A survey of John Singer Sargent’s Iberian paintings is on view at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.
Curious Objects: Thomas Commeraw, Free Black Potter in 1800s New York
For nearly two hundred years, from his death in 1823, New York potter Thomas Commeraw was out of sight. In the digital age it finally became possible to positively identify him: as a prosperous free Black craftsman with a manufactory in Corlears Hook.
Current and coming: Helen LaFrance at the Speed
While not exceedingly well known, Kentucky native Helen LaFrance was one of the most gifted and prolific self-taught artists of the past century…
Curious Objects: BONUS Episode: Collecting Outside the Lines
A few weeks back, Curious Objects host Benjamin Miller participated in a panel discussion at the Winter Show alongside collector Jeremy Simien (former guest of the podcast) and Morgan Library and Museum curator Jesse Erickson…
Field trip: Son et Lumiere, Twenty-First-Century Style
In terms of a cultural trend, something possibly important is afoot in a spectacle titled