News

May 13, 2019

Why touching art is so tempting -- and exciting

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.

May 09, 2019

Boston is getting a new art museum, and it will be free to every visitor

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.

May 07, 2019

Art Collector to Plant 299 Trees in a Stadium to Protest Inaction About Climate Change

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.

May 07, 2019

Santa Rosa Show Celebrated by the Community

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.

May 02, 2019

Can an Art Collective Become the Disney of the Experience Economy?

Meow Wolf started as a loose group of penniless punks. Now it’s a multimillion-dollar dream factory anchoring an “immersive bazaar” in Las Vegas.

Featured on nytimes.com

Apr 30, 2019

A Painter Who Left the Art World in Order to Actually Make Art

For the past 30 years, Vivian Suter has been quietly working in her home on Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. Now, she’s found international recognition.

Featured on nytimes.com

Apr 29, 2019

What will art look like in 20 years?

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.

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Apr 26, 2019

Pinterest employee #1 launches blockchain art market MakersPlace

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.

Apr 17, 2019

What Happened to Notre-Dame’s Precious Art and Artifacts?

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.

Apr 15, 2019

Luxury fashion brands are making a splash in the art world

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.

Apr 10, 2019

5 Places That Inspired Vincent van Gogh’s Art

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.

Apr 09, 2019

Why Madame X Scandalized the Art World

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.

Apr 04, 2019

University of Arizona President Attends NAP

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. 

Apr 04, 2019

Hartford Focuses On Their Youth

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.

Apr 04, 2019

Cleveland’s 20th Year Breaks All Records

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.