Fine Arts News

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The U.S. Postal Service, in conjunction with the Ricco-Maresca Gallery in New York, unveiled five new stamps Thursday depicting the paintings of Mexican artist Martin Ramirez.

The U.S. Postal Service has just unveiled five new stamps depicting the paintings and drawings of Martin Ramirez.
An immigrant from Mexico, Ramirez was a self-taught artist who spent almost half of his life in California mental hospitals after being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

A ceremony Thursday at the Ricco-Maresca Gallery in Manhattan — which is hosting an exhibition in conjunction with the release of the stamps called "Martin Ramirez: Forever" — signaled a kind of official recognition that brought family members from across the country and his native Mexico to New York City for the unveiling.

In 1925, Ramirez left a pregnant wife and three children in Mexico to find work in California. He was 30 years old and spoke no English. Six years later he found himself like a lot of people during the Great Depression: homeless. Sociologist Victor Espinosa told NPR in 2007 that the government had to find a place for them.

"We have to remember in those days — we're talking about the Depression Era in California — people were living in the streets and the mental institutions were really like homeless shelters," Espinosa said.

Ramirez wound up at DeWitt State Hospital, outside of Sacramento, Calif., where James Durfee ran Ward 106. Durfee says the ward was filled with all kinds of patients, some of whom were violent.

"It was my opinion that he was very fearful of some of these other patients, and I believe that's why he chose to draw underneath the table in a crouched position," he says.

Durfee remembered that Ramirez made paint by mixing spit with crushed crayons and colored pencils. He used matchsticks to apply his colors — subdued reds, yellows and blues. Many of the drawings are on long sheets of examining table paper, depicting trains running in or out of tunnels, cars morphing into turtles and numerous Madonnas.
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A Martin Ramirez painting from 1950 depicting a train and tunnel. The Ricco-Maresca gallery is hosting an exhibition of Ramirez's work called "Martin Ramirez: Forever."

By the time of his death at the hospital in 1963, many of Ramirez's works had been destroyed. But some were taken by a psychologist studying mental illness and art. Most of those works eventually made their way to private collectors.

Nineteen Ramirez works are now on display at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, where the postal service unveiled the new stamps last week. Fourteen members of the artist's family were on hand for the ceremony.

"We're all just so dumbfounded by the hugeness of it all," says Elba Ortega, the artist's great-granddaughter. "It's just such an honor. I know that he would be as happy and as overwhelmed as we are."

About eight years ago, the Ramirez family hired lawyers to assert the estate's ownership of the artist's works. A source close to the family told NPR that since then it's been able to sell more than 50 works. Christopher Klatell, a lawyer for the Ramirez estate, says a Ramirez Madonna was discovered at the Library of Congress last year.

"The Ramirez estate then did a part gift, part sale of that work ... so that it could remain in the Library of Congress' collection," Klatell says.

New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz is pleased that art collectors have recognized the genius of Ramirez, but he takes major art museums in New York to task for neglecting the artist's works.

"The Whitney owns none of them, MoMA owns one, the Met owns none and the Guggenheim owns four," Saltz says. "So, you know what? Big shout out to the U.S. Post Office."

The Postal Service's five Ramirez issues are "Forever" stamps, which means the general public can use and see them for years to come.


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In The Shame In Venice 2, Kenyan artist Michael Soi protests the makeup of his country's pavilion at the Biennale.

There's something sketchy at this year's Venice Biennale – the international art exhibition sometimes dubbed the Olympics of the contemporary art world.

When you come to the Kenyan pavilion, almost all of the artists will be ... Chinese.

The Biennale, one of the oldest and most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the world, takes place in Venice every two years.

Thirty countries, including the U.S., have a permanent slot.

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"Thank You Africa" is by one of two Kenyan citizens who will exhibit at the Biennale. He is Armando Tanzini, a 72-year-old Italian-born painter, sculptor and real estate magnate who has lived in the country for nearly a half a century.

About 50 other countries have applied for their own exhibition space, called a pavilion. The East African country of Kenya hosted its first pavilion in 2013, and plans to host another this year, featuring mainly Chinese nationals. None of them have apparently ever been to Africa or reference it in their work.

The controversial roster — including contemporary artists Qin Feng, Shi Jinsong, Li Zhanyang, Lan Zheng Hui, Li Gang, and others — has provoked outrage among Kenyan bloggers and artists. It's also provoked a sense of deja vu — the same thing happened in 2013. Kenya's first-ever pavilion was also overwhelmingly Chinese.

"I was a member of the jury for the last Biennale in 2013 and the Kenyan Pavilion was shambolic," writes Olabisi Silva on Facebook. The founder and director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria, wrote that the Kenyan pavilion was "full of Chinese and Italian artists with some [Kenyan artists] in a dark room."

"A frightening manifestation of neocolonialism vulgarly presented as multiculturalism," wrote Wenny Teo in a critique of the 2013 exhibit, "to be avoided like the plague."

In Nairobi, where the Kenyan contemporary art scene is gaining traction with serious art buyers, the news is being felt not just as an artistic flop but as a colossal missed opportunity. "It's a kick in the stomach," says Sylvia Gichia, director of Kuona Trust, an artist's collective and residency program in Nairobi. Organizations like hers work hard to bring Nairobi's artistic renaissance to a global audience via art fairs and art auctions.

Needless to say she is dismayed that the 370,000 art lovers who visit the Biennale will see none of the work that's driving the contemporary Kenyan scene. "What," Gichia asks, "do the Chinese have to do with visual arts in Kenya?"

Nobody in Kenya's government will answer that question. (Calls and texts to the personal cell phone of Nairobi's Minister of Culture, Dr Hassan Wario, went unanswered.) In most countries, the government either selects the artists or assigns that duty to a private gallery. In Kenya, the government apparently played no role other than to fob off the job to an Italian curator, Paola Poponi.

Poponi cannot say she's ever stepped foot in Kenya, but her official title is "commissioner" of the Kenyan pavilion, the same title she held in 2013. She defended the choice of artists, in an email liberal with capitalizations, saying that the Kenyan pavilion ably expressed the international theme of this 56th Biennale, which is All The World's Futures.

Poponi wrote, "Talking about art FROM ANOTHER PART OF THE WORLD during an art exhibition can be useful for KENYA, always more able to create its OWN IDENTITY." She said that art should not be constrained by geography and explained in a follow-up email that "MEETING THE REST OF THE WORLD" would enable Kenyan artists analyze their own experiences "more deeply."

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Artist Parviz Tanavoli with his sculpture Big Heech Lovers.

With his head of silver hair and stylish black blazer, Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli looks younger than his 77 years. He's been called the father of modern Iranian sculpture, but he hasn't had a major museum show in the U.S. in almost four decades. Now, Wellesley College's Davis Museum is giving viewers a chance to see 175 of Tanavoli's sculptures and drawings.

While leading a tour of the Massachusetts school's gallery, Tanavoli stops in front of his curvaceous sculptures known as "Heeches."

"Any Iranian could easily read this," he says, referring to the sculptures. "It's composed of three letters: H, the head is like H; then the center part is like I or double E; this curve is like CH at the end." On paper, the Heech is a slender piece of calligraphy that's popular in Persian poetry: It means "nothingness" in Farsi.

"The other advantage of this word is all the meanings behind it," Tanavoli says. "... All the great poets like Rumi, they deal with this word; they question about it. What is Heech? I mean, is there nothing?"

Tanavoli has crafted hundreds of Heeches over the past 50 years — in ceramic, bronze, fiberglass and even neon. They are graceful, almost human forms that connect with viewers and helped revive sculpture as an art form in Iran.

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Parviz Tanavoli, Neon Heech, 2012.

"He's definitely the pride of the Middle Eastern art scene," says Ali Khadra of the contemporary art magazine Canvas, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Khadra flew to Boston for a 24-hour visit just to see Tanavoli's new exhibition. He calls the sculptor "a beacon of hope" for aspiring artists in his politically tense region and he hopes this show will help bring a little of the culture behind the headlines to Western audiences.

"It's like a chain reaction," Khadra says. "When a museum is interested, an education program takes place and the interest keeps growing. And this is how the West will know about Middle Eastern art."

The 'Good Days' In Iran

Sculpture died off as an art form in the region now known as Iran after the Arabs conquered Persia in the 7th century. At the time, visual depictions of the human body were at odds with the Muslim belief that art is a representation of the divine. But after studying sculpture in Italy in the 1950s, Tanavoli returned to Tehran and opened a studio that became a magnet for young artists.

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Fiberglass Heech sculptures by Parviz Tanavoli.

"It was very exciting for [me]," the artist says. "I was young and I thought I was doing something and I worked very hard for it. And when I look at it today, I'm proud of it. They were good days."
But they were also challenging.

"There weren't that many people trained for art, and there weren't that many followers or fans and collectors," he says. "People weren't familiar with the modern art I was producing."

In 1965, authorities shut down Tanavoli's gallery show in Tehran because it merged materials and imagery from the East and West. Things got more complicated for the artist with the 1979 revolution and the taking of hostages at the American embassy in Tehran. He ultimately left his teaching job at Tehran University and moved his family to Toronto.

A Cultural History Lesson Through Art

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Parviz Tanavoli, Hands in Grill, 2005.

Shiva Balaghi is a Middle Eastern culture historian at Brown University and co-curator of the Davis Museum's show. She says you could teach a seminar on modern Iranian history through Tanavoli's work. "You see the common art of the streets of Tehran represented in his work; you see Iranian folklore; you see ancient Persian myths. But you also see that within Iranian society and culture there is this poetic and lyrical spirit and this sense of humor that withstands regardless of the day-to-day political situation."

That situation is reflected in some of Tanavoli's mor e brutal, confining imagery of cages, locks and jail cells. Still, Balaghi thinks Americans will be surprised to see how optimistic this Iranian's work is.

"There is this sense of gratitude for the simple things in life — like the image of a bird flying, like the shape of a letter in the alphabet," she says.

Tanavoli keeps a foundry and studio in Iran and lives there part of the year, but he admits that politics have hindered his country's ability to share its culture. He says, "We used to be very well connected with Westerners ... but now it's unfortunate because so much has been happening in Iran in [the] last 35 years in culture — music, film and all of that — a lot of people are not even aware of it."


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A series of 60 paintings by Jacob Lawrence captures the journeys of millions of African-Americans who left the Jim Crow South in search of better lives elsewhere.

There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
The son of a cook from South Carolina and a domestic worker from Virginia, Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917, but it was his years in Harlem that shaped some of his most iconic work: a series of 60 paintings about the black Southerners, like his parents, who fled to cities in the North and West during the Great Migration.

That mass exodus of African-Americans began a hundred years ago, and lasted until the 1970s. New York's Museum of Modern Art is honoring that history by displaying Lawrence's entire series for the first time since 2008, when it was shown at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Co-owned by the two museums, the paintings are making a rare appearance together now at MoMA in "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North."

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Each of the 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's Great Migration series is accompanied with a caption. For this panel, he wrote in 1941: "In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry."

Leaving A 'Godforsaken Place'

Jim Crow laws that codified racial inequality in the South helped drive Lawrence's parents – and 6 million other African-Americans — to move to cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago. Along the way, they transformed the music, demographics, and politics of the places they went.
"They were not only heroic in their courage to leave a godforsaken place for a better place," Muhammad explains, "but also that they were also going to challenge that new place to live up to its own possibilities."

Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote about the Great Migration in The Warmth of Other Suns, says the mass movement was a turning point in U.S. history that was overlooked for decades.
"There are many, many children and grandchildren of the Great Migration who did not hear this directly from their own families," she says. "Because it went on for so long, it was often hard to see, and I think one of the people who could see it all along was Jacob Lawrence."

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"Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this."

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Come out of the Bone Age, darling....1955
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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Good thing he kept his head, 1962

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In 2008, Thomas put on a similar exhibit that focused on images of African-Americans. His new exhibit is focused on white women — but American attitudes towards other races appear in works like Golly, Mis' Maria, Folks Jus' Can't Help Havin' a friendly feeling' for Dis Heah!, 1935

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Aggressive loyalty, 1963

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Advertisements don't need any words to say a lot about a culture.
That's one of the messages that shines through in the work of artist Hank Willis Thomas. In 2008, Thomas removed the text and branding from ads featuring African-Americans, creating a series he called Unbranded, which illustrated how America has seen and continues to see black people.

In the run-up to the 2016 election — and the possibility of a white woman being nominated — he's mounted a new exhibit, featuring women in print. It's called Unbranded: A Century of White Women, and it features images from mainstream commercial print advertisements from 1915 to today.

"Ads really aren't about the products. It's about what myths and generalizations we can attach."

- Hank Willis Thomas

Stripping away the normal elements of an advertisement and reducing it to pure image is powerful, Thomas says.
"I think what happens with ads — when we put text and logos on them, we do all the heavy lifting of making them make sense to us," he tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "But when you see the image naked, or unbranded, you start to really ask questions.
"That's why we can almost never tell what it's actually an ad for, because ads really aren't about the products. It's about what myths and generalizations we can attach, and the repetition of imagery of a certain type."

