Fine Arts News

Rembrandt's most ambitious painting — the wall-size "The Night Watch" — is getting a tune up. NPR's Audie Cornish talks with Petria Noble of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam about the restoration.

more...

Augusta Savage was an artist, educator, activist and community leader. Her work is the focus of an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, organized by the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens. She's pictured above with her 1938 sculpture Realization.



Sculptor Augusta Savage once said: "I was a Leap Year baby, and it seems to me that I have been leaping ever since." Born on Feb. 29, 1892, Savage leapt from the Jim Crow South to public attention in the Harlem Renaissance, but is little known today. Now, her work is the focus of an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, curated by Jeffreen M. Hayes and coordinated for the historical society by Wendy N.E. Ikemoto.

Savage grew up in Green Cove Springs, a brick-making town in Florida. "It had all of this natural red clay, and so Savage would seek out those red clay pits as a child," explains Ikemoto. But before long, "she stopped making mud pies and started making things."

more...

Pekka Halonen (1865 -1933)
Ateljeenäkymä 1910

Big royal statues from the Kingdom of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, are pictured in 2018 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

Early in the movie Black Panther, a black visitor played by Michael B. Jordan confronts a white curator over African artifacts in a fictional British museum.

"How do you think your ancestors got these?" the visitor asks. "You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it — like they took everything else?"

The visitor turns out to be the villain of the movie. But a similar (if less ultimately violent) discussion is happening in museums around the world over the volume of African art in their collections. Officials in Germany and The Netherlands have announced plans to return art and artifacts taken from Africa during the colonial period. And more museum staff are meeting on the topic across Europe.

In 2006, France's Quai Branly museum lent a set of wooden statues and carved furniture to the country of Benin. Originally seized from the region by a French military expedition in 1892, they were housed in a Beninese museum called the Fondation Zinsou.

Marie-Cécile Zinsou, founder of the museum, says people lined up for 3 to 4 hours, and that visitors to the exhibition left lots of messages of gratitude in the visitors' book.

more...

Men wait to board a non-existent plane in Adrian Paci's 2007 video, Centro di permanenza temporanea (Temporary Detention Center).

A 10-minute drive from the White House — where immigration has a top spot on the President's "to-do" list — a museum has filled three of its floors with artists' reactions to displacement, relocation and flight.

"The Warmth of Other Suns - Stories of Global Displacement" at The Phillips Collection features some 75 paintings, photographs, videos and installations exploring the global refugee crisis. The works were chosen by curators from the New Museum in New York and many of the artists are immigrants themselves.

Every day brings stories about immigration — on radio, TV, social media. What can art say that's different? "Art has a language of its own," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of The Phillips Collection. "It's very direct."
Artists don't necessarily look at suffering in a different way, "but they know how to express it," says Dani Levinas, chairman of the Phillips board.

Albanian artist Adrian Paci explores hope, impatience and frustration in his video Centro di permanenza temporanea (Temporary Detention Center). "What you see in this video is a stairway — the kind that you would use to board an airplane on an empty tarmac," says New Museum curator Natalie Bell. "What's absent in this film is the airplane, so you see a number of men attempting to board, climbing up the stairs, and waiting."

For what? They're on a stairway to nowhere. The plane may never come.

Kader Attia strews second-hand clothing on the floor for the installation La Mer Morte (The Dead Sea).

French Algerian artist Kader Attia has strewn a gallery's wooden floor with faded blue clothing — T-shirts, jeans, sweatshirts, shoes for the installation La Mer Morte (The Dead Sea).

"It at once evokes an image of clothing that's been washed up on the shore — but also serves as a kind of memorial of the people who have been lost at sea," says Bell.

Sometimes I turn the page on such sights of tragedy — maybe you do, too. Some 71 million souls have been "forcibly displaced" from their homes, according to the U.N. — it's hard to wrap your head around it. But this exhibition, in its persistent, gentle enormity, forces attention.

more...

Does the state have a right to control a woman’s mind, her life and her body?
Those questions have been hotly debated as lawmakers consider new legislation on reproductive policy,, access to maternal health care on the federal and state levels.
Those conversations have been fueled by Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” widely considered to be a literary masterpiece.

We’ll never know how many people have seen their own experiences represented in the character of Offred, the live-in slave used to bear children in a totalitarian state.

more...

Singer, producer, supervisor, songwriter, musician. Raphael Saadiq has worn many hats during his time in the music industry.
Named for his older brother who died of a heroin overdose, “Jimmy Lee” is Saadiq’s first solo album in eight years. It’s an exploration of addiction and unresolved trauma.
The R&B singer delves into visiting his brother in prison, the war on drugs and his own struggles with drug use.
Why did he feel this was an album he was compelled to make? What should his audience take away from it?
Saadiq sits down with us to answer.

more...

Jason Moran, Slugs' Saloon, 2018.
Farzad Owrang/Courtesy of Jason Moran and Luhring Augustine

For many observers of modern jazz, pianist Jason Moran became a known entity 20 years ago, with the release of his debut album. For Adrienne Edwards, curator of performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, his name first circulated more recently, as a kind of rumor.

"I have really good friends who are artists — whether it's Adam Pendleton, or Julie Mehretu, or Kara Walker, or Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch — that were all saying, 'I want to work with Jason,' " Edwards reflected this week. "And I kept going, 'What is it about this musician doing things that are much broader than music? What is it about him that they are drawn to?' "

The answers can be found, if not entirely resolved, somewhere in Jason Moran, a pathfinding exhibition that opens this Friday. It's the first full show presented at the Whitney by Edwards, who originated it (with another curator, Danielle Jackson) last year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. And, in addition to consolidating a large swath of Moran's interdisciplinary work, the show highlights how his jazz skillset — not just with improvising, but also with nuances of alchemy and flow and surprise — have opened new possibilities for the artists in his orbit.

"Everyone had different reasons for seeking him," Edwards says of those artists, "but the commonality was definitely aesthetic. Trying to get to a feeling of something that they knew, in their own work, they hadn't fully gotten to yet."

more...

Roman courtyard 120х160 oil on canvas 2014

Every year, millions of people visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It holds thousands of years of art history: Egyptian temples, Renaissance sculptures, iconic 20th century paintings.
Admittedly, it's a little much.

"For the public this is one of those great and magnificent spaces that can be hugely intimidating," says Christine Coulson, standing in the museum's great hall. "But for me this feels like home."
Coulson worked at the Met for 25 years, often writing speeches or lectures for the museum's director to deliver. Now, she is writing in her own voice — and sometimes, in the voice of the artworks themselves.
Her debut novel, Metropolitan Stories, goes behind the scenes at the museum. It's a series of loosely connected stories about the people and objects that fill the galleries.

She gave NPR a tour of what she calls her "second home," featuring some of the objects that made their way into the book.

more...