Fine Arts News

The ancient mixing bowl now in the possession of Manhattan's District Attorney.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art delivered an ancient vase by courier to Manhattan's district attorney last week. The DA had issued a warrant for the Greco-Roman vessel on July 24, citing "reasonable cause to believe" the museum was in possession of stolen property.

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Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist, explains to Ailsa Chang how he persuaded U.S. authorities to seize an ancient Italian vase from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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A pulpit for Pisa Cathedral by Italian sculptor Giovanni Pisano, showing a woman breastfeeding, was on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in October 2016. This weekend, a breastfeeding museum visitor says she was told to cover up, which the museum says violates its own policies.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has apologized to a breastfeeding visitor who says she was told to cover up.

The woman, who posts on Twitter as @vaguechera, says she had "flashed a nanosecond of nipple" in the museum's courtyard when she was told to conceal her breasts. Instead of bearing that in silence, she busted out her phone and started tweeting.


The woman in question told the BBC that she appreciated the apologies and the widespread support she received.
"That said, clearly not everyone is aware of the legal protection that women are afforded when feeding in a public space," she told the BBC. "Policies are important, but they only work if staff are supported to understand and carry them out."

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El Corrido de Boyle Heights, or The Ballad of Boyle Heights, was painted in 1983 by the East Los Streetscapers, an artist collective that painted a number of murals across Los Angeles' Boyle Heights neighborhood.

In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights, on the corner of Soto Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue, a brightly colored mural masks the wall behind a bus stop. At the center of the image, a woman sings proudly. She's surrounded by men playing musical instruments and a couple dancing in swirls of bright colors.

The mural is called El Corrido de Boyle Heights, or The Ballad of Boyle Heights. It was painted in 1983, and it's one of thousands of similar murals that started popping up in 1960s — murals that portray Chicano culture and heritage. The images speak to the Chicano political movement, which animated many Mexican-Americans in LA, and to the broader issues of their time: the Vietnam War, environmental degradation, education, civil rights.

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Ask Luis Garza how the La Raza exhibition came to be at The Autry Museum of the American West, and he raises his palms, eyes heavenward:

"Karma," he says. "Fate. Serendipity. The gods have chosen to align us at this moment in time."

Garza, who co-curated the exhibition with Amy Scott, is being a little dramatic, but he's not wrong. The country has finally started paying attention to Latino culture. Planning for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a huge, international group of shows focusing on Latin American culture in the Americas and in Los Angeles, was underway, spearheaded by the powerful Getty Museum. And at about the same time, Garza and others had begun to review thousands and thousands of photographs taken during the Chicano Rights movement. Photographers from La Raza (literally "the race"), an activist newspaper-turned-magazine published from 1967-1977, chronicled Chicanos in LA and Southern California; it would become nationally significant. After the magazine shut down, the archives were eventually gifted to UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. Years later, the Center wondered if the Autry might be interested in doing something with them.


Students argue with school administrator during the Walkouts. Circa 1968.

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Olga Wisinger-Florian (Austrian, 1844 – 1926)
Autumn Leaves

New York's Guggenheim Museum announced Monday that it was removing three works from its upcoming exhibit of contemporary art from China. Animal rights activists said the works depicted cruelty to animals.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York has announced it is pulling three works from an upcoming exhibit of contemporary Chinese art owing to "explicit and repeated threats of violence."

An online petition demanding the museum remove the works garnered more than 600,000 signatures since it was posted five days ago, contending that three of them depict animal cruelty. The pressure mounted from there: Tweetsshow protesters gathered outside the museum on Saturday, holding signs that say "suffering animals is not art."

The works in question all involve either live animals or videos thereof.

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The 2017 MacArthur "genius" grant recipients.

It's not often you'll find these 24 names in the same place. They are historians and musicians, computer scientists and social activists, writers and architects. But whatever it may read on their business cards (if they've even got business cards), they now all have a single title in common: 2017 MacArthur Fellow.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced the winners of this year's fellowship — often better known as the "genius" grant — and the list includes a characteristically wide array of disciplines: There's painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby, for instance, and mathematician Emmanuel Candès and immunologist Gabriel Victora, among many others.

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Njideka AkunyiliCrosby, 34, painter living in Los Angeles:
"Visualizing the complexities of globalization and transnational identity in works that layer paint, photographic imagery, prints, and collage elements."

