Leaf-cutter ants at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, April 18, 2023. In January, the American Museum of Natural History’s new insectarium gained 500,000 tenants. It has taken them some time to find their footing. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times)
by Emily Anthes
NEW YORK, NY.- It was a cold, gray afternoon in December, and at the American Museum of Natural History, 500,000 leaf-cutter ants were hunkered down in their homes. The ants typically spend their days harvesting slivers of leaves, which they use to grow expansive fungal gardens that serve as both food and shelter. On many days, visitors to the museum’s insectarium can watch an endless river of ants transporting leaf fragments from the foraging area to the fungus-filled glass orbs where they live. But on Tuesday, the flow of leaf-cutter ants had slowed to a trickle, with just a few intrepid insects visibly living up to their name. It was hard to blame them. It was a biting, blustery day — and the end of a long, eventful year for the colony. The tropical ants, which had been harvested in Trinidad and nurtured in Oregon, had never set foot in New York City before last December, arriving like 500,000 insect ingé ... More
The full-scale prototype’s dimensions are very similar to those of Ingenuity.
WASHINGTON, DC.-The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has accepted into its collection an aerial prototype of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. The prototype has been donated to the museum by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In April 2021, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly in the atmosphere of another planet when it made its first flight on Mars. The prototype NASA has donated to the museum was used in tests at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a simulated Mars environment and was the first Ingenuity prototype to demonstrate that flight on Mars was possible. The results of those tests gave NASA the confidence to commit to sending Ingenuity there. “None of Ingenuity’s accomplishments would have been possible without years of development and testing, requiring prototypes and engineering and flight models to learn and better understand design challenges and work through solutions,” said Matt Shindell, ... More
Giovanni Anselmo with his work “Untitled” in 1970. (Paolo Mussat Sartor, via Marian Goodman Gallery via The New York Times)
by Will Heinrich
NEW YORK, NY.- Giovanni Anselmo, one of the funnier and more philosophical of the Italian artists making what critic Germano Celant indelibly named arte povera, or poor art, died Monday at his home in Turin, Italy. He was 89. His death was announced by the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, which represented him. In 1967, Celant noticed that some members of the postwar generation of young artists were using humor, provocation and unconventional materials to rebel against both older artistic orthodoxies and materialist pop culture. He coined the term arte povera in connection with a show he curated in Genoa, Italy, which included the work of Jannis Kounellis, Alighiero Boetti and others. He then wrote a manifesto and began gathering other like-minded artists. Anselmo, an early addition to the ... More
Installation view of The Nature of Art. On view through April 14, 2023. Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.-The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, has unveiled its inaugural campus-wide exhibition, The Nature of Art, a celebration of humanity’s highest aspirations —the intellectual and creative pursuits that reflect and shape our world. This exhibition brings together, for the first time, the special exhibition galleries in the Hough Wing with the MFA Collection galleries in the Volk Wing. The connected ideas generated from The Nature of Art traverse throughout the MFA campus, sparking conversations with works in the collection and allowing visitors to experience them through a new lens. As an encyclopedic museum, the MFA aims to examine the whole of human art production, and one of the most exciting possibilities of a collection that spans 5,000 years is the ability to explore big ideas across space, time, and geography. This provides an opportunity to observe the commonalities of the human journey and co ... More
Melissa Hawkins, the museum’s curator of mammals and senior author of this research, examining museum specimens at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
WASHINGTON, DC.- A new study led by scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History identifies five new species of soft-furred hedgehogs from Southeast Asia. The study, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, used DNA analysis and physical characteristics to describe two entirely new species of soft-furred hedgehogs and elevate three subspecies to the level of species. The two new species, named Hylomys vorax and H. macarong, are endemic to the endangered Leuser ecosystem, a tropical rainforest in North Sumatra and Southern Vietnam, respectively. The museum specimens that were vital to describing these two new species came from the natural history collections of the Smithsonian ... More
Installation view.
