Fine Arts News

The work of art is made entirely of Rubik's Cubes — all the little colored squares create a kind of mosaic. It's expected to sell at auction for more than $160,000.


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Gabriel Rico's Nimble and sinister tricks (To be preserved with out scandal and corruption) I, 2018. The work is made of glass, brass and different objects.

When a work of art is broken, is it destroyed — or transformed?
That's perhaps a generous question that one art critic is posing after a dramatic incident Saturday at the Zona Maco contemporary art fair in Mexico City.

One of the works on display was a large sculpture by Mexican artist Gabriel Rico. The piece involved a large sheet of glass with objects suspended through it, including a soccer ball, a tennis ball, a stick, a feather and a rock.

Rico, who is based in Guadalajara, Mexico, "creates pieces that fragment the composition of the contemporary human and evidence the geometric imperfection in nature. ... Rico's sculptural works reflect on the nature of the materials used to produce them and their arrangement in the final composition," according to a preview of the exhibit from his gallery.

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The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology — known as The Penn Museum — has hired refugees and immigrants from the Middle East, Africa and Central America as part of their "Global Guides" program. Moumena Saradar, who is originally from Syria, stands next to the wedding jewelry and headdress of Queen Puabi, her favorite part of the Middle East gallery.

The museum faced a docent dilemma.
When Ellen Owens, director of learning and public engagement at thePenn Museum, looked at her pool of docents, she saw a wonderful — and aging — group of largely white people. Docents explain exhibits to visitors and show them around the galleries. Owens thought that having docents from a range of ages and backgrounds might be a good way to connect with more diverse communities who might not otherwise be drawn to the Penn Museum.

With her colleague Kevin Schott, Owens hit upon an idea. Their institution is world-renowned for its priceless artifacts from the Middle East, Africa and Central America. So, why not hire refugees and immigrants from those parts of the world to work as docents?

"We really wanted to have the narratives of lots of different people, to bring the authentic voices of people that live in other places into the galleries of the museum," Owens explains.

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Eric Tucker painted the everyday people in his hometown of Warrington, England — like this smoker in a pub.

Eric Tucker's paintings have an effect on people. You can see it in their expressions as they stroll through a new exhibition, Eric Tucker: The Unseen Artist, at the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery.
"Happy. Really happy," says Cris Bury. "He's got the character straightaway."

"I'm wandering round here with a smile on me face because I just think they're wonderful," says Phil Lord. And Colin Okell adds, "A lot of them depict a society that's gone."

Bury is a retired teacher who's lived in this former industrial town in northwest England for four decades. She didn't know about Tucker. "Nobody did until he died," she says. "And that's when it was discovered."
Tucker was a boxer and construction worker in Warrington. And though few knew it, he was also a prolific, self-taught artist whose paintings depicted a lost, industrial era. Before he died in 2018 at the age of 86, family members discovered a trove of about 400 canvases, the best of which are now on display here.
Tucker spent his days in the front parlor of his home, painting the working-class world he knew: Boisterous pubs where people played piano and sang. Neighborhoods of terraced houses — the English equivalent of row homes — where men played cricket in empty lots against a skyline of belching smokestacks. It was a communal way of life that disappeared with Warrington's factories.

Many of Tucker's paintings depict a version of Warrington that's long gone.

Linda Guethes is a retired secretary in her 70s. She says she can remember a time when nobody had a car. "So everything you did, you passed people all the time. You met people at the school gates, you know, with prams. Now they pull up, drop my kids off and go, and all that community is gone."

"We were struck by the quality of the work," says Craig Sherwood, the curator of the Warrington museum."One of the real, real strengths with Eric's work, it's the connection that he feels with the people of Warrington. He is very much part of the community and he's communicating it through his art."

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In the decades before World War I, French artists began painting scenes of ordinary life — on the street, at work, at home, in the clubs and cafes. An exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum is dedicated to this Belle Époque or beautiful era. Above, Pierre Bonnard's 1900 oil on cardboard triptych The Place Clichy, Paris.

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One thousand years of Native American women's art is currently traveling around the country, being featured at major museums.

"The whole idea to wipe us off the face of the Earth didn't work," says Anita Fields, an Osage artist in the show. "So we're still very powerfully here."

"Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists" is now on view at Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the White House. It's the third stop on a tour that also includes Minnesota, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone–Bannock), Adaptation II, 2012, shoes designed by Christian Louboutin, leather, glass beads, porcupine quills, sterling silver cones, brass sequins, chicken feathers, cloth, deer rawhide, and buckskin
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Of course, legendary Native women artists — such as Puebla potter Maria Martinez — have been featured in solo exhibitions, including at the Renwick Gallery. And Native women's work has long been shown in major museums such as the Smithsonian. But that does not mean it was recognized as such.

"It wasn't being called Native women's art," points out Fields. "It was: The war shirt that was worn by the warrior, and so it was named for him."

Native women's art was usually anonymized and identified by tribal affiliation when exhibited in museums, says co-curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe. "This was a Nez Perce object, or an Apache dress," she explains by way of example. The names of the artists have been lost.

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Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, photographed in New York on Aug. 19, 2007. The artist, best known for their work in the groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, died on March 14, 2020.


Genesis P-Orridge, the visual, musical and performance artist whose work with Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV gave rise to the industrial and acid house genres, has died at age 70, after being diagnosed with leukemia two-and-a-half years ago. P-Orridge's two daughters, Caresse and Genesse P-Orridge, shared a statement confirming their death via their label, Dais Records.

P-Orridge never meant to engender industrial music, the genre with which they are most closely associated. With their collaborators in the avant-garde arts collective COUM Transmissions and its house band Throbbing Gristle, they clawed away at music as they knew it; what came to be known as industrial was simply what was left. The English musician, artist and social provocateur saw destruction as a means to creation, and took everything from noise to language to their own body, which they modified extensively before and during their gender transition, as raw material for reordering the world.

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A nurse works in the influenza ward of the Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C., in November 1918. Artist Jordan Baseman evokes the era in Radio Influenza, a work of audio art commissioned to mark the centenary of the pandemic.

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The last great pandemic struck the world more than 100 years ago. But voices from that time can still be heard in Radio Influenza, a haunting work of audio art available online.

The voices are not real. They're computerized. They sound tinny and faraway as they read fragments of newspaper stories from 1918, when the so-called Spanish flu ravaged the planet. Still, these fleeting dispatches from the past are uncannily relevant.

"A man with a cold can easily throw it twelve feet by a sneeze," cautions an entry from Oct. 2, 1918. "Therefore, he must be kept at a distance. Sneezing and coughing unscreened by a handkerchief should be regarded as an assault. The sick animal who creeps away by himself until he has recovered shows an example that man would do well to follow."

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Hahn/Cock by Katharina Fritsch was unveiled in London's Trafalgar Square on July 25, 2013. The giant rooster sculpture has since been relocated to the roof of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

German sculptor Katharina Fritsch has a thing for roosters. She's responsible for the giant blue one perched atop the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., overlooking Constitution Avenue. "It brings joy, you know, to the capital," she says.

Why roosters? They intrigue her; she finds them interesting and sociable. "They have a language — they have 30 sounds for food," she explains.

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"She's challenging you to sit down in that chair," Los Angeles artist Alison Saar says of her 2019 sculpture, Set to Simmer.

For Los Angeles sculptor Alison Saar, art came from both sides of the family. Her mother, Betye Saar, 93, is a well-known artist. Her father, Richard Saar, was a conservator and ceramicist. The sculptures and prints Saar makes echo themes her mother has touched for decades. Betye Saar's collages reflect the anger of the civil rights generation; her daughter builds on that history.

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