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Interview Highlights

On what surprised him when he laid out the advertisements chronologically
I actually was amazed to look at how advertising can function as a mirror for the hopes and dreams — or the anxiety — of a society at a period of time.

The one that really kind of struck a chord with me was this image from 1955 of a woman being dragged by her hair in a corset and holding a telephone. When I first saw the ad I was struck by the violence in it — it's a man, kind of dressed like a caveman ... dragging her. And the text said, "Come out of the Bone Age, darling." And the suggestion was that corsets were made with bones, and that if you wanted to be advanced, like a modern woman, you would wear synthetic [materials].

But at the same time that that image was produced, Emett Till was killed in the United States for whistling at a "white woman." And I found it fascinating that her virtue could be so challenged and maybe besmirched by him whistling at her, allegedly, but it would be OK in the public to present images of white women being dragged by their hair by white men.

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You don't have to try so hard!, 1958. Artist Hank Willis Thomas and NPR's Linda Wertheimer used this "unbranded" ad from 1958 — with a man mischievously smiling as a woman laps up beer — as an example of the growing sexualization of women in ads from the late '50s.

On how in the late '50s and early '60s the images became more sexualized
I also think that it's amazing that it really happens almost immediately after World War II. And I think this sexualization in mainstream ads, which is what I use, was part of this need for women to be kind of put in a place.

On whether it got any better for women as decades passed
Mr. Mom came out [in 1983], and we see that kind of switching of positions. And then the '90s is where I think things start to get more diverse — and then into the aughts it gets, I think, crazier. Because we see really sexist images, but we see images where African-Americans appear for the first time as equals to white women, we see men being kind of in a lesser position than women in certain images, and we even see same-sex couples.

But the final image is an image from 2015 for a Ram truck, where it looks like — it's based off an image of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" ... and there's all these women in bikinis in the cold. It really speaks to the ridiculousness of it.


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Andy Warhol. Mona Lisa Four Times, 1978. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Edlis/Neeson Collection

Chicago art collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson have given a "landmark gift" of pop art to the Art Institute of Chicago, handing over 42 works that were created by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and others.

After the donation was officially accepted Tuesday night, its president and director Douglas Druick told The Chicago Tribune, "This is one of the landmark gifts in our 136-year history."

The collection also includes works by Roy Lichtenstein and photographs by Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. The donation was confirmed after the museum agreed to display the 42 paintings, silk-screens and sculptures for the next 50 years.

Edlis, 89, is a former plastics executive; he and his wife, Neeson, have given their support to several large U.S. museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art. Edlis tells the Tribune that the agreement avoids one of his peeves about donated art.
"They always end up being shown for a short period of time, and then they end up in storage," he says.
As for the art's importance, The Wall Street Journal reports:

"Art historians say the collection is among the world's greatest groups of postwar Pop art ever assembled, collectively chronicling art's 20th century shift from the swirly abstracts of the 1940s and 1950s toward the colorful, wry images of everyday objects that define Pop art in the U.S. during the 1960s. The group from Mr. Edlis and Ms. Neeson fill a major gap in the Art Institute's Pop collection, which was widely considered weak."


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Jackson Pollock cooks with his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, and his mother, Stella Pollock, in the kitchen of his home in Springs, in East Hampton, N.Y., 1950. Courtesy Pollock

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As the weather warms up, you might find yourself staring out an office window, daydreaming about what you'd rather be doing: lazing outdoors, perhaps, on a large blanket with a picnic bounty spread before you.
In fact, people have been fantasizing about picnics as a return to a simpler life pretty much since the dawn of urban living, says Walter Levy, author of The Picnic: A History.
"Picknicking coincides with modern history — the shift from pastoral to urban living, the decline of villages and the rise of modern cities," Levy writes. "When you're having a picnic," he tells The Salt, "your intention is to break away from the ordinary."

And nowhere is this escape reverie more visible than in the history of art.

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An illustration of noblemen enjoying a feast outdoors, from a French edition of The Hunting Book of Gaston Phebus, 15th century.

Of course, people have been eating outdoors since the dawn of humanity. And medieval hunting parties commonly carried large feasts with them as they rode out. But the picnic as we know it today – as a day outing with the expressed purpose of eating amongst nature — only surfaced about 500 years ago, Levy says.
As dining outdoors became a popular leisure activity, it became a common subject for artists attracted both to the pastoral imagery — and to the wealthy people who embraced the pastime.

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Francisco de Goya's Picnic En La Ribera Del Manzanares (Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares), 1776

Francisco de Goya's 1776 painting Picnic En La Ribera Del Manzanares (Picnic on the Banks of the Manzanares) is an early example of the picnic in art. The scene it sets might give us picnic-envy today.

Though the painting shows the lower artisan class merrymaking along the river, historically, its own surroundings have been much posher: It was part of a series that hung in El Pardo palace near Madrid. Kenneth Bendiner, author of Food and Art, believes that early picnics represented a fantasy of the simple life — in this case, perhaps a royal romanticizing of the freedoms enjoyed by the rest of us.

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Thomas Cole's A Pic-Nic Party, 1846

The American landscape painter Thomas Cole had similar aspirations with his 1846 painting A Pic-Nic Party. As the Brooklyn Museum (where the painting hangs) describes it, "Cole chose the subject of a picnic to describe the ideal coexistence of nature and civilization." And he ups the fantasy factor: In addition to food, Cole includes women making flower garlands, rather than wearing a hat, as was customary at the time, while a guitarist serenades the picnic party.
But the picnic really came to the foreground of art history with Édouard Manet's 1862 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon On The Grass). It's considered one of the first examples of modern art.

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Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe (Luncheon On The Grass), 1862

While the depiction of nude women wasn't shocking in itself, placing them in a modern setting, among bourgeois men, certainly ruffled feathers. It dropped the classical ruse that such depictions were of goddesses and suggested instead they might be, well, prostitutes. The tumbled foods sitting on a pile of clothing add to the impression that these picnickers weren't merely innocently consuming the contents of that woven basket.
"That aspect is attractive to artists, because it seems that being outdoors raises your libido," says Levy. "It's sort of a release from being urbanized."

Adults weren't the only ones who loved the escape a picnic could provide. "Children's books loved to portray picnics," Levy says. Think of the idyllic picnic Ratty and Mole enjoy by the riverbank in Wind in the Willows. Illustrator E.H. Shepard portrayed them sprawling contently in the sun after consuming a wicker basket full of food.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson's Sunday on the Banks of the Marne, 1938

By the 1930s, famous photographers were capturing picnickers at their leisure. Henri Cartier-Bresson's photo Sunday on the Banks of the Marne feels almost like a painting come to life. And Levy points to an even more casual depiction of the picnic, loosely defined, in Robert Frank's The Americans. The 1955 photo shows two teenage couples canoodling on a lawn filled with parked cars. It's yet another instance where nature and sensuality intertwine on the picnic blanket.

But starting with the pop art movement in the 1970s, a seismic shift occurred in the depiction of food in art. Instead of shorthand for a pastoral ideal, food became a source of satire, Bender says. "It went against the whole history of food imagery, which was about delight of taste and the joys of consumption," he tells The Salt.

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Banksy's Picnic, 2005

British graffiti artist Banksy's 2005 mural Picnic speaks directly to the separation of nature and civilization that a picnic has always attempted to bridge. In this hyper-modern picnic, the distance between the contemporary picnickers and the hunter-gatherers that surround them seems insurmountable.

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Tove Danovich is a writer based in New York.

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A visitor views a replica of Jean-Honore Fragonard's 18th century painting, Young Woman (right) as the original hangs to its left.

I'm not sure a picture is worth a thousand words. But why do some pictures sell for millions and others that seem identical go for just a few dollars?

Since February, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London has hung a fake among its permanent collection of 270 Old Masters. Maybe we should call it a "tribute" Old Master: a hand-painted, unapologetic stroke-for-stroke copy of a great painting, produced at the Meishing Oil Painting Manufacture Company, one of many art factories in China, where hundreds of artists — and given their technical skills, that word seems earned — make exact, oil-painted copies of Monets, Matisses, Picassos and other masterpieces.

The gallery invited visitors to detect the knockoff appearing among masterpieces. Nearly 3,000 people cast votes; only 347 guessed correctly that the replica Old Master was an imitation Jean-Honore Fragonard painting, Young Woman, an 18th century portrait of a young woman who has dark brown hair, tied loosely, and kind brown eyes.

Xavier Bray, the gallery's chief curator, says the idea wasn't to try to get gallery-goers to play international art detective, or to just fan out to find the Canalettos, Gainsboroughs and Rembrandts, but to look deeply and intently at every painting on their walls.

"Never before have I seen so many people actively looking at each painting," he said. "The visual exercise of comparing and contrasting will demonstrate how exciting it is to engage with an original work of art."

The last time a Fragonard came up for auction, it sold for $28 million dollars. This replica Fragonard was painted to order in China and sold for a little over $100 dollars.

Try to buy even a good pair of shoes for that price.

But does imitating an original so cheaply make the original seem less valuable?

I was prepared to be outraged when I logged into the websites of a few of the Chinese art factories. Instead, I came close to ordering replicas of Hopper's Nighthawks and Caillebotte's Paris: A Rainy Day; because I love looking deeply into both paintings, and art prints can look flat. I imagined what it would be like to hang a Seurat over our cat's food bowl, and tell visitors, "She thinks Renoir painted too many dogs."

The replica could even be a reminder: that real originality — I won't try to stretch the word genius — isn't only the skills to paint, with color, words, or notes, but to see something no one else does; and help it come alive.

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A month after her father died of sepsis, Jennifer Rodgers began creating maps.
She took a large piece of paper, splattered it with black paint and then tore it into pieces. Then she began to draw: short black lines mimic the steps she walked in the hospital hallway during her father's hospitalization.

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Of I Wish You The Sunshine Of Tomorrow, Rodgers says: "The ICU room my dad was in on the day he died had yellow walls. Every time we visited him we had to wear hospital gowns that were a bright yellow. [It] was a recurring color in that whole time frame of my life."

"It was a physical release of emotion for me," she says.

The layered pieces document her father's seven-month fight with sepsis, a life-threatening condition when the body's response to infection causes inflammation that can destroy organs. They also represent her feelings of uncertainty and grief.
We talked with Rodgers, a high school art teacher in Philadelphia, about how she created the artworks. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you choose maps to visualize your father's illness and death?

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Strata Of Memories

I found a book called Geography of Loss by Patti Digh, and that has been my guidebook. A map organizes a place in a certain way and we use them to get us from one point to the next. My maps have become a way to get from a point in my life where I was very much grieving to another point where I came to a resolution with some of it.

In Strata of Memories, gold plays a key role. Why is that?

The gold comes from the idea of using a precious metal to heal. The Japanese have an art called Kintsugi that is over 500 years old. Instead of taking a bowl or mug that has been broken and throwing it out, the pieces are put back together with gold. The gold heals the broken piece of pottery and actually makes it more precious and more valuable.

In The Last Day there are a series of lines that appear to be intentional.

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Last Day

The day he died we spent a lot of time in the waiting room outside the ICU and it was a lot of walking back and forth. I wanted to mimic the physical steps I took as the whole day was unfolding, almost as a way for me to honor that day.
[The red is] symbolic of sepsis and what it did to my dad's body, and watching someone die from sepsis, which was truly devastating.

Is it difficult to look back on these images?

To look at them, not so much. To talk about them and actually think about what was happening at the time, that is definitely difficult. At the same time it feels very healing to me. I don't know any other way to get through what became the most challenging time in my life. I didn't know any other way than to make art about it.

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Rodgers uses abstract shapes of home and movement to evoke her father's journey to living in a hospital in Liminal Space.

Rodgers has three pieces on display through June 10th at the Henry Gallery at Penn State University, Great Valley Campus.


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"Willem van Heythuysen," 2005. Oil and enamel on canvas. Wiley says his subjects pick their poses from art history books — as in this take on an old Dutch painting.

Katherine Wetzel/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

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Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Wiley says he fell in love with classical art as a young child.

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The Two Sisters, 2012. Wiley says he wants to see black and brown bodies depicted in the visual vocabulary he learned as a young art student.

Jason Wyche/Courtesy of Sean Kelly/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

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Arms of Nicolas Ruterius, Bishop of Arras, 2014. Wiley works in many traditional media, including oil, bronze sculpture, and here, stained glass.

Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris/Copyright Kehinde Wiley

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The exhibit (visible in the foreground is 2008's Femme piquée par un serpent) closes this week in Brooklyn. It travels to Fort Worth, Texas, in September, then on to Seattle and Richmond next year.

This week, the Brooklyn Museum is wrapping up its mid-career retrospective of artist Kehinde Wiley — which means 14 years of work and something like 60 paintings.

It's been drawing a diverse and large crowd, partly because Wiley's work has been featured on the TV show Empire, and partly because he is a well-known and, in some ways, controversial figure in the art world. Wiley takes contemporary figures — oftentimes young black men and women — and places them in old European art traditions: Oil paintings, portraits, stained glass and even bronze sculpture.