MADRID.- Partial View is an anthological exhibition on Ibon Aranberri (Itziar-Deba, Gipuzkoa, 1969) that brings together more than 40 works in various formats (photographs, sculptures, installations, videos, slides, etc.) related to his most representative projects of the last three decades, revised and resignified through the artist’s current vision. The show can be seen at the Museo Reina Sofía from November 29 to March 11. The positioning of the works is fundamental to the significance of this exhibition, which is a labor of reformulation, revision, and reassignation that takes shape in relation to the space it occupies and the projects that surround it. Rather than chronologically, it does so through proximities, synchronies and tangential relationships. The name Partial View arose precisely because, as the artist says, “nothing acquires its original dimension in itself; the narrative is constructed in the intersections, ... More
Zwischen den Jahren by Valentin Goppel, 11 January 2024. 40 GBP / 50 EUR / 55 USD. 305 x 240mm landscape , 80pp, 37 images. Hardback ISBN 978-1-915423-17-7 ISBN signed 978-1-915423-18-4.
NEW YORK, NY.- On New Years Eve in 2020, Valentin Goppel began to photograph his friends and acquaintances in an attempt to both process and represent the disorientation he felt during the time of Covid. Through taking pictures of his friends he found a way to deal with the uncertainty. It wasn’t difficult for him to explain to them the pictures he was looking for— they were all in the middle of the same situation and felt connected in a state of limbo. The book’s title Zwischen den Jahren, describes the time between Christmas and New Year—the time between years. It acts as a metaphor to explain the period of transition between child and adulthood, in addition to the sense of suspended time or paralysis between before the Covid pandemic and an unknown future. I tried to find ... More
Aaron Rose at home in Los Angeles. (Stephen Ross Goldstein/The New York Times)
by Marisa Meltzer
NEW YORK, NY.- During the lockdown days of the pandemic in early 2020, Aaron Rose found himself sifting through old papers in his home in California’s Hollywood. “I can’t let anything go,” he said with a laugh. “I’m a hoarder. That’s why there were 200 poems from 1989 sitting in a box.” Rose, 54, has held many jobs. When people ask him to pick a lane, he’ll say he is a “polymath,” which he knows is a cop-out. Fine, then: “Artist encompasses all of it.” For 10 years, from 1992 to 2002, he ran Alleged Gallery, an influential Lower East Side space in New York City where people such as Chloë Sevigny and Chan Marshall hung out and a generation of artists such as Mike Mills, Shepard Fairey, Tom Sachs and Mark Gonzales got their start. He’s also a filmmaker known for the ... More
Dan Lam, Fertile.
NEW YORK, NY.- Some might find the textures and hues of Dan Lam’s solo exhibition Guttation at Hashimoto Contemporary visually challenging, but that’s the point. This new series of alien-like sculptures was inspired by a peculiar yet vital purging process for vascular plants and fungi called “guttation,” where plants expel excessive nutrients in their system. Continuing to explore the tension between desire and disgust, the Dallas-based artist suspends the attractive and repulsive aspects of natural oozing, seeping, weeping, and gushing through her chaotically controlled studio process. Exploring guttation through over one sixty works of various sizes, Lam suggests that something necessary might be vile; something vile might be beautiful. Known for her colorful drip sculptures, the techniques used to create this body of work mark a new period of studio exploration that resulted in fresh textures and colors. With ... More
Fantasia Barrino-Taylor in New York in December 2023. (Dana Scruggs/The New York Times)
NEW YORK, NY.- Throughout the six months of production on the new film adaptation of “The Color Purple,” Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, who plays the protagonist Celie Johnson, often called on God for strength. “There were times that I just felt like I’m not going to make it,” she admitted sadly. “I cannot do it. I would cry going to set. I would cry leaving set. I would talk to God, and I would tell him: ‘You’ve got to make this make sense. Make it make sense. There’s got to be something out of this.’ It was so hard.” The film, based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, details the transformative journey of a rural Georgia woman in the early 20th century. First adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie in 1985 by Steven Spielberg, then reinterpreted for Broadway in 2005, it has once again been retrofitted as a musical, complete with dance. The role of Celie, however, remains ... More
Paramjit Singh, Untitled, 2023. Oil on canvas, 68 x 59 inches.
