News

Devon Van Houten Maldonado asks artists and curators to imagine the changes and trends that will influence the art world in the next two decades.

Featured on bbc.com

The future may be uncertain, but some things are undeniable: climate change, shifting demographics, geopolitics. The only guarantee is that there will be changes, both wonderful and terrible. It’s worth considering how artists will respond to these changes, as well as what purpose art serves, now and in the future.

More like this:

Featured on techcrunch.com

Pinterest  is a great place to find digital art but a terrible place to sell it. The fact that anything online is infinitely copyable makes it tough for artists to establish a sense of scarcity necessary for their work to be perceived as valuable. Yash Nelapati saw this struggle up close as Pinterest’s first employee. Now he has started MakersPlace, where creators can generate a blockchain fingerprint for each of their artworks that proves who made it and lets it be sold as part of a limited edition.

Officials say the ‘main works of art’ were saved. But others have been lost or seriously damaged

Featured on smithsonianmag.com

People around the world watched with heavy hearts as a fire tore through the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris yesterday. It took firefighters 12 hours to extinguish the flames. When all was said and done, the cathedral’s iconic spire collapsed, its roof has been destroyed, but not all was lost in the blaze.

Featured on theconversation.com

Louis Vuitton reopened its refurbished flagship store in Florence in March 2019 to great fanfare from the fashion industry. The brand made great play of the fact that, alongside all the luxury apparel and accessories, the store is replete with artworks including works by Italian artists such as Osvaldo Medici del Vascello and Massimo Listri.

Featured on artsy.net

Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh led a turbulent, restless life. From a young age, he moved incessantly, searching for both artistic inspiration and an environment that would calm his gnawing nerves. “It always seems to me that I’m a traveller who’s going somewhere and to a destination,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, in August 1888. By the time of the artist’s death in 1890, at age 37, he’d lived in over 15 different cities across Europe.

Featured on artsy.net

In 2019, it’s hard to see why John Singer Sargent’s 1883–84 paintingMadame X scandalized Paris. If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American wing, where it now hangs in an ornate gold frame, you’ll see a simple composition of a porcelain-skinned woman with an updo standing against a brushy brown background. She wears a plunging black gown with gold straps, one hand clutching a fan while the other rests on a round table. Her face is in profile, the line of her long nose leading the viewer’s eye slantwise out of the picture.

Pamela Wagner, the wonderful coordinator of the University of Arizona’s National Arts Program Exhibit, had another successful year. She hung a total of 186 artworks for their 9th annual exhibit! Their show, entitled “On Our Own Time”, invites all UA employees, retirees and immediate family members to take part. 

The Executive Director of the National Arts Program had a chance to visit Community Renewal Team (CRT) and see first hand just what this wonderful organization is accomplishing. One of their biggest projects each year is coordinating the City of Hartford’s National Arts Program Exhibit. In its 28th year, coordinator Ilana Bernstein says that they have renewed their commitment to offering this exhibition for many years to come.

This year marked a huge milestone for the City of Cleveland National Arts Program exhibit.  The city celebrated their 20th Anniversary with the program while simultaneously breaking all of their previous participation records.  This year’s exhibit featured 525 pieces of art by city residents - that’s 204 pieces more than their 2018 show! Organizing a show of this size is no small task and coordinator Rosa Casiano along with her team from Cudell Fine Arts did an amazing job from start to finish.  The show received rave reviews from participants, visitors and judges alike.

Featured on washingtonpost.com

Miriam Sutton likes to wander around her neighborhood in Northeast Washington with secrets in her pocket: palm-size handmade stickers, decorated to look like Japanese paper cranes. She started making them for a friend who'd fallen ill — in line with the belief that if you make 1,000 paper cranes, you get a wish. Her friend died before she got to 1,000, but she keeps making them in his memory. When she thinks no one is looking, she'll stick one onto a newspaper box or the back of a stop sign.

Featured on bostonglobe.com

Millennials snapped up $28 million worth of art inspired by the Simpsons television show, along with skateboarding shoes and cans of spray paint at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong as a new generation of collectors comes of age.

“The auction room suddenly got a lot hipper, with all these cool millennial buyers in hoodies,” said Edie Hu, art advisory specialist at Citi Private Bank in Hong Kong. “Their tastes are very different from their parents, and Sotheby’s is tapping into that.”

The celebrity artist says a religious epiphany inspired the unexpected decision.

Featured on hyperallergic.com

In a surprise statement released last night by his publicist, mega-celebrity pop artist Jeff Koons announced the end of his career in art and the termination of all projects and staff at his Manhattan studio by the end of 2019.

Featured on nonprofitquarterly.org

Featured on time.com

Arthur Brand, a man nicknamed the “Indiana Jones of the art world,” has done it again.

The Dutch art historian and art crime investigator recently located Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar ( also known as Buste de Femme) after it was stolen from a Saudi sheikh’s yacht on the French Riviera in 1999.

Curators at Paris exhibition tracked down names of models used by likes of Manet, Picasso and Cézanne

Featured on theguardian.com

French art masterpieces have been renamed after their long-overlooked black subjects in a ground-breaking new Paris show on the representation of people of colour in art.

Edouard Manet’s Olympia, the scandalous painting of a naked reclining prostitute that marks the birth of modern art, has been renamed Laure after the woman who posed as her black maid.