While some artists may intentionally create works that respond to political circumstances, others may do so by default. Protesting policy, war, or social norms, artists challenge the status quo and give voice to a movement. An artist and activist, LaToya Ruby Frazier, employs and upends documentary traditions as a means to disrupt media stereotypes. Interrogating how…
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The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) took a major step toward interrogating a controversial 18th-century group portrait in its collection centering on an early benefactor to the university, Elihu Yale. Responding to criticism of the painting’s subject from students and others, the YCBA removed the work from a gallery wall and replaced it with…
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Twenty-six works of art seized by French colonial soldiers in 1892 returned to Benin on Wednesday, November 10, 2021, a landmark in the long fight by African countries to recover looted artifacts. The works, which include the doors of the Palace of Abomey, royal thrones and warrior dance staffs, were formally welcomed back to Benin…
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The “Salvator Mundi,” which sold for $450 million at Christie’s auction house as a fully authenticated Leonardo da Vinci, has been downgraded by curators at the Prado national museum in Madrid, Spain. It was bought in November 2017 by the Saudi culture minister, Prince Badr bin Abdullah, apparently for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The downgrading…
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Stuart Semple still remembers the first time art knocked him on his ass. It was the late 1980s and 8-year old Semple was at the National Gallery in London, face to face with Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. “The painting leapt off the wall; it was like it was hovering. It totally overloaded my system. My…
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Recent projects used machine learning to resurrect paintings by Klimt and Rembrandt. They raise questions about what computers can understand about art. In 1945, fire claimed three of Gustav Klimt’s most controversial paintings. Commissioned in 1894 for the University of Vienna, “the Faculty Paintings”—as they became known—were unlike any of the Austrian symbolist’s previous…
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, plans to return a brass cockerel looted in 1897 by British troops from the royal palace in Benin to Nigeria, and is in contact with the relevant authorities there, a spokeswoman says. The cockerel, the only work in the collection to have been plundered in the sacking…
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Complex that will include a research institute for the Barbados Archives—a 400-year-old documentation of the British transatlantic slave trade The architect David Adjaye is to design a major new heritage site in Barbados, the country’s prime minister announced this weekend. The new site on the Caribbean island will lie next to a burial ground where…
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I’ve been on Clubhouse—the invitation-only social media app gaining members even faster than it amasses bad press for privacy invasions—for about three weeks now, just long enough to get myself into trouble. I keep clicking on friends’ names without realising I am creating a new “room” to welcome them to the app. And when I…
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In the 1990s, the Ohio Historical Connection, previously known as the Ohio Historical Society, gave the Nez Perce an ultimatum: either the tribe would purchase tribal artifacts owned by the Society, or the artifacts would need to be permanently returned after their 20-year loan agreement expired. The tribe scrambled to come up with the $608,000…
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