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01. The right tools

In order to achieve a desirable result with watercolour it’s important to have the right tools. While you don’t have to invest in an expensive set of supplies, you don’t want to use paint or paper that is not suitable for watercolour either.

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02. Start with sketches

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03. Colour studies

04. Preparing paint and paper

05. Understanding watercolour as a medium

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06. What to do first

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07. Getting experimental

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the source

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Why does there seem to be such a vast space between Etsy and blue-chip virtual auction houses like Sotheby's? Where's the website where you can spend $200 or $2,000 on quality art online? New companies are trying to fill that gap.

Let's say you're not a millionaire but you're still interested in buying affordable art from the comfort of your living room. Where do you find something that is between craft-oriented websites like Etsy and high-end auction houses like Sotheby's? Now, new companies — like Paddle8, Ocula, Artline, Saatchi, Artsy, Amazon Art — are trying to fill the gap.

In a sun-drenched loft near downtown Los Angeles, carefully coiffed curatorial assistants are talking art with buyers over the phone. This is the West Coast office of Paddle8, an online marketplace that sells mid-range art. It was co-founded in 2011 by Alexander Gilkes, 35, formerly the chief auctioneer for Phillips, the third-largest auction house.

Much of the art on his site is within reach of a middle-class consumer, he says: "Our average selling price across the site is $5,000."

Online art sales went up more than 30 percent last year, according to an analysis by the European Fine Art Fair. It found the online market is mostly mid-range art — a growing and lucrative — niche. Even Sotheby's teamed up with eBay this spring, after its online art sales shot up 100 percent last year, according to a company video.

Like eBay, Paddle8 is an auction site, but unlike eBay, everything's curated and authenticated. And being in the digital space comes with some economic advantages that Paddle8 says it passes along to its customers. For example, Paddle8 does not have to staff and schedule expensive viewings in posh locations or take months to produce costly catalogs.

"You can send an image, we can do a remote appraisal," explains Paddle8 managing director James Salzmann. "We can have it up for sale in a matter of days."

The downside, of course, is getting art lovers to connect with a piece of art viscerally through a computer screen, says artist and former art critic William Powhida.

"That's harder to do online," he mulls, adding that, in a hierarchical and elitist art world, it's hard to see how online art sales will even work if they sideline critics, shows and the pleasure of seeing art with other art lovers.

"It becomes so much more transactional," he says.

That doesn't bother the tech entrepreneurs behind Ziibra, another new art-sales website. Matt Monahan, 29, a tech investor turned artist, says, "Historically, the problem has been that the gatekeepers are curators and gallarists and the people over at Sotheby's who decide who gets to be a famous artist. Me and my tech buddies are about to change all that, we're going to disrupt it!"

Just as Uber disrupted transportation, he says.

Ziibra's founder, 24-year-old Omri Mor, seeks to create a personal connection between buyer and artist. He scouts for artists on Instagram, and then posts slick videos of Ziibra's artists in their studios.

Ziibra is trying to make consumers feel like collectors, says Powhida, and he thinks it's a smart strategy — to a point. "I just don't know how much is real and how much is marketing," he says.

Powhida believes that much of the art sold online seems meant to appeal to a mass audience. As a result, it's generally not particularly challenging. "Most of the work I saw was sort of colorful and decorative and had a strong visual appeal," he says. "That's probably the nicest way I can say it."

But the visual appeal is crucial, says Mor, who plans to improve technology for seeing the art you might want to buy online.

"I'm going to build holograms," he declares.


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Courtesy of Myles Johnson and Kendrick Daye

Like lots of little kids, Jeremiah Nebula — the main character of a children's book called Large Fears — has big dreams. He wants to go to Mars.

But Jeremiah is also pretty different from the characters that Myles Johnson, the author of the Kickstarter-backed book, met in the stories he read when he was growing up. Jeremiah is black, and he really, really likes the color pink.
"He's queer, and he's a bit unconventional. He's essentially myself as a child," says Johnson, a 22-year-old freelance writer based in Atlanta.

Johnson says the idea for Jeremiah Nebula came to him while dancing around to some 80's music in his room one day. "I started thinking, what is Jeremiah like? What are his fears and dreams? What does he like to eat?" Johnson says.

So Johnson called up his friend, Kendrick Daye — a 26-year-old visual artist who runs a magazine called Art Nouveau in New York — and told him about his idea. They began collaborating on the book last year.

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The book opens on Jeremiah daydreaming about jumping so high, he lands on Mars. On his way to Mars, he has to hop-scotch across a series of stars, which, it turns out, represent his fears and anxieties.

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The storyline reflects Johnson and Daye's childhoods — they both say they grew up with large fears of their own. "When you're black and queer, you learn at a very early age that what you like or who you are isn't accepted everywhere," Johnson says. "You realize that you're not safe everywhere."

Dreaming up alternative universes was a form of escape. "When I was in school I got into a lot of trouble for daydreaming," Daye says. "If you grow up and you feel like you don't fit in, you just start to live in a fantasy world."

As Johnson and Daye were developing Jeremiah's story, they realized they wanted to create something for "any kids who feel like they don't quite fit in or blend in," Johnson says.

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Johnson spent his formative years watching far too much 'Twilight Zone' ("I loved the really scary ones!" he says), while Daye was engrossed in R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. They loved those stories, but something was missing.

"Growing up, there were rarely any characters who were black, and never queer. Not being visible in the media really does something to your psychology," Johnson says. "It's easy to feel invisible, its easy to believe you're invisible."

The two met about four years ago, in Atlanta, where Daye was studying literature at Morehouse College and Johnson was a student at Georgia State. They hit it off almost immediately. "I seeing him around, and I really admired him. I was like, 'I want to work with him, and I want to be his friend!'"

So far, the pair has raised about a third of the $3000 in Kickstarter funds they need to publish and promote the book. They're planning to use a portion of the funds toward workshops helping young kids discuss their own fears about not belonging.

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A blind visitor to Spain's Prado Museum runs his fingers across a 3-D copy of the Mona Lisa, painted by an apprentice to Leonardo da Vinci.

It's a warning sign at art museums around the world: "Don't touch the artwork."
But Spain's famous Prado Museum is changing that, with an exhibit where visitors are not only allowed to touch the paintings — they're encouraged to do so.

The Prado has made 3-D copies of some of the most renowned works in its collection — including those by Francisco Goya, Diego Velazquez and El Greco — to allow blind people to feel them.

It's a special exhibit for those who normally can't enjoy paintings.

"Since I went blind, I've been to museums maybe twice," says Guadelupe Iglesias, 53, who lost her vision to retinal disease in 2001. "I can listen to the audio guide, but I have to imagine — remember — what the paintings look like."

Now Iglesias is back at her beloved Prado, rubbing her hands all over copies of the masterpieces she used to view from a distance.
"I used to come to the Prado all the time," she says. "I love Velazquez. I used to bring my daughter and her friends here to see this very painting."

Iglesias stands in front of a 3-D copy of Velazquez's 17th century work, Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan. While a tour guide describes the painting's layout, Iglesias runs her fingers over a prickly crown of laurels on the god Apollo's head.

"Fantastic!" she exclaims, beaming.

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A Different Way To Experience Art

Most visitors to the "Touching the Prado" exhibit are not vision-impaired. The museum provides opaque glasses for them — like blindfolds.

"It's kind of weird. I sort of kept checking over the top of the glasses to see what I was touching, because you kinda can't tell," says Isabel O'Donnell, 20, a college student visiting Madrid from Buffalo, N.Y.

"I think it's a really cool way to experience art even if you're not vision-impaired. I like art, and I've always kind of wondered what art feels like," O'Donnell says. "Touching paintings seems like a really cool idea. It's more like what the figures feel like, if they were real."
The Prado consulted Spain's national organization for the blind, ONCE, about which paintings could best be adapted for touch. Curators began by taking a high-resolution photo of each masterpiece, and then used special pigments to paint on top of it.

"It's a special type of paint designed to react to ultraviolet light and rise like yeast when you're baking," says the curator of the exhibit, Fernando Pérez Suescun, who ordinarily works on the Prado's education team. "It creates volume and texture."

The pigments were developed by a printing company in northern Spain and have been used in previous exhibits at Bilbao's Fine Arts Museum.

Color And Texture

"Touching the Prado" is not the world's first 3-D art exhibit for the blind, but it is one of the only ones to incorporate both color and texture, Pérez Suescun says. Previous projects at museums in New York, London, Florence and Mexico City have allowed blind visitors to touch duplicates of famous sculptures, crafted with 3-D printers, or paintings reduced to black-and-white with texture.

"For people with partial vision, this exhibit is perfect, because what you can't see, you feel," says Ana Rosa Argente, whose vision is deteriorating, but who is not yet classified as blind. "I can see light and some colors, but the rest, I use the texture to complete the picture in my mind."

The small exhibit is comprised of six duplicated paintings from the Prado's collection, including a copy of the Mona Lisa painted by an apprentice to Leonardo da Vinci. Some have been reduced in scale, to allow visitors to touch them easily without having to move around. All are accompanied by Braille text.

On his way out of the exhibit on a recent visit, the curator, Suescun, says he still can't shake the feeling that he's encouraging museum-goers to break the rules.

"I'm actually telling people to put their fingerprints all over the paintings!" he says, laughing.

This is the only exhibit where the Prado has installed dispensers for hand sanitizer — and water dishes for seeing eye dogs.
"Touching the Prado" runs through June 28.


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George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846) became wildly popular after an East Coast art union bought it and started disseminating it as a print. National Gallery of Art

Eight Midwestern river men — all jolly fellows — traveled from St. Louis to New York recently on a museum-to-museum voyage. George Caleb Bingham's 1846 painting The Jolly Flatboatmen is the star of a show opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday, but Bingham's painting belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it's hung, on and off, for more than 50 years.

The National Gallery bought the painting in May. And while the gallery's director, Rusty Powell, won't say how much they paid ("We never discuss those matters," he declares) the last time it was sold — to a Detroit collector in 1986 — it went for $6 million. Almost 30 years later ... well, you can do the math.

"It's the most important genre painting in American history," Powell says. The Jolly Flatboatmen depicts an everyday scene in 19th-century life: eight men floating downstream from trading posts along a great Midwestern river (the Mississippi or the Missouri, the artist doesn't say), where some merchant sent them on a shopping spree.

"This is a scene of them coming back down the river," says curator Franklin Kelly. "So in fact you see the flatboat is very low in the water." It's loaded with furs, a coonskin and rolls of blankets. Kelly says they're heading back to port, their hard work mostly over. One of the river men steers and the rest are loafing and making music.

"One man's got a fiddle," Kelly says, "the other, younger man is banging on a pan." Another is lying on his back doing what at Gold's Gym they call a crunch. He's watching a guy in a pink shirt and blue pants, his arms raised, his hair blowing.
"[He's] dancing up a storm," Kelly says. " ... It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. There's a little bit of mist in the distance hanging over the river. But it's a nice time."

This 1846 painting made George Caleb Bingham's career. Known around Missouri primarily as a portrait painter, he went national with The Jolly Flatboatmen with help from an East Coast arts group. Judith Brodie, curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery, says, "If it weren't for the American Art Union, this painting may never have been painted."

It's very democratic. These are working people; they're wearing their ordinary clothes — tattered — but they're having a good time. It's that notion of a democratic art in a democratic society.

Curator Franklin Kelly

Several New York businessmen formed that union to promote paintings of American scenes by American artists. Every year, the union bought a painting — in Bingham's case, for $290. Then they held a lottery to decide who took the painting home.

The Jolly Flatboatmen ended up in the hands of New York grocer Benjamin van Schaick. It only cost him $5, the money he had paid to join the union. Other members just got prints of the painting, but those prints became wildly popular — some 18,000 were circulated. And a great American icon was born. Curator Franklin Kelly explains what makes it iconic:

"It's part of that American experience, that 'Go West, young man.' But it's also about work and play. It's very democratic. These are working people; they're wearing their ordinary clothes — tattered — but they're having a good time. It's that notion of a democratic art in a democratic society."
The Jolly Flatboatmen is part of the Met exhibition "Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River."

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In 2010 the Detroit Institute of Arts hosted the exhibit "Fakes, Forgeries, and Mysteries" — about how experts figure out whether artworks are authentic. Above, a painting titled A Female Saint (left) that was once attributed to Italian artist Sandro Botticelli is exhibited alongside The Resurrected Christ (right), a Botticelli painting from around 1480.

Michelangelo is known for masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel and the statue of David, but most people probably don't know that he actually got his start in forgery. The great artist began his career as a forger of ancient Roman sculptures, art scholar Noah Charney tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

By the time Michelangelo's forgery was revealed, the Renaissance master was famous in his own right. But many other artistic forgers continue to copy the work of past artists in the hopes of passing their creations off as authentic.