MUMBAI.-Sakshi Gallery is presenting "One Hundred Moments Of Solitude," a solo exhibition by Paramjit Singh, from December 14, 2023 to January 6, 2024. Paramjit is exhibiting in Mumbai after 16 years! Paramjit Singh has been India's preeminent painter of picturesque and immersive landscapes. Trained under Sailoz Mookherjea, Singh's fascination with landscapes emerged during his student days in the 1950s, evolving into a lifelong passion. His artistic journey began with a nod to Giorgio de Chirico's Metaphysical style, later transitioning into a Surrealist exploration of stones before a transformative experience in the Kangra Valley inspired his distinctive style in the 1980s. Working swiftly without preparatory drawings, Singh layers the canvas with paint, fashioning a textured base. The palette knife is wielded with dexterity, creating multi-layered oils that appear as stippling or an accumulation of small brushstrokes. Singh's resultin ... More
Musa, Suco and Vernón round out the museum’s advisory board, which consists of 19 citizens, the Smithsonian Secretary and Under Secretary for Museums and Culture, one member of the Regents and two members of Congress.
WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents has appointed three new members to the National Museum of the American Latino board of trustees. They are: • Ileana Musa, managing director and co-head of International Wealth Management for Morgan Stanley • Mike Suco, president and CEO of Coca-Cola Bottling Company United Inc. • Carla Vernón, CEO of The Honest Company Musa, Suco and Vernón round out the museum’s advisory board, which consists of 19 citizens, the Smithsonian Secretary and Under Secretary for Museums and Culture, one member of the Regents and two members of Congress. Together, the board of trustees of the National Museum of the American Latino helps with fundraising and advises and assists the Board of Regents on matters related to the development of the museum. “Ileana Musa, Mike Suco and Carla Vernón are a we ... More
In 1959, Pape, along with Oiticica and Clark, would sign the Neo-Concrete manifesto authored by Ferreira Gullar.
LONDON.-White Cube announced representation of the estate of pioneering Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004). Her first solo exhibition at the gallery will take place at White Cube Seoul in spring 2024. A prominent figure in the Neo-Concrete movement and preceding Concrete movement, Pape was instrumental in the emergence of contemporary art in Brazil from the mid-20th century. Her multidisciplinary practice encompassed not only painting but also printmaking, sculpture, film, performance and installation. In the latter decades of her life – from 1976 to the early 2000s – Pape dedicated herself to a series of geometric installations entitled ‘Ttéia’ – a semantic play on the Portuguese words ‘teia’ (meaning ‘web’) and ‘teteia’, connoting a person or entity of grace. Established in the early 1950s, Grupo Frente renounced the tenets of Brazilian modernism, instead, seeking a form of ... More
Quote He who sells himself to style turns statues into bad literature. Auguste Rodin
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Arts-based social prescribing comes to Stanford STANFORD, CALIF.- Starting in January 2024, Stanford University will begin offering arts-based social prescribing to students through Vaden Health Services. This expansion of mental health services is being championed by Deborah Cullinan, vice president for the arts, and administrated by Art Pharmacy, a non-pharmaceutical mental health solution. Through this collaboration, Stanford is the first major university and educational institution to launch a comprehensive, social prescription program available to students to address well-being. Social prescribing is a practice through which health care providers prescribe social care or social interventions as supplements to traditional clinical and pharmaceutical care. Arts-based prescriptions for Stanford students could be participatory experiences, such as taking a poetry workshop, dropping into ... More
The great experiment that is 'The Color Purple' NEW YORK, NY.- Last month, I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Black-directed films in one week. I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways. Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; ... More
Carlos Lyra, composer who brought finesse to bossa nova, dies at 90 NEW YORK, NY.- Carlos Lyra, a Brazilian composer, singer and guitarist whose cool, meticulous melodies helped give structure and power to bossa nova, the samba-inflected jazz style that became a worldwide phenomenon in the early 1960s, died Dec. 16 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 90. His daughter, singer Kay Lyra, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was sepsis. Alongside Antônio Carlos Jobim, Carlos Lyra was widely considered among the greatest composers of bossa nova. Jobim once called him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.” Lyra was part of a loose circle of musicians who in the 1950s began looking for ways to blend the traditional samba sounds of Brazil with American jazz and European classical influences. They often gathered at the Plaza Hotel in Rio, ... More