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Sunil Amrith, 38, historian living in Cambridge, Mass.:
"Illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia."

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Greg Asbed, 54, human rights strategist living in Immokalee, Fla.:
"Transforming conditions for low-wage workers with a visionary model of worker-driven social responsibility."

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Annie Baker, 36, playwright living in New York City:
"Mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language."

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Regina Barzilay, 46, computer scientist living in Cambridge, Mass.:
"Developing machine learning methods that enable computers to process and analyze vast amounts of human language data."

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Dawoud Bey, 63, photographer and educator living in Chicago:
"Using an expansive approach to photography that creates new spaces of engagement within cultural institutions, making them more meaningful to and representative of the communities in which they are situated."

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Emmanuel Candès, 47, mathematician and statistician living in Stanford, Calif.:
"Exploring the limits of signal recovery and matrix completion from incomplete data sets with implications for high-impact applications in multiple fields."

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Jason De León, 40, anthropologist living in Ann Arbor, Mich.:
"Combining ethnographic, forensic, and archaeological evidence to bring to light the human consequences of immigration policy at the U.S.–Mexico border."

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Rhiannon Giddens, 40, singer, instrumentalist and songwriter living in Greensboro, N.C.:
"Reclaiming African American contributions to folk and country music and bringing to light new connections between music from the past and the present."

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Nikole Hannah-Jones, 41, journalist living in New York City:
"Chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform."

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Cristina Jiménez Moreta, 33, social justice organizer living in Washington, D.C.:
"Changing public perceptions of immigrant youth and playing a critical role in shaping the debate around immigration policy."

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Taylor Mac, 44, theater artist living in New York City:
"Engaging audiences as active participants in works that dramatize the power of theater as a space for building community."

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Rami Nashashibi, 45, community leader living in Chicago:
"Confronting the challenges of poverty and disinvestment in urban communities through a Muslim-led civic engagement effort that bridges race, class, and religion."

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Viet Thanh Nguyen, 46, fiction writer and cultural critic living in Los Angeles:
"Challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced."

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Kate Orff, 45, landscape architect living in New York City:
"Designing adaptive and resilient urban habitats and encouraging residents to be active stewards of the ecological systems underlying our built environment."

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Trevor Paglen, 43, artist and geographer living in Berlin:
"Documenting the hidden operations of covert government projects and examining the ways that human rights are threatened in an era of mass surveillance."

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Betsy Levy Paluck, 39, psychologist living in Princeton, N.J.:
"Unraveling how social networks and norms influence our interactions with one another and identifying interventions that can change destructive behavior."

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Derek Peterson, 46, historian living in Ann Arbor, Mich.:
"Reshaping our understanding of African colonialism and nationalism in studies that foreground East African intellectual production."

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Damon Rich, 42, designer and urban planner living in Newark, N.J.:
"Creating vivid and witty strategies to design and build places that are more democratic and accountable to their residents."

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Stefan Savage, 48, computer scientist living in La Jolla, Calif.:
"Identifying and addressing the technological, economic, and social vulnerabilities underlying internet security challenges and cybercrime."

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Yuval Sharon, 37, opera director and producer living in Los Angeles:
"Expanding how opera is performed and experienced through immersive, multisensory, and mobile productions that are infusing a new vitality into the genre."

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Tyshawn Sorey, 37, composer and musician living in Middletown, Conn.:
"Assimilating and transforming ideas from a broad spectrum of musical idioms and defying distinctions between genres, composition, and improvisation in a singular expression of contemporary music."

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Gabriel Victora, 40, immunologist living in New York City:
"Investigating acquired, or adaptive, immunity and the mechanisms by which organisms' antibody-based responses to infection are fine-tuned."

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Jesmyn Ward, 40, fiction writer living in DeLisle, Miss.:
"Exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential."

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Christie's unveiled Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi at Christie's New York on Tuesday in New York City.

The only known Leonardo da Vinci painting in private hands is heading to auction.

The portrait of Jesus Christ, Salvator Mundi, was only recently confirmed to be a da Vinci. This piece was thought to be a copy of a destroyed original. And it's still not clear where the painting was, exactly, for more than a century.

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The cats of Alexander Gunin