this art form is evidence of an evolutionary shift: the onset of symbolic thinking, a marker for the modern mind.

The State of Delaware is currently in its 8th year with the National Arts Program and just seems to get better with age. “It is an opportunity for State employees and their family members to be part of an exhibition of visual art. And to share their talents that they’ve been doing at home that maybe they’ve never been able to showcase before,” said Division of the Arts’ deputy director Kristin Pleasanton. The exhibition included artworks from 207 artists and was displayed once again in the Delaware State University Art Center/Gallery.

Featured on cnn.com

Imagine an empty gallery in a museum. It's just you, a 200-year-old masterpiece and the quiet. The brush strokes of a Rembrandt painting draw you in, and with your hands behind your back, you lean in to study the colors and textures.

Looking sideways, you spot the security guard at the door, standing bored and inattentive. You could easily reach out your hand and steal a quick touch, rules be damned.

The 15,000-square-foot museum will open in February 2020.

Featured on boston.com

It will cost nothing at all to check out contemporary art in Boston when a new museum opens its doors next year.

The idea was inspired by a 1970 drawing depicting a forest entrapped in a big city soccer stadium.

Featured on hyperallergic.com

Basel, Switzerland-based art collector and curator Klaus Littmann will plant 299 trees in the Wörthersee Stadium in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt as a statement on climate change. For Forest: The Unending Attraction of Nature, a temporary intervention scheduled to open on September 9, will be Austria’s largest public art installation to date.

From a new record installation time to a super fun awards reception, Coordinator Jessica Rasmussen reported that everything ran very smoothly for the City of Santa Rosa’s 16th Annual NAP exhibit.  Jessica credits this success in large part to an amazing group of returning volunteers who look forward to helping with the program each year.