Why we can't get enough of cult documentaries NEW YORK, NY.- Nobody joins a cult. They just joined an exciting group of people trying to change the world. They just wanted to empower themselves, to feel better, to know Jesus, to do drugs with interesting people, to be different from their parents, to live off the grid. Then things got hairy, and now here they are, sagely describing this process to a dutiful filmmaker. Our current cult documentary boom has been going strong for years now, beginning in earnest with 2018’s “Wild Wild Country” and not really letting up. There has been “Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle,” “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults,” “The Way Down,” “Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey,” “Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence,” “Waco: American Apocalypse,” “Shiny Happy People,” “The Deep End,” “In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal.” There were two NXIVM documentaries — “The Vow” and “Seduced: Inside th ... More
What to know about 'Maestro': A guide to Bradley Cooper's Bernstein biopic NEW YORK, NY.- Pop quiz: Who wrote the score for Bradley Cooper’s new Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro”? Trick question: Bernstein. But you might not realize it, or learn of some of his more lasting accomplishments (“West Side Story” erasure!), even after watching the entire film, which focuses on the personal life of the prodigiously talented musician. Which is to say, the film — which Cooper directed and starred in, and which is now streaming on Netflix — does not hand-hold. It assumes some basic familiarity with one of America’s most storied conductors and composers. Here’s a guide to help you get up to speed. One of the rare virtuosos to compose for musical theater, write classical music and conduct august bodies such as the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein is probably best remembered as the composer ... More
Dan Greenburg, who poked fun with his pen, dies at 87 NEW YORK, NY.- Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, bestselling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died Monday in New York City. He was 87. His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, said his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg. Dan Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother. “Never accept a compliment,” Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?” “Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!" “I don’t know. First the chicken ... More
Researchers, Coast Salish People analyze 160-year-old Indigenous dog pelt in the Smithsonian's Collection WASHINGTON, DC.- Researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History led a new analysis that sheds light on the ancestry and genetics of woolly dogs, a now extinct breed of dog that was a fixture of Indigenous Coast Salish communities in the Pacific Northwest for millennia. Anthropologist Logan Kistler and evolutionary molecular biologist Audrey Lin analyzed genetic clues preserved in the pelt of “Mutton,” the only known woolly dog fleece in the world, to pinpoint the genes responsible for their highly sought-after woolly fur. The study’s findings, published today, Dec. 14, in the journal Science, include interviews contributed by several Coast Salish co-authors, including Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Master Weavers, who provided crucial context about the role woolly dogs played in Coast Salish society. “Coast Salish ... More
Rice University's new engineering and science building opens HOUSTON, TX.- The newest and largest research facility in Rice University’s historic core campus — the Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science is now open. The 250,000 square foot O’Connor Building provides students and researchers with technology-rich facilities that align with the University’s goal to stay at the forefront of scientific discovery and to recruit the country’s best scientific and engineering minds. Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Texas, Rice is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report and the O’Connor Building will only elevate this standing. An epicenter for interdisciplinary collaboration, the new high-performance facility includes state-of-the-art laboratories, classrooms, offices, a cafe, as well as many interactive gathering ... More
A Drink With a Chef de Cave Denis Bunner | Sotheby's
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Flashback
On a day like today, sculptor and painter Louise Bourgeois was born
May 25, 1911. Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (25 December 1911 - 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. In this image: Louise Bourgeois, The Found Child, 2001. Black fabric, 30.5 x 68.6 x 40.6 cm. Collection The Easton Foundation. Photo: Christopher Burke, (c) The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY.