The art industry, says Charney, is a "multibillion-dollar-a-year legitimate industry that is so opaque you can't quite understand why anyone participates in it." In his new book, The Art of Forgery, Charney traces a tradition of fakes and forgeries that dates back to the Renaissance.

In many instances, forgery is a question of economics; a forgery that is authenticated may be worth millions of dollars. But Charney says that many other art forgers are doing it as a "sort of passive aggressive revenge" against an art world that was not interested in their original work — but was too dim to tell forgeries from true masterpieces.

Charney adds that the business practices of the art world provide a "fertile ground" for criminals: "You do not necessarily know who the seller is when you're buying a work of art. You might have to send cash to anonymous Swiss bank account. You may or may not get certificates of authenticity or any paperwork attributing to the authentic nature of the work in question. You may not be certain the seller actually owns the work. You might have gentlemen's agreements and handshakes rather than contracts — and this is normal in the legitimate art world."

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Interview Highlights

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On Michelangelo's forged sculptures
In the Renaissance ... an ancient Roman sculpture was far more valuable than a work made a few weeks ago by this character Michelangelo ... who no one had ever heard. And so he, in cahoots with an art dealer, contrived to make a marble sculpture called Sleeping Eros. And it was buried in a garden and dug up, broken, repaired and sold as an antiquity to a cardinal who was an expert in antiquities and should probably have known better.
But the cardinal, after a few years, started to get suspicious and tried to return the sculpture to the dealer, but by this time, Michelangelo was the most famous sculptor in Rome. So the dealer was very happy to take the sculpture back and he sold it very easily as now a Michelangelo original.

On the problem with art expertise
One of the odd things about the art world is that there has never been any objective determination of expertise in a specific period or artist. You could have a Ph.D. or even two in Rembrandt and that doesn't necessarily mean that you can identify a Rembrandt from a copy after Rembrandt or something done by someone in his studio. In the world of wine, you need to go through elaborate steps to become a master of wine over many years and fulfill these objective tests — the art world doesn't have that.
So expertise has always been a matter of personal opinion and it's been quite subjective. It's very unscientific, and yet, for centuries, expertise has been the primary way to authenticate something. The secondary way is provenance research, looking into the documented history of the object, but knowing this, criminals can insert themselves into the history of the object and pass off forgeries with remarkable ease because the art world, unfortunately, is often inadvertently complicit in authenticating forgeries.

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Noah Charney is an art historian and writer, and the founder and president of The Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit research group devoted to issues of art crime.

On what to look for in a painting
It depends on the type of painting, but if we're talking about an oil painting one of the things that has to be replicated in order for it to appear old is called craquelure. Craquelure is the web of cracks that appears naturally in oil paint over time as it expands and contracts and that literally looks like little webbing on the surface and you can study that and you can determine whether it was artificially induced to make it look old quickly or whether it appeared naturally.
There are various tricks to try to make it appear that it was old when it was artificially induced, but that's usually a good clue for oil paintings. ... We actually have some accounts, voluntarily presented by famous forgers, for their own recipes for how to make forgeries and a handful of the forgers in the book volunteer themselves — they were never caught — because they wanted the notoriety.

On his favorite forger
One of them is Eric Hebborn, and if I'm allowed to have a favorite forger it would be him. He's the only forger in this pantheon of forgers in this book who I would argue was at the same artistic skill level as the people he imitated. And he published a book called The Art Forger's Handbook which was literally — it was like a cookbook of recipes for how to create forgeries and artificially age them — and one of the techniques is to take an oil paint and cover it in a shortening, like Crisco or Bake Rite. And you literally bake it in an oven at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time and it artificially induces something that looks like craquelure. He also explained how you could paint on craquelure, which is very painstaking, but he was able to successfully pull it off.

On how forgers get caught
Most forgers are caught on the charge of fraud, and for that to happen, someone has to be defrauded out of money, or perhaps their reputation. And what tends to happen and the way that they're caught, is that they accidentally leave some sort of anachronism in one of their works of art.
For example, the famous German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi, who got out of prison just a few weeks ago, he was caught because he used a pigment called titanium white in a painting that had been made, supposedly, before titanium white was invented and so that's what gave away the game. But on the other hand, there are forgers who intentionally insert anachronisms in order to be able to reveal themselves later on.

On master art studios
We tend to think of artists as individuals creating the work of art in their entirety and that is not the way it has been for many centuries. That's a very romantic notion of how art is created. ... All of the great old masters ran art studios and depending on how much you paid them, they would create themselves a relevant proportion of the work of art.
If you want a Rubens, for example, you pay him the maximum amount then he paints everything himself and he designs it, too. You pay him the minimum, it's still called a Rubens, but he supervises and designs the object, but it might be entirely painted by his pupils and, in practice, it's usually a mixture. Faces, eyes and hands are almost always done by the master because they're the more difficult (if you're talking about portraits). But backgrounds, architectural elements, still lifes — those were almost never painted by the master. And yet anything coming out of the master studio is considered the work of Rubens.
So when people get upset about artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst — who design works and supervise it, but they have a team of people in a factory making it for them — that's actually in keeping with a centuries-old artistic tradition.


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Artist Bob Wysocki and geologist Jeff Karson, both of Syracuse University in upstate New York, have their own personal volcano. It's an old furnace that used to melt bronze for statues. Now, it melts hundreds of pounds of basaltic gravel at a time, mimicking the process inside the earth's crust that creates lava. The driveway where the two men perform their experiments (and create their art) is the only place you can find flowing lava within a thousand miles of NPR's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

So of course, I had to drive up and see it.
In this video, I learn how lava once caused a diplomatic standoff in Europe, nearly have my eyebrows burned off while leaning over a giant cauldron, and roast marshmallows without the help of a campfire. And along the way I, too, discover lava's allure.

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A Philadelphia mural titled You Go Girl by Jetsonorama and Ursula Rucker. This is just one of many murals that the city's Mural Arts Program helped create.
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It took artist Katherine Craig about a year to create her nine-story mural on 2937 E. Grand Blvd. in Detroit. Most people who drive around the city have seen it — one side of the Albert Kahn-designed building is covered in a blanket of electric blue, and a flowing waterfall of multicolored paint splatters descend from the roof line. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the landscape of low buildings and muted Midwestern colors.

It's called "The Illuminated Mural" and it's become emblematic of Detroit's North End neighborhood.
This week, it was also on the auction block.

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Katherine Craig painted Illuminated Mural in Detroit with the help of neighborhood children. The building it's on was auctioned this week.

Well, the building is. But what does that mean for Craig's mural? What rights does a muralist have to the wall she painted on?
That's a question that echoes throughout the country right now, as muralists try to lay claim to their artwork under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990.

A Massive Loss, A Huge Win

California muralist Kent Twitchell was in a hotel room in Sausalito, Calif., when he got the call — his six-story mural of Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles had been painted over. It was June 2, 2006, a date he remembers vividly because it was the day he lost his mural, and also the day of his daughter's wedding.

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Kent Twitchell's Ed Ruscha Monument, located on the side of a building in Los Angeles, was destroyed in 2006. Melba Levick/Courtesy of Kent Twitchell

Twitchell had worked on the mural over the course of nine years, and it was ruined in one day.

"It's hard to describe," he says. "It's like being kicked in the stomach, I guess. It takes the wind out of you."
So he took the case to court. He sued the U.S. government, which owned the building, and 11 other defendants for damages under the Visual Artists Rights Act, which prohibits the desecration, alteration or destruction of public art without giving the artist at least 90 days' notice.

He won $1.1 million, which is regarded as the largest win under VARA.

"If the work is destroyed, it's like part of your resume being destroyed," says Eric Bjorgum, the lawyer who won Twitchell's case, and the president of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles.

Many disputes surrounding murals have a lot to do with advertising, Bjorgum explains. When an area of a city is downtrodden, muralists choose highly visible walls for their works to spruce up the space. But when that area is developed, large spaces that are seen easily from the street are ideal real estate for advertisers.

Money is always a motivator — in one of Bjorgum's cases, a brewing company was paying $18,000 per month to have a beer ad on a wall, covering up a mural.

Muralist Robert Wyland knows how that goes all too well. In 27 years, he painted 100 whale-themed murals, called Whaling Walls, in cities around the world. With that many murals, it makes sense that he's run into problems. Some of the murals were painted over, relocated or destroyed.

Others were covered with gigantic, multistory advertisements.

That's what happened in his hometown of Detroit. Whale Tower, painted in 1997, is on the back side of the 34-story Broderick Tower. The Grand Circus Park area wasn't very populated when he painted the mural, Wyland explained, so when the new stadium, Comerica Park, went up next door in 2000, the wall his mural was on became a hot commodity for advertisers.
In 2006, a gigantic vinyl ad for Chrysler's Jeep Compass was put up over the mural. Verizon Wireless followed suit. Wyland was angry, but knew that even if he sued the companies under VARA, it would only be a "drop in the bucket" in comparison to the ad revenue they were getting from the space. They'd pay him off and keep his mural covered.

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Wtewael revisited the adultery of Mars and Venus several times. In this version of Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan (1604-1608), Apollo raises the curtain on the bed as Vulcan, Venus' husband, approaches with his net, hoping to ensnare the couple. Cupid — Venus' son — takes aim at Apollo, as Mercury, Diana and Saturn look on and laugh. The J. Paul Getty Museum/National Gallery of Art

The Dutch have given the world an array of master painters — Van Gogh, Vermeer, Rembrandt. But the brilliant and risque work of a lesser-known Dutchman is currently on display at the National Gallery of Art.

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In his 1601 Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan, Wtewael shows Mercury raising the bed curtain to let the other gods see the couple.

Joachim Wtewael (pronounced U-te-val) worked in Utrecht in the late 1500s and early 1600s. He loved painting stories from the Bible and mythology — impressively buff Roman gods and goddesses in — at times — downright salacious comportment.
"You know, gods didn't always behave particularly well," says curator Arthur Wheelock Jr. "And that was something Wtewael and people from his generation loved to explore."

In vivid colors, with precisely painted details, on huge canvases as well as small copper plates, naughty gods and goddesses frolicked and fooled around.

Wtewael depicts Mars and Venus "having at it," says Wheelock, "and this was not so good because Venus was married."

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In 1610, Wtewael paints Venus looking up at Mercury as Apollo and Minerva raise the curtain of the bed. Vulcan, with his net, stands to the side of the bed, with Apollo, Jupiter, Saturn and Diana above.

Her husband, Vulcan, caught them in the act. He got a big metal net and trapped them inside it. In three separate small paintings, Wtewael shows Vulcan revealing Venus and Mars to the other gods.

"All the gods are lying around, looking and laughing at them being caught in the act," says Wheelock.
Large canvases show gods getting married, taking baths, waging wars. Wtewael also did Christian scenes — adoration of the baby Jesus, the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. They're all gorgeously painted works, just teeming with life.

In the late 1500s, inspired by a story from Genesis, Wtewael painted Lot and His Daughters:
They've just fled Sodom. Lot's wife looks back at the destroyed sin city and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his daughters hide in a cave, thinking the world is coming to an end. His daughters fear that — with no men left — they'll never have children. So ...

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Sodom burns in the background as Lot's daughters seduce him in Wtewael's 1597-1600 depiction of a scene from Genesis.

"In the efforts to maintain the line and keep the line going, Lot's daughters got Lot drunk. ... This [painting shows] the moment when they're all partying. Lot doesn't know what's going on," Wheelock explains.

And then a Lot of things got out of hand; Wtewael paints him blotto, surrounded by his voluptuous, naked daughters. "He's clutching one of their breasts, and she is reaching up to tickle his chin," Wheelock says. "It's a very sensual work."

The daughters end up with two sons. Incest! Booze! Lust! Adultery! And to make it even more intriguing— the painter himself was such a proper 16th century fellow — a very strict Calvinist, a pillar of the community. But with his paints and brushes, he embraced the fullness of life.
"I think that is what I love about Wtewael," Wheelock says. "The engagement in all aspects of life: the sensual, the spiritual, religious, all these things are there. It's a fun show; nobody's having a bad time."

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Museumgoers play in the 10,000-square-foot exhibition called "The Beach" at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

The nation's capital is sweaty and sweltering right now, but Washington locals and visitors can find a seaside getaway in the most unlikely of places. In the middle of downtown D.C., the National Building Museum has installed a 10,000-square-foot indoor "beach" that has attracted kids, tourists and workers looking for an out-of-the-ordinary lunch break.

"What we've got here is a big, white box 200 feet by 50 feet," explains Cathy Frankel, vice president for exhibitions. "We have it carpeted with our sand, which is more like white AstroTurf. You can walk around here on the beach. It's always 75 degrees and sunny here."

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The exhibition includes lounge chairs and 700,000 white plastic orbs in the museum's Italian Renaissance style building.

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Ludolf Verworner ~ 1893, Germany

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Nicholas Herrera sits in his studio, with a work in progress sitting just over his shoulder.(Photos are courtesy of David Michael Kennedy, another El Rito native, who was featured on NPR in 2011.)

