Fine Arts News

The Fulbright Triptych by Simon Dinnerstein.

American museum-goers can now get a rare glimpse of a painting that's been called a masterpiece — but has spent most of its life in storage. When The Fulbright Triptych was first shown in 1975, its future looked bright, but it didn't work out that way. It's a massive work — nearly 14 feet wide — with near life-sized portraits of the artist, Simon Dinnerstein, and his family.

It's the details that get you. In the right panel sits the artist, in the left, his wife holds their infant daughter, and in the middle is his work bench covered with engraving tools. On the walls behind are carefully reproduced paintings, postcards and photographs. And in between, two windows look out on a small town, all rendered in a hyper-realistic kind of folk-art style.

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Elisabeth Sinding (1846 - 1930)
Winter Guests

The Carter Burden Gallery in Chelsea only shows works by artists who are at least 60 years old.

Some artists in New York may be wishing to get older faster. A gallery there caters to artists age 60 and older. No kids allowed.

Some 200 artists have exhibited at the Carter Burden Gallery since it opened nine years ago in Chelsea. Business is good, and works sell from $200 to $9,000. It's a lot like hundreds of other galleries in New York — except for one important thing: The Carter Burden has an age limit. Why?

"Older adults do not stop being who they are because they hit a particular age," said gallery director Marlena Vaccaro. "Professional artists never stop doing what we do, and in many cases we get better at it as we go along."
What does change is the art market. With rare exceptions, artists who were hot when they started out found that galleries, and certainly museums, cooled to them as years passed. They kept making art, but weren't being shown or bought. Carter Burden's mission is to give them a wall, "because walls are the thing we need," Vaccaro said.
According to Vaccaro, very few galleries represent older professional artists, unless they're really famous. "And I get that," she said. "Galleries are a business. They need to show artists that are going to bring in big bucks."
Carter Burden is different. It's a nonprofit, supported by a board, a corporate sponsor and philanthropists. "That allows us to show the work that is purely an aesthetic choice, and not be concerned if I'm going to get $25,000 for a painting that sells," Vaccaro explained. "We could not do that if we had to survive just on the sale of the work."

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Google's app matching faces to famous paintings went viral prompting, a flurry of selfies over the weekend.
Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Who can say why some gimmicks take off and others flop? But the Google Arts & Culture app tapped into the zeitgeist over the weekend, until it seemed like just about everyone with access to a camera phone and a social media account was seeking and sharing their famous painting doppelganger.

Forget the fact that Google launched the app and online page in 2016, allowing users to browse a trove of artwork sourced from hundreds of museums worldwide. It was the portrait feature included in last month's update that has spun the selfies into overdrive.

The metric site App Annie said Google Arts & Culture was the No. 1 free app over the weekend. And by Monday, it was still holding on to the spot.
Perhaps users can't resist the vain pleasure of seeing and showcasing their own visages reflected back in a famous work of art.
Or maybe it's just fun.

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Nestled among palm trees at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens near Pasadena, Calif., there's a mysterious, metallic structure that curls like a nautilus shell. It's called the Orbit Pavilion, and it was created by a team of artists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories, or JPL.

Step inside the 17-foot-tall structure and you'll hear otherworldly sounds triggered by the tracking signal of 19 orbiting satellites above Earth.

"All day long they move all around you," says artist Dan Goods. "It's much like listening to a bird sort of flying across the sky. And in this particular case, it's satellites that are helping us understand the Earth."

Goods describes his team as "artists, designers, makers, thinkers helping come up with ways of telling the public about what NASA does, as well as helping scientists and engineers think about the future."
He's speaking from a wood-walled JPL conference room lined with the paintings of stern-faced former directors, including the one who hired him. Goods says, "The director of JPL gave me a six-month opportunity, and that was 14 years ago. What I find is that a lot of really creative people here — we think in similar ways. You know, we're always trying to experiment; we're trying to ask big questions and see where our experiments take us. It's been an amazing place. It's like a playground for nerds here."

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Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama stand next to their newly unveiled portraits during a ceremony Monday at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Brand new portraits of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama — wearing matching calm, strong expressions — were revealed on Monday at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama sitting in a chair, elbows in his knees, leaning forward with an intense expression. The background, typical of a Wiley painting, is a riotous pattern of intense greens.
"Pretty sharp," Obama said with a grin.

Amy Sherald, a Baltimore-based artist, painted Michelle Obama sitting in a floor-length gown, chin on her hand, looking directly at the viewer with a calm, level gaze.

The paintings, like the presidency they honor, are a historic first. Wiley and Sherald — both already famous for their portraits of black Americans — are the first black painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum.
Celebrities from Shonda Rimes to Steven Spielberg, former administration officials from Josh Earnest to Eric Holder, and members of the media filed into the Portrait Gallery's expansive, glass-covered central courtyard for the ceremony. Kim Sajet, the director of the gallery, told the audience that a portrait was not truly finished until a viewer, a member of the public, had a personal encounter with it.

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During a customs check of a bus along a highway outside Paris, agents found a stolen Edgar Degas painting inside a suitcase. None of the passengers would claim it.

In December 2009, a small painting by Edgar Degas was quietly stolen from the Cantini museum in Marseille, France. Museum staff discovered Les Choristes was missing when they arrived in the morning, and the prosecutor suggested it could be an inside job because the painting had been unscrewed from the wall and there was no evidence of a break-in.
An investigation was launched, but eight years went by and the 1877 painting — worth an estimated $1 million — wasn't seen again.

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Erich Berger and Mari Keto have made radioactive jewels, part of their Inheritance Project, that are unwearable by humans — and remain locked in a concrete vault equipped with radiation measurement devices.

Vincent Ialenti is a MacArthur Nuclear Waste Solutions Fellow at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He holds a PhD in anthropology from Cornell University and an MSc in Law, Anthropology & Society from the London School of Economics.

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These nuclear critics' and advocates' motivations may seem worlds apart. But what inspires me, as an anthropologist, is their common humanity. They have each, in their own ways, found inspiration in the most unlikely of places — challenging us to approach familiar nuclear energy technologies from fresh, outside-the-box angles.

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Jasper Johns, pictured in his New York City studio in 1964, was known for transforming common objects like flags, numerals and archery targets into unsettling paintings.
A guide at the Jasper Johns exhibition at The Broad museum in Los Angeles smiles. Then she urges: "Go look at that one."

Brianna MacGillivray points at "Flags," from 1965. The painting is enigmatic, yet direct — much like the artist.
He's painted two rectangles on a gray background. The top one has black stars against an orange background; the stripes are black and green. There's a tiny white dot on one of the green stripes. Below this rectangle is another one, all gray.

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Carol Ann Waldron



Carol Ann Waldron was born in Dublin in 1948. She spent her childhood and early years in the County Wexford village of Oulart and subsequently her family moved to Greystones, County Wicklow and it is here that Waldron now lives and works.

Waldron is a primarily self-taught artist. Having learned the basic techniques of painting, she is of the opinion that creativity is either present or not and while it can be nurtured and nourished, it cannot be taught.