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The Three Kings Pasando Por Nuevo Mexico, by Nicholas Herrera.

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The Last Supper, by Nicholas Herrera.

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There are two things that have put El Rito on the map. In the little village in northern New Mexico, there's a tiny cafe that serves the best red-chili Frito pie in the world. And then there's the santero — Nicholas Herrera.
"This is where I live," says Herrera. "This is my studio."

As a santero, or saint carver, Herrera continues a tradition of Spanish religious art that goes back to the 1700s in this remote part of the American Southwest. But his works are not relics. He carves edgy, comic, satirical pieces that reflect contemporary realities of the hispanos of the high desert.
Herrera is 51 and still looks like the biker he once was. His black hair falls in a braid down his back; he wears a thick, droopy mustache and a jean jacket.
In his sunbathed studio, he creates art that holds up a mirror to this scenic and socially troubled land. On his table, for instance, is a work in progress. Two police officers standing about a foot high are pointing handguns at a teenager. The teen represents a popular El Rito boy named Victor Villapando, who was shot and killed by the police last summer. He reached for a toy pistol; some say he was suicidal. A grand jury chose not to indict the officer.

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Gustave Caillebotte plays with perspective in his 1880 work Interior, A Woman Reading. Private Collection/Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

If you're planning to become an artist, here's one nice way to do it: be independently wealthy, easily pay your bills without needing to sell your own work, buy up the paintings of your marvelously talented friends, and then give their works to the nation. A little-known 19th-century artist named Gustave Caillebotte's did just that and there's a big show devoted to him at the National Gallery right now.

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Caillebotte shows a cheerful scene in his 1885 oil on canvas, Sunflowers, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers. Private Collection/Comité Caillebotte/Courtesy of National Gallery of Art

Because Caillebotte didn't need to sell his paintings, many of the works now on display had previously only been seen by private collectors and his family. Marie-Claude Chardeau a family member who loaned works to the show. She owns Sunflowers, from 1885.

It's a "swell" painting, she says, that makes her feel as if she is in the middle of a garden. The painting shows a sea of cheerful sunflowers in front of a cozy farmhouse. It would brighten even the rainiest of days.

Caillbotte's best-known work, owned by the Art Institute of Chicago, depicts one of those rainy Paris days. His 1877 painting Paris Street, Rainy Day, shows top-hatted men and woman in long dresses walking on wet cobblestone streets past imposing wedge-shaped buildings. They are sheltered under dark umbrellas.
"It's what we think about Paris — it's what you see in movies," says Chicago curator Gloria Groom.

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Caillebotte puts you right on the sidewalk in Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago/Courtesy National Gallery Of Art

You feel you're walking into the immense painting, Groom explains, because of Caillebotte's bold perspective — the buildings far in the background, and one umbrella-ed couple up close, maybe about to walk right past you.

When it was shown, Groom says it was criticized for depicting umbrellas that looked like they were bought at a department store; supposedly it "cheapened" the work's monumental scale. "They all look alike because they are mass manufactured," Groom says. "And he's showing each person kind of in their little world of the umbrella."

Beneath their umbrellas, Caillebotte's people seem isolated — alienated on that slick, wet street. He's painting modern life, as medieval Paris gets ripped up for broad new boulevards and lines of trees. A few years earlier, Caillebotte had done an indoor scene, that National Gallery curator Mary Morton says launched his career.

Caillebotte made The Floor Scrapers in 1875. It was a painting of three laborers at work preparing his first studio. It was in what was then the relatively new neighborhood of the 8th arrondissement, where Caillebotte's father had bought a "great pile," according to Morton. "It's a beautiful place to live and his father is very kind and supportive and starts building out a painting studio for his son," she says.
In Caillebotte's angled, unusual painting he shows bare-chested workers kneeling on the ground as they reach with their skinny, muscled arms to smooth out the floor.

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Caillebotte's 1875 painting The Floor Scrapers was rejected by the elite Salon, but it was the work that launched his career. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resour/Courtesy National Gallery of Art

Caillebotte submits this picture to the Salon — the elite Fine Arts Academy show in Paris — and it causes a sensation. Laborers!? Working people!? The jury rejects it. But Caillebotte's name starts to get around. His art, with its dramatic perspectives and odd subject matter is unusual — very different from his renegade pals, the Impressionists, with their light-filled brushstrokes, and sunshine scenes. But he exhibits with the Impressionists — for a while.

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Caillebotte looks on the Paris streets below in The Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880. Private Collection/Comité Caillebotte/Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

"His father made a lot of money," says co-curator George Shackelford of the Kimbell Art Museum. The elder Caillebotte sold blankets and other materials to Napolean's army, Shackelford explains. He "made a fortune and reinvested it in real estate and so Caillebotte literally lived on rent."

By the time he was 26, Caillebotte had inherited that fortune — and Morton says that affected his attitude. "He doesn't have that drive and motivation that all the other guys do to make art to live," she says. "He does not need to make this art. But he is really inspired from '75 to about '82 and I think ... it's about this movement, this fraternity [of artists] — they're changing the course of French painting and that's the way they are talking to each other."

Caillebotte made only some 500 paintings in just a few years. And then turned to other interests — boating, gardening — before he died at age 45. All along, he'd stayed in touch with his artist friends — Monet, Renoir, Degas that bunch — and bought lots of their work.

"He lived in comparative luxury and could buy these paintings from his friends, and would buy them not out of charity so much, but very much but looking to give his friends cash money," Shackelford says. That's how Caillebotte ended up with one of the great collections of Impressionism. When he died in the 1890s, it went to the French government.
Today those works make up the core of the Musée d'Orsay's great Impressionist collection. And Caillebotte — known more as a collector than an artist — is now getting attention for the paintings he created: strong scenes of urban life, boating, portraits, food (his bloody calf's head and ox tongue, hanging in a butcher shop, will spoil your lunch today). Caillebotte painted the new realities of 19th century Paris.

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We're passengers in a boat in Caillebotte's 1877-78 Boating Party. Private Collection/ Comité Caillebotte/Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

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Chiharu Shiota takes over an entire townhouse for her 2013 work Trace of Memory. It's one of the many unusual installations at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

The Mattress Factory hasn't been an actual mattress factory for a while now. Built on a hillside in the Central Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, back at the turn of the last century, it was used as a warehouse and showroom for Stearns & Foster until the 1960s.

Today, it's one of the country's more unusual art museums. Filled not with paintings or sculptures — and certainly not with mattresses — it is now, four stories of ... well, of "stories" in a way. Installations that take you places you don't expect to go in an art museum.

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Fibers from the fique plant, dyed with natural pigments by artist Susana Mejia, are part of the Waterweavers exhibit. In the photo above, the fibers hang to dry in the Amazon jungle.

You walk into an air-conditioned building in Washington, D.C., and suddenly you're surrounded by rivers.
You can hear them, from the bubbling chuckle of a current to an unforgiving roar.

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A woven fish trap by Abel Rodriguez hangs over artist Alberto Baraya's latex cast of a rubber tree.

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Spanish designer Alvaro Catalan de Ocon taught Colombian artisans how to recycle plastic bottles into art using traditional weaving techniques. The sale of these lamps helps support local communities.

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Artist Jorge Lizarazo reinterprets traditional Colombian weaving techniques in his pieces, like this area rug.

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A traditional canoe covered with intricate beaded designs hangs in the gallery. This piece was created by artisans in a workshop founded by Jorge Lizarazo.

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Dyed figue fibers by Susana Mejia hang in the exhibit.

You can see them, foamy currents rushing past on video screens.
And when you take a break and sit down on a chair — carved out of reclaimed rainforest wood — you look up to see cascades of linen and plastic that seem to pour from the ceiling like flowing water.

Welcome to Waterweavers, an exhibit at the Art Museum of the Americas that represents the contemporary culture of Colombia with a focus on rivers (including the Amazon), woven art and life in the rainforest.

The exhibition was organized by the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York City, and curated by Jose Roca with Alejandro Martin. It appears at the AMA through September 27 thanks in large part to the support of the Colombian Embassy.
Rivers, I find as I walk through the show, have many meanings. In a mountainous country, they are an alternative to what museum director Andres Navia calls "one of the most inefficient land transportation systems." They can harbor violence, as their waters are used to move drugs, guns and money that fuel the armed conflict between guerrilla groups and the government.
And the rivers of Colombia also inspire the country's artists. Adriana Ospina, the collections curator of the AMA, leads me on a tour of the exhibition, describing each piece as we go. Some are simple: a tall blue waterfall of linen that cascades from the second to the first floor is meant to evoke water and is fastened at the top with a simple knot, as if the artist were about to begin weaving. A canoe—"you can put it in the water and it actually works!"— is covered in beads in traditional designs.

One of the most important pieces, in Ospina's opinion, is not tied directly to rivers but to the history of the rainforest. It's by the artist Alberto Baraya: a latex cast of an actual rubber tree, historically tapped for rubber in the Amazon. During the rubber boom from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the Amazon's resources were exploited. So were the native peoples who made up much of the labor force. The latex tree is scarred with indentations made by the rubber tappers.

To me, the most powerful work is a video installation, by the artist Clemencia Echeverri, titled Treno and subtitled "Funereal Song" in English. The room is dark, and two facing video screens are filled with the broad, dark expanse of the Cauca River. The sound of roaring water fills the space, first broken only by birdsong and jungle noises. As the short video plays, Ospina explains, "You see how the river starts growing and growing and becoming really violent." The water reaches more than halfway up the screen, and rapids become visible. "And all of a sudden you hear the scream of someone, it's like a fisherman asking for help," Ospina says. "If you pay attention to the river and screams, you'll see things that are floating out of the river." There are all sorts of things that can be found floating on this river, she says. Clothing. Garbage. Bodies. The calm of nature broken by human violence.

But if you stand there for a moment in the dark, watching the video, it comes to an end and then starts anew. The rapids calm, the water level sinks back to the bottom of the screen, and the sounds of tumult are replaced again by the singing of birds. That's the message I take home with me. Out of chaos, beauty.

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Sultan 'Ali 'Adil Shah II Slays a Tiger (ca. 1660) is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's critically acclaimed Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700 Opulence and Fantasy exhibition.

This is an introduction to NPR's Muslim Artists, Now series, which will highlight contemporary Muslim musicians, writers, painters and filmmakers, among others.

When the Islamic galleries of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened in 2011 (after eight years of renovation), it was heralded as a landmark moment for deepening American understanding of the Islamic world. Amid live performances and lectures, the museum's 15 new galleries brought audiences into a physical world of lavish carpets, ceramics and miniature paintings.

Since the Met's Islamic revival, the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London have also invested in glittering new galleries for Islamic art. And this year alone in the United States, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Baltimore's Walters Art Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art each has an exhibition dedicated to the genre.

Sheila Canby, the curator in charge of the Met's Department of Islamic Art, acknowledges that showcasing the galleries' objects provides an alternative to the predominant political narrative. She says, "After things like Sept. 11, after things like the destruction of ancient sites in northern Iraq and Syria, museums serve as a place where people can come to this idea of Islam through the material culture, not just through what they're being told all the time."


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In the reservation era, Blackfeet men adopted this Sioux-style warbonnet. The men who wore these early reservation warbonnets would not have actually worn them in war.

At the foot of the Big Horn Mountains in northern Wyoming, a century-old ranch plays host to a small art museum. It's quite an idyllic setting — but just a few years ago, the Brinton Museum's finances didn't paint such a pretty picture.
An endowment set up in 1960 preserved the historic ranch near Sheridan, Wyo., as well as the bachelor-rancher Bradford Brinton's art collection. By 2008, though, it seemed that before long the museum would have to close, says the place's director, Ken Schuster.

"You could really see the writing on the wall," Schuster says.

That didn't make much sense to Forrest Mars Jr., however. The grandson of the creator of Mars candy bars and M&Ms lived next door to the ranch. And while he'd never thought about getting involved in the museum, his mind changed when he heard about something else: a collection of American Indian artifacts in Chicago, which Schuster and his wife, Barbara, had told Mars about.
"They kind of got me enthused about the collection and what we could do with it — and could we save it?" says Mars.

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When the reservations were established and peace made between the Apsáalooke and the Lakota, there were frequent visits between the tribes. The result was that Lakota warbonnets, pipebags and even pipes were placed in Crow hands. Courtesy of the Brinton Museum hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of the Brinton Museum


A Trip Next Door, Via Chicago

The story behind that artifact collection began more than a century ago. In 1911, the neighboring Gallatin ranch received gifts from the nearby Crow tribe.

"Crow people were gift givers," says Mardell Plainfeather, a Crow historian and artist based in Billings, Mont. "They appreciated the act of giving something to someone. And that item could be very special to them, but so was the person on the other hand who was receiving it."

The gifts included robes, war shirts, moccasins and teepee furnishings given to the Gallatin family by the Crow, who also gave them art from the Northern Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, Nez Perce and Blackfeet tribes — more than 90 pieces in all.
In turn, the Gallatins' daughter passed the collection on to Peter Powell.

"It is one of the great collections of Plains Indian art," says Powell, an Anglican priest and an adopted member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe and its chiefs' society. He also runs the Foundation for the Preservation of American Indian Art and Culture in Chicago, where the Gallatin Collection has been held for safekeeping since the 1970s.

"And it's been that many years, more than 40 years — almost half a century — of working and praying for the return of the collection," he says.

New Life From Mars

When Mars found out about the collection from Schuster, he immediately had some questions: "Why are they in Chicago? Can we get them back?"

Schuster wasn't so sure if they could — at least, not with the Brinton Museum about to go broke and without state-of-the-art storage and display facilities. So, Mars decided to invest $16 million in a new building.
"That's why we built it," Mars says. "It was to bring them home."

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The wearer of these moccasins would be blessed with power flowing from a sacred mountain, and blessed by the assistance of a sacred bird who carried his petitions above.

But bringing those artifacts home was only the first step. Plainfeather, the historian, says that the objects on display are sacred, having been handed down from generation to generation — so it's crucial to consider the way they're handled and displayed.
"These are spiritual, and you can feel it," says Katie Belton, the Brinton Museum's associate curator. "And there are some things as a woman I'm not allowed to touch, such as Cheyenne eagle feathers; I'm not allowed to touch those with my bare hands, and I take that really seriously.

"But in addition to the honor of touching the objects, it's a huge honor to work with Father Powell."
Powell is overseeing the curation of the exhibition, along with an American Indian advisory council. It's an unusual approach for a museum.

"We want to stress that which museums before have not stressed: The sacred nature of the art of the people who created it, who consider themselves to be holy people," Powell says.

The new Brinton Museum was dedicated with a blessing by elders from the Crow, Northern Cheyenne and Lakota tribes. Ken Schuster, the museum's director says it was Forrest Mars Jr. who gave the struggling museum a fresh start.
"It was a major game changer, because he really saved the institution."


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The Ogden Museum of Southern Art's "The Rising" exhibition includes portraits (by photographer Jonathan Traviesa) of the day laborers who helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Anniversaries call for exhibitions, and art museums across New Orleans felt compelled to remember Hurricane Katrina as the 10th anniversary of its landfall approaches. But the anniversary shows at some of the city's most high-profile museums seem surprisingly understated, at least to outsiders' eyes. In fact, they barely seem to be about Katrina at all.

"I didn't know that's what it was," says one baffled tourist when he's informed he's in the middle of a Katrina-related show called "The Rising" at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Evan Smith of Birmingham, Ala., looks around at photographs of gay teenagers, Latino migrant workers and oil refineries. "I didn't know that, no," he says.

Richard McCabe knows his showcase of the city's up-and-coming photographers doesn't exactly scream Katrina. He tells a group of students, "I was a little worried about doing this because I wanted to do something about the 10-year anniversary but there was no way I could go back and relive it through photographs because they were just too painful."

McCabe, who moved to New Orleans just before Katrina, ruled out so-called disaster porn for "The Rising." That meant no wreckage, no waterlines and no people trapped on roofs.

"The tourists would love to see those pictures," he says ruefully, "because a lot of people think half of New Orleans is still underwater, you know?"

McCabe curated this show for a city with a long and illustrious history of photography. Back in the early 1900s, photographer E.J. Bellocq documented New Orleans' brothels. (His career was later fictionalized in the movie Pretty Baby.) Today, New Orleans' photography scene is more vibrant than ever, according to McCabe. He wanted to take control of the imagery with a fresh exhibition that shows how the city sees itself now.

"We've done, at this institution alone, like 20 Katrina shows," he observes.

The same problem bedeviled Russell Lord, curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Lord also decided against including explicit Katrina images in his anniversary show, "Ten Years Gone," partly, he says, because of what they could trigger.

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Willie Birch's Crawfish Dwelling is made from one of the many crawfish homes that Birch found in his backyard after Katrina.

"Psychologists and psychiatrists are kind of preparing for this moment and preparing for an onslaught of those kinds of images and the effect they might have on people in terms of PTSD," he says.


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A photo of Pablo Picasso's painting, Head of a Young Woman, released by French authorities on Tuesday. The painting was seized from a yacht on July 31 in Corsica, France. The painting belongs to a Spanish billionaire who was planning to sell it elsewhere in Europe. But Spanish authorities say it is a "national treasure" that can't be sent abroad without government permission.

For nearly 40 years, Jaime Botín, a member of the wealthy family that runs Spain's Santander Bank, has owned Pablo Picasso's Head of a Young Woman. Botín kept the painting on his private yacht docked on Spain's Mediterranean Coast.

1906 work is not one of the Spanish master's most famous paintings, but it is from an important year in Picasso's life, and it has been valued at up to $28 million.

Botín's son Alfonso took the boat for a sail last month to the French island of Corsica, and that's where the trouble began. French customs officials boarded the yacht and seized the painting.

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The yacht Adix, owned by Spanish billionaire Jaime Botin, sails off the coast of Corsica on Aug. 4, four days after French customs officials seized a Picasso painting on board. The painting has been valued at around $28 million.

"We found the artwork on the boat already packaged up," French customs official Vincent Guivarch told reporters. "It appeared ready to be shipped."

Authorities believe the Botíns were planning to send the painting to Switzerland, to sell it there. But Spain considers the Picasso a "national treasure," a cultural asset that can't be taken out of the country.

This case has raised questions about rich art collectors' rights to do what they want with paintings they own versus government efforts to protect what they consider to be part of the national heritage.

"The law says that if the artwork is more than 100 years old and has national cultural significance, the owner needs to apply for permission to take it abroad or sell it," says José Castillo, a national heritage expert at Spain's University of Granada.

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Spanish authorities carry a box containing Picasso's painting Head of a Young Woman at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid after being transferred from the French island of Corsica on Tuesday.

Botín has been denied such permission for years. Spanish officials say he finally gave up and was trying to smuggle the painting through Corsica.

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Artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi, seen here in his New York studio in 1940, exhibited with Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper. But his work was quickly forgotten after his death in 1953.

In 1906, 16-year-old Yasuo Kuniyoshi came to the U.S. alone from Japan. He made his name as a painter and at 40 he was showing his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But there was one thing Kuniyoshi longed for that he was always denied: American citizenship. In fact, he was classified as an "enemy alien" during World War II.

Kuniyoshi died in 1953 and after that pretty much disappeared from public memory. But Tom Wolf — guest curator of a Kuniyoshi exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — says don't overdo the hardships. "He was a fun-loving guy," Wolf says. "He was a party animal, he had tons of friends, other artists loved him and he was so thrilled that he was able to became so successful. So it wasn't all suffering and tragedy."

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Curator Joann Moser says the peach in Kuniyoshi's Boy Stealing Fruit (1923) is likely a reference to a famous Japanese folktale.

And Kuniyoshi was successful in his lifetime — right up there with Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper. "He exhibited with these people, he won prizes," says American Art Museum co-curator Joann Moser. But, she adds, after Pearl Harbor, things changed: "When he walked down the street, he looked like the enemy."

And the anxiety of being Japanese-American during World War II shows in his work. The colors are somber; the faces he paints — highly stylized, flat and folk-artish — are often fearful; and babies and children are never cuddly. His Boy Stealing Fruit from 1923 stares warily, a banana in one hand while the other reaches for a peach.
"There's a very famous Japanese folktale about a little boy and a peach," Moser says. "And so I think that is a reference to his Japanese childhood."

The chubby child could be cute, but he's not. Neither is the baby on his mother's shoulders in another 1920s canvas — Child Frightened by Water. Even Kuniyoshi's bright fuchsia paintings from the 1950s have grim details — a reference to death on the Fourth of July or a scary face behind a colorful mask.

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The child in Kuniyoshi's Child Frightened by Water (1924) could be cute — but he's not.

It's easy to see biography in Kuniyoshi's work. The fun-loving party animal had lots to deal with, and anti-Asian prejudice went back a long way. In 1919, Moser explains, Kuniyoshi married a white American woman who then lost her citizenship for marrying an Asian man.

During the war, Kuniyoshi wasn't sent from New York to an internment camp like the West Coast Japanese were, but there were restrictions. "His camera was taken away from him," Moser says. "His binoculars were taken away. His bank account was frozen."

But Kuniyoshi was devoted to America and deeply patriotic. "So when the Department of Defense asked him to do some drawings for propaganda posters," Moser says, "he was eager to do that."

He sketched a mother and child hanging from a tree as a Japanese soldier leaves the scene. In Clean Up This Mess, a woman's hand discards a bag filled with Japanese symbols, like a flag and a samurai sword. The posters never got made, but the anti-Japanese sentiment was clear. It must have been difficult for Kuniyoshi repudiate his roots.
"I think he was very torn and it was a terrible period in his life," Wolf says.

"The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi" (at the American Art Museum through the end of August) is Kuniyoshi's first retrospective in more than 65 years. Abstract expressionism and newer movements nudged him off the art scene after he died in 1953. Curator Joann Moser says this show is a reminder of Kuniyoshi's American experience.

"He was really one of the most highly respected and esteemed American artists," she says. "So within artist circles, he functioned very well; he had many friends. But outside the artist circles, he remained a 'Jap.' "
Over the years, the Japanese have bought up Kuniyoshis work and he's become a popular artistic prophet in his native land.


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Paul Durand-Ruel, shown above in his gallery in 1910, acquired some 5,000 impressionist works — long before others were buying them.

It might seem unusual for an exhibit to focus on a man who sold paintings rather than the artists who painted them. But there was one particular 19th century Paris art dealer who shaped the art market of his day — and ours — by discovering artists who became world-wide favorites. He's now the subject of a major exhibition in Philadelphia.

Paul Durand-Ruel was quite the shopper. He was the first buyer of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, Monet's Stacks of Wheat (End of Day Autumn), some 100 works in the Musée d'Orsay's impressionist collection in Paris, and more than than 100 paintings in Dr. Albert Barnes' Foundation in Philadelphia — all purchased from Durand-Ruel.

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Fishing for fine art: Gyotaku, the art of making inked prints from real fish, originated in 19th century Japan. Above, three examples from modern Gyotaku artist Heather Fortner (from left): Under the Rainbow Rainbow Trout; Little big skate and Primary colors butterfly ray.

Fishing lore is full of tales about "the one that got away," and fishermen have been known to exaggerate the size of their catch. The bragging problem is apparently so bad, Texas even has a law on the books that makes lying about the size or provenance of a fish caught in a tournament an offense that could come with a felony charge.

But in 19th century Japan, some enterprising fishermen found a foolproof way to record trophy catches. (Some versions of this origin story suggest they did so at the emperor's behest.) The method was known as gyotaku, or "fish rubbing," and allowed fishermen to print inked fish onto paper — creating a permanent record of their size. They used a nontoxic sumi-e ink, a black ink traditionally used in both writing and painting which could be easily washed off. Once the print was made, the fish was either released, if it was still alive, or sold at market.

At first, these prints were rudimentary, but they soon became works of art. Fishermen began adding details like eyes (which don't show up in a print) and enhancing other parts of the image. Over time, gyotaku became an established art form with two printing methods: direct and indirect.

Gyotaku artist Heather Fortner explains that in direct printing, the ink is placed directly onto the fish, using it almost like a stamp on the page. Indirect printing is the "finer art form," she says: The paper is glued to the fish and ink is tamped gently onto the page, "like a gravestone rubbing."

Though gyotaku artists traditionally used sumi-e ink, today, anything from India ink to acrylic is considered fair game.

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Oregon pomfret, by Heather Fortner. "I have always loved the ocean and anything from the ocean," Fortner says, adding, "Gyotaku allows you to express an appreciation for the natural world by partnering with the finest artist in the world: Mother Nature."

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The Broad Museum, on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, opens Sunday. Admission is free.

Los Angeles is getting a new contemporary art museum, courtesy of billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife Edythe. Their free museum opens Sunday.

Surrounded by the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad is already an architectural landmark, with its honeycomb-like exoskeleton.

"This shell of sorts, this light filter, this amazing sculptural structure ... enrobes the museum," says Joanne Heyler, the museum's director and chief curator.

Traveling up through the middle of the building in the round, glass elevator you can peek inside what's known as "the vault"— an entire floor storing the Broads' collection of more than 2,000 paintings, photos and sculptures.

On the top floor, diffused natural light pours in through skylights. There's work here from Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman and Chris Burden. There's an entire room for Takashi Murakami. The collection includes a lot of L.A. artists, Heyler says.

Despite the insane art market, the Broads have no trouble purchasing the art they like. "It's simple," says Heyler. "If there's a work of interest, we acquire it. There's no committee process. There isn't a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process to follow."

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Eli and Edythe Broad have been collectors for more than 40 years.
From his office in L.A.'s Century City neighborhood, Eli Broad, 82, can look out over the many of the cultural institutions he's helped fund — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and now, his museum.
"We want this to be a gift to the city of Los Angeles," he says. "We've been collectors now going on 45 years."

Broad says building his museum took longer and cost more than he thought it would. But he wanted a permanent home for his collection so people could see it and enjoy it.

"We wanted to share it with the broadest possible public," he says. "That's why we have free admission."
Forbes estimates Eli Broad is worth $7.4 billion. He made his fortune building suburban tract homes, and also running an insurance company. He and his wife bought their first artwork — a van Gogh drawing — and then quickly switched to collecting contemporary art. He says they liked buying works with social or political meaning. And along the way, they've gotten to know the artists personally.

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With skylights and the "interior veil," light streams into The Broad's third floor galleries.

He remembers artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at age 27, smoking pot in their powder room. He says the first time he saw Basquiat's work in New York he was drawn to it "because it wasn't just graffiti, it was very thoughtful," Broad says.

He recalls seeing Cindy Sherman's work for the first time in a gallery on Mercer Street in New York. "We followed her career and have 120 of her works," he says.

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Sultan Al Qassemi says, "I don't buy artworks that I think are pretty ... I buy art that is politically meaningful." That art includes Yemeni photographer Boushra Al Mutawakel's Mother, Daughter, Doll series.

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Akhram Zaatari Untitled (Plane 6), 2013, by Akram Zaatari, Lebanon.

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You Are Love, 2008 by Chant Avedissian, Egypt.

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Old McDonald's, 2014, by Farah Al Qassimi, United Arab Emirates.

Wealthy art collectors often spend millions of dollars on trophy pieces by European masters, then keep them hidden from view. Not Sheikh Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi: He spends his fortune on artworks by living, Arab artists, then shows them to as many people as possible.

Al Qassemi is a bit of a paradox. He's a member of an Arab royal family, but he recently showed up at NPR's New York bureau by himself and casually dressed, looking more like a grad student than a sheikh. While clicking through the artworks on his Barjeel Art Foundation's website, he emphasizes his collection's diversity. "These [artists] are from all over the Arab world: Syrian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Egyptian, Jordanian, from the [United Arab Emirates] and Lebanon," he says.

I don't buy artworks that I think are pretty and aesthetically appealing. But I buy art that is politically meaningful.

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi

Al Qassemi's collection consists of more than a thousand works, but he's perhaps better known as a media personality than an art collector. A regular commentator on the Middle East, he's been interviewed about finance on Bloomberg TV, and unemployment on CNN. He's written for The New York Times and Foreign Policy, and during the Arab Spring, he tweeted constantly, translating Arabic speeches and reports into English. Time magazine wrote "to the extent that the revolution was tweeted, much of it came through the feed of Sultan Al Qassemi."

And when it comes to the sheikh's art collection, he has an almost activist sensibility. "I don't buy artworks that I think are pretty and aesthetically appealing," he says. "But I buy art that is politically meaningful."

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Mona Hatoum's Witness recalls the destruction caused by Lebanon's long civil war.

In other words, he buys art like Witness, a porcelain sculpture by the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum. Al Qassemi says it's a miniature replica of a famous statue in downtown Beirut that is riddled with bullet holes from the long, Lebanese civil war. "And Mona Hatoum created this work wanting to capture forever the destruction that this civil war had on the arts and culture, but also the psyche of the Lebanese," he says. Hatoum's piece is now on display at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto as part of the exhibition "Home Ground: Contemporary Art From The Barjeel Art Foundation."

Another work in Al Qassemi's collection is Memorial, a haunting black and white video installation by Iraqi artist Adel Abidin. With a kind of magic realism, Abidin uses cows as a metaphor for human suffering during the 1991 American invasion of Iraq. It shows a cow separated from the rest of its herd by a Baghdad bridge that's been bombed. At one point, the cow takes a running leap at the bridge and tries to jump to the other side, but doesn't make it.

Abidin, who was a teenager in Baghdad in 1991, says he and his family crossed that bridge over the Tigris River almost every week to visit his grandparents. When he heard it had been bombed, he rode on his bike to see it. On the fallen part of the bridge, there was a dead cow. He has no idea how it got there.

"I'd never seen a cow in the center of Baghdad — it's a very urban city, you don't really see cows in it," he says. "So I was thinking, 'Would the Americans [drop] the cow? How did the cow end up there?' And this stayed in my mind until 2009. Then I came up with a scenario of the death of this cow."
Abidin says the image of a cow risking its life to cross the bridge is meant to communicate human social need, and "that we always need to be with others. ... We don't function alone."

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Sultan Al Qassemi says sharing provocative, emotional artworks from the Arab world helps take the narrative away from extremists.

Nada Shabout is director of the University of North Texas' Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute. She says that with so much of the Arab world "in flames," Arab artists need to get their messages out — and they need patrons like Sultan Al Qassemi to help them do that. "He's been a very generous collector in terms of opening up his collection to graduate students, to scholars, so we can, in fact, engage and write these, you know, different narratives," she says.

Adel Abidin agrees. And he says Al Qassemi does his homework. "I don't think he aims for the easy stuff, you know. He's a good researcher, actually; he digs out for information. It's not like what he hears, he says, you know — he has to check it out."

Al Qassemi wants other people to check it out, too. In addition to Toronto, London's Whitechapel Gallery is also hosting a show from his Barjeel Art Foundation.
Nada Shabout says it certainly helps that Al Qassemi is a wealthy member of one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates. But, she says, you'd never learn that from him. "He never really puts himself in the family. And it's [rare] that you would find an article where he is referred to as 'sheikh,' which, you know, is the equivalent of emir, prince. So he likes to sort of think of himself as an ordinary man even though we know he's not," she says with a laugh.

Class aside, Al Qassemi says he's driven to share artworks that are provocative and emotional responses to difficult issues. He believes they help counter the brutal images of destroyed neighborhoods and beheadings so prevalent in the news. "We are taking the narrative away from these extremists," he says. "We are building bridges of communication with the western world and the eastern world. And I think that art is a global language, much like music, and that people will identify with artwork even if they don't understand the history of the Middle East. So it's very, very important."

Making it possible for these Arab artists to keep working, and for the rest of the world to learn their stories is, for Sultan Al Qassemi, what being an art collector is all about.


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The Rising Tide, on the shore of Thames River in London. Each horse is a hybrid — half animal, half oil pump.

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Of the four sculptures that comprise The Rising Tide, two are businessmen or politicians — including this one with arms folded and eyes shut tight.

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At high tide, the four sculptures of The Rising Tide are almost entirely submerged.


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The Silent Evolution, by Jason deCaires Taylor, in Cancun, Mexico.

You probably never will see most of Jason deCaires Taylor's public art projects firsthand — at least, not without goggles and fins.

Most of his sculptures stand at the bottom of the sea. His life-size statues — ghostly figures of men, women and children — seem to walk the ocean floor as they hold hands, huddle, even watch TV.

But his latest art installation is an exception: You can fully see it (if only twice a day). The Rising Tide, a set of four horseback riders standing in the river Thames in London, is completely visible only at low tide, when the water recedes.

As he tells NPR's Scott Simon, his style gives rise to a curious fact: Between the elements, the tides and the life that grows up all around them, his works are never quite the same from one moment to the next.


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Dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov poses for a portrait at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City in July. The center, a multidisciplinary practice and performance space, opened in 2005.

When Mikhail Baryshnikov says, "I'm really afraid to get bored with myself," he means it.
As one of the greatest ballet dancers in history, he's captivated audiences around the world. He was also artistic director of American Ballet Theatre, has danced to his own, had a run as Carrie Bradshaw's part-time lover on HBO's Sex and the City, and so much more. (His list of credits and awards is long and eclectic.)

Today, at 67, Baryshnikov is still creating art of all kinds around the world. And on Monday, a gala in New York will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a space he created to give artists the freedom to explore and take risks.

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Dancers from the Dance Heginbotham company rehearse at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in July.

Creating An Artist Nirvana

With such an exceptional, international career, you'd think the sign in front of his arts center would have "Baryshnikov" in lights, but actually you can barely see it. "Misha didn't want this place to be called the Baryshnikov Arts Center," says Georgiana Pickett the center's executive director. "He wanted it to be more global, and some wise people told him, 'That's not a good idea. Let's put your name on it.'"

Baryshnikov's idea was to build a place where artists from different disciplines would come together. He had no interest in it being dance-only.

"Another dance company? Really, we are packed," he says, referring to the numerous dance companies that call New York home. If he was going to create something for artists, at the top of his list was space, light and privacy — elements, he says, that are so important to the creative process. "Art-making is not a factory, with a few exceptions, of course, you know like Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol. It's a very slow and very fragile process. It took me 25, 30 years to really understand what actually it takes."

Baryshnikov put up $1 million of his own money to build the center. With help from a small group of donors, he bought a portion of a six-story building in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Today, after extensive renovations, the center has two state-of-the-art theaters and four studios.

For the artists lucky enough to get a residency, it's nirvana.

'In The Middle Of Possibility'

Vocalist and songwriter Somi is rehearsing in a light-filled studio that overlooks the Hudson River. "This is such a glorious space because you've got these high windows and you're surrounded by the city," she says. "And being in the middle of New York, right, it's like you're in the middle of possibility."

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Vocalist Somi, right, and guitarist Liberty Ellman practice at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

But "possibility" in the middle of New York is wildly expensive and most artists can't afford to live in the city. Executive Director Georgiana Pickett says, "It's one of the reasons we exist ... because New York is experiencing a hemorrhaging of its cultural capital. You know, people are leaving. They can't do it anymore."

Baryshnikov is more sanguine. "It's no secret that in '70s and '80s New York City [was a] friendlier city for younger people, and more affordable," he says. "And it's tougher and tougher."

But he believes it's still a dynamic and inspirational place to be an artist: "I really believe that, still, the magnet is right here — and not just in Manhattan, but around New York City. And still artists around the world [look] at us with a kind of envy that we are here. They want to be here at least for a few weeks at a time to practice their art."

There are also deeply personal reasons Baryshnikov chose to create something permanent in New York. When he defected from the Soviet Union in 1974, New York became home. He says the Baryshnikov Arts Center is "a kind of civic duty."

Downstairs in the center's Jerome Robbins Theater, choreographer John Heginbotham is rehearsing a piece with his new dance company. (He met Baryshnikov when he was a dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group.) Heginbotham is stuck on a part. "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know," he tells his dancers, shaking his head. When Baryshnikov stops by, he can't resist asking him for help.

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Top: Choreographer John Heginbotham watches his dancers rehearse at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Bottom left: Dancers in the Stephen Petronio Company rehearse. (From front to back: Jaqlin Medlock, Gino Grenek, Emily Stone and Joshua Tuason) Bottom right: Choreographer Stephen Petronio illustrates an idea to his dancers.

"Misha?" he says.
"You're the boss," Baryshnikov replies.

Heginbotham says this creative laboratory is really a gift from Baryshnikov to other artists: "He could've just been a great ballet dancer, but he is such a curious and investigative person that he has taken that and put it into creating work and helping other people create work. He betters himself all the time and he encourages us to do that too."

Building Something That Will Last

The nonprofit center generates income by renting space, fundraising and selling tickets to performances in its two theaters. Many big donors who've supported Baryshnikov throughout his career have contributed generously to the center's ambitious goals.

Rebecca Thomas, a consultant to arts nonprofits, says there's a "spotty" history of arts organizations that are closely linked to one person: Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey's companies both struggled to adapt after their deaths. According to Thomas, "When we oftentimes see challenges is when that particular leader moves on for whatever reason, because sometimes the donors and the board members do too."

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Mikhail Baryshnikov says he created his Baryshnikov Arts Center as a kind of thank you to New York, the city that became his home after he defected from the Soviet Union in 1974.

Georgiana Pickett and the rest of the Baryshnikov Arts Center staff think about that all the time. "We are trying to build something here that's going to last without Misha," she says. "You know, it is his vision and it is his legacy, and that is the right word. But he's not going to live forever. None of us are. And so we're trying to build something here that's going to last."

'It's Nice To Go Back ... But I'd Rather Look Forward'

At 67, Baryshnikov is still plenty active. He just made for the clothing company Rag & Bone, turning and curving his body in a kind of duet with street dancer Lil Buck, and he's touring a solo theater piece based on the writings of Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

He admits he's always been restless for new challenges. "[The] unknown, it's always much more intriguing and appealing. ... Like [a] new dish in a restaurant which you never taste or a new music composition, a new film and a new book," he says. "It's so much more interesting than [going] back to ... square one. ... Sometimes it's nice to go back, you know, but I'd rather look forward."

Maybe Mikhail Baryshnikov was right about not wanting the center he founded 10 years ago to bear his name. As he puts it, what happens inside the studio — that "fragile" art-making process — is much more important.

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Shahzia Sikander, pictured here, created the film Parallax (also pictured) to explore the layers of history and change that are remaking parts of the Middle East and South Asia.

Shahzia Sikander is one of the contemporary art world's most celebrated stars. She's projecting her hypnotic video installations onto Times Square billboards; she's led exhibitions at major art museums across the world; and she was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation as a "genius" fellow in 2006. The Pakistani-born artist says art has always been a "ticket to life," but what distinguishes Sikander's art from her contemporaries is her training in a centuries-old handmade form of Islamic art — the bejeweled world of Indo-Persian miniature paintings.

The Finest Pictures With The Finest Lines

While the Renaissance masters were going big, the royal ateliers of India's Mughal dynasty were going small. Miniature painting thrived in the 15th- and 16th- century courts of India's Islamic kingdoms. Sometimes as small as 3 inches by 3 inches, these paintings were highly decorative, graphical pages that wove stories of heroism, lovers and political intrigue into gilded works of art. Artists followed stringent rules, and in addition to years of training, the craft required incredibly precise techniques. Pakistani art historian F.S. Aijazuddin says, "For the finest pictures and for the finest lines, they would use what was called an ek baal, which was a single hair — a single squirrel hair — to achieve the finest line."

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Traditionally, India's miniature paintings told stories of heroism, lovers and political intrigue through gilded works of art. Sultan 'Ali 'Adil Shah II Slays a Tiger (ca. 1660) is part of that tradition.

These miniature paintings are often at the center of the world's leading collections of Islamic art. Navina Haidar curates one such collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She says miniature paintings are "dependent on tremendous technical finesse. As an artist, you are trained by your father, your forefathers, in a workshop setting to create a world that's miniaturized in its scale but absolutely universal sometimes in its content or in its ambition."
But as the Muslim kingdoms of India faded in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the patronage and the practice of miniature painting. Then in the 1980s, the artist Bashir Ahmad. revived the tradition by establishing a formal department of miniature painting at the prestigious National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan.

Taking Miniatures To A New Level

As a young art student at Lahore's National College of Arts, Shahzia Sikander says she was fascinated by miniature paintings. And while she acknowledges it was a strict and "craft-oriented way of working," she saw miniatures as a language to say new things. For her graduate thesis, she created a miniature painting that broke the mold: a scroll that was 13 inches tall and 5 feet long and featured more than a dozen interconnected illustrations. More importantly, it was a deeply personal piece depicting the daily life of a modern Pakistani woman.

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The Scroll, Sikander's graduate thesis, depicts the life of a modern Pakistani woman.

Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal says that thesis was a breakthrough in the history of miniature painting. "Miniature went in decline only because of absence of patronage, not because of loss of technique — so that technique was there," she says. "So when these techniques were passed on by Bashir Ahmad to younger people — I mean especially Shahzia, Shahzia took it to a new level. I mean, it was her thesis work that was sensational. Everybody talked about her work."
Sikander was invited to show The Scroll and other works at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C. The show lasted one day and she didn't sell a single piece of art, but she spent the rest of her visit knocking on the doors of as many American graduate schools as she could, eventually winning a spot a the Rhode Island School of Design. There, Sikander began the academic process of further deconstructing miniature paintings. She says she often faced questions about her ethnic origins and was frustrated to be reduced to an ethnic artist. After all, at the heart of her ambition was the same ambition as any artist — the burning desire to communicate.

She says, "People want to know ... 'What is that cultural practice? Do you, like, run around catching your squirrel?' So I think some of these topics hijacked [the work], actually. They were detrimental."

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Once in New York, Sikander began mixing modern techniques with traditional elements of Islamic art. Unseen is a projection that also features intricate Indo-Persian borders.

Finding A Home In New York

Sikander eventually moved to New York City and began creating a new body of work that integrated her illustrations with her training as a modern artist. She says, "This is the first place that I'd been in my three or four years in the U.S. [where] I wasn't being seen through an ethnic lens. ... So I could be who I wanted to be. ... I felt the same kind of confidence that I had when my work got recognized in Pakistan."

In New York, Sikander began merging components of miniature paintings with modern, abstract designs. The result was a blend of surreal shapes and vivid colors that would be at home in a Salvador Dali painting. But her pieces were also tightly controlled, featuring geometric patterns and intricate Indo-Persian borders.
Glenn Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, was astounded by the craftsmanship and beauty of her work. "There is a visual lushness," he says. "She has a capacity to draw that's absolutely breathtaking, so she can make images small or large with such precision that you look at them and you're dumbfounded."

In recent years, her illustrations have moved beyond the page into animation, video and large-scale projections.

Control, Exploitation And Hope In 'Parallax'

Sikander's latest piece, Parallax, is cinematic in its scale and ambition. It's a 15-minute film derived from hundreds of handmade illustrations and paintings. The title of the piece suggests a shifting point of view, disorientation and new ways of seeing. Sikander says was inspired by a drive she took across the United Arab Emirates. She spent that trip reflecting on the conditions facing millions of migrant workers from Pakistan, and both the curse and opportunity of the country's immense oil wealth. The result is a work where colorful flows of paint (echoing oil) collide with layers of illustrations and animated forms. She's interested in the layers of history and change that are remaking this region.

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Shahzia Sikander poses with Parallax, a 15-minute film she made using hundreds of handmade paintings and illustrations.

Parallax made its American debut at Tufts University at the invitation of historian Ayesha Jalal. She says Sikander is not an overtly political artist, but by disorienting the viewer she's forcing you to see reality in a new light. "She's not really making a political statement but the way in which she presents her work makes you understand that there is exploitation," Jalal says. "Something is going on here — there's control and there is exploitation but there is hope as well."

Breaking Out Of The Muslim Artist Label

So is Shahzia Sikander making Islamic art? Is she making American art? Or is what she does contemporary? Ruba Kana'an is a curator at Toronto's Aga Khan Museum of Islamic art. She says Sikander evades easy categories, and that is a breakthrough in its own right. "It takes quite a lot for artists from Muslim heritage to lose that sort of hyphen that identifies them," Kana'an says. "You're either [an] Arab contemporary artist or you're [a] Pakistani contemporary artist. Well, many artists want to be identified first and foremost as artists. ... Their work is not limited to or restricted to their heritage."

That's exactly what Sikander has been trying to do since she first tried her hand at traditional miniature painting. She says, "Whether it was the Muslim identity, whether it was the female identity or the Asian identity or the Asian-American identity or the hyphened identities ... I felt all of them were essential to who I was. All of it. I couldn't reject one for the other. I didn't want to be labeled by just one. That's still part of who I am."

And in the process of establishing who she is, Sikander has paved the way for other Muslim artists to break out of the frame.


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Everything at the brand new Cultural Center in downtown Buenos Aires is free — from art installations to symphony concerts. "Culture is an investment for this government, not an expense," says Culture Minister Teresa Parodi.

A new tourist attraction in Argentina — The Centro Cultural Kirchner in downtown Buenos Aires — has been posting some impressive numbers since it opened in mid-May. As many as 10,000 patrons a day are trooping through an ornate, turn-of-the-last-century building that has been converted into what's said to be the fourth-largest cultural center in the world. Remarkably, everything in it is free, from video installations to comedy acts to symphony concerts.

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Looking up from below at La Ballena Azul (the "Blue Whale") while its bluish metal "skin" was still under construction. The concert hall is three stories high and actually "floats" — it is mounted on shock-absorbing stilts to protect it from vibrations from the subway nearby.

They call the main concert hall La Ballena Azul, "The Blue Whale," and it swims inside a grand Beaux Arts palace where, for most of the last century, folks in Buenos Aires mailed letters: the former Central Post Office. The Blue Whale auditorium — blimp-shaped, three stories high, holding 1,750 people — floats in what used to be the package-sorting area.

Why "floats"? Because the subway runs nearby, says guide Federico Baggio. "So the vibrations would not enter the symphony hall. It ended up having a whale shape, so that's why they named it like that, but the purpose is acoustics."

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A chandelier-like structure made of frosted glass sits above the Blue Whale. It is large enough to house exhibits.

The Blue Whale is the most eye-catching attraction in the new Kirchner Cultural Center, but even it can't upstage its surroundings. The Palacio de Correos, literally the "Postal Palace" — commissioned in 1889 and completed almost 30 years later — was the largest public building in Argentina when it opened in 1928. It's eight stories tall, occupies a full city block behind a French Second Empire facade, and contains almost 1 million square feet of marble hallways, stained-glass ceilings and windows. You can also find traces of original post office fixtures, such as mailboxes and grand marble counters where you could finish and address your letters.

When the new architects changed things, to add, say, elevators, or a boxy, chandelier-like structure above the Blue Whale that's big enough to mount exhibits in, they purposely used different materials: frosted glass, stainless steel. That way you never lose sight of the the ornate beauty of the original building — beauty that enticed President Juan Peron to move his presidential offices here in the 1940s from the nearby Casa Rosada.

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First lady Eva Peron's desk now sits in a spectacular vaulted room. Once the office of the postal service director, it was later the headquarters for the Eva Peron Foundation.

And the grandest room — a spectacular vaulted space the size of a banquet hall that had been the office of the postal service director — became the headquarters for the Eva Peron Foundation, which dispensed charity and gifts to impoverished Argentine citizens. That space has been restored as a sort of museum exhibit, with everything from Eva Peron's desk to bottles of champagne, letters piled all the way to the 20-foot ceiling in one corner, dozens of toys, go-carts, and other gifts of the sort she dispensed.

Approaching the desk, you hear recordings of actors' voices re-creating what went on there — children excited over Christmas toys, or asking first lady "Evita" for something for their grandparents. It's a scene some older visitors can remember from real life, and occasionally prompts tears.

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Kani Alavi stands before his painting It Happened in November, part of the open-air East Side Gallery built on fragments of the old Berlin Wall. He's fighting proposed development that would overshadow, relocate or remove segments of the gallery. "The fight to keep this wall intact, to preserve it, has become [my] life," he says.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Kani Alavi was a young artist living in an apartment overlooking the border between East and West Berlin. He remembers seeing East Berliners streaming through "like a wave of water," he said through an interpreter. "Some were joyful, some were doubtful, some were afraid they might not [have the chance to] cross again."

Alavi painted that moment: a flowing river of faces he calls "Es geschah im November," or "It happened in November."
Today, tourists can see that painting, alongside more than 100 others, covering a nearly mile-long stretch of the original cement Berlin Wall. It's called the East Side Gallery.

Alavi and a group of artists created it in 1990, soon after the wall fell. They wanted to preserve part of history, and felt it was symbolic to paint on the East side — which was blank during the East-West division, since East German soldiers patrolled the area dubbed the "death strip."

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Dmitri Vrubel's painting of the Soviet Union's Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany's Erich Honecker kissing — under a Russian phrase that reads, "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love" — is a popular part of the East Side Gallery.

Today, it's covered in colorful paintings, including one depicting the famous "kiss" between former Soviet head Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker. The open-air gallery gets an estimated 800,000 visitors each year, including graffiti artists and vandals who scribble across the colorful paintings.

But for Alavi, the wall's biggest threat isn't vandalism. It's developers.

Alavi and his supporters have spent the past few years fighting developers from building alongside the gallery wall. While he has taken some to court and won, one developer managed to get building permits off Alavi's radar and recently constructed a luxury tower. The 14-story building with aquamarine windows overlooks the nearby Spree River, and as of this spring, had reportedly sold 80 percent of its units.

When construction started two years ago, 6,000 protesters showed up — including former Baywatch actor David Hasselhoff, who happens to be a popular singer in Germany. (He sang "Looking for Freedom," which he originally performed at the Berlin Wall in 1989 before a pro-reunification crowd.)

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A luxury apartment building towers over the East Side Gallery, despite the objections of artists like Kani Alavi.

But 10 days later, construction workers removed a 6-meter portion of the wall under heavy police protection, so they could start building. A hotel was also granted a building permit right next to the luxury tower, though no construction date is set.
Standing in front of his painting on the wall, Kani says he hopes the East Side Gallery will one day become a UNESCO World Heritage site and be protected from further development. But the shiny new apartments tower behind him, and tourists strain to hear him above the rush of traffic.

It might seem like a losing battle (the Mercedes-Benz Arena sits right across the street, and already had part of the wall sliced out and relocated for an unobstructed view of the water). But Alavi feels it's crucial to preserve the Berlin Wall so people remember the struggle for reunification, and how borders are treated as barriers — especially in light of Germany's migrant crisis today.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the controversial announcement earlier this summer that the country would take in 800,000 refugees — far more than any European Union nation. The media photos of Syrians streaming across the border look eerily similar to Alavi's own painting of East Berliners crossing the Berlin Wall.

"This painting has determined my future for 25 years," says Alavi, who migrated from Iran himself in 1980. "The fight to keep this wall intact, to preserve it, has become [my] life."

In 2011, Germany awarded him the prestigious Federal Cross of Merit for his efforts. Then in March 2014, he gave the South Korean president Park Geun-hye a tour of the East Side Gallery. She invited him to build a similar version along the DMZ border between North and South Korea, which he says will begin construction next year.

As Germany celebrates 25 years of reunification this Saturday, Alavi says, "We should get rid of psychological walls in our minds and our heads ... to get rid of the physical walls around the world."

Ironically, the man who was inspired by the fall of a wall is now determined to keep this one standing. It's a physical reminder of the borders people once crossed, and the change that is possible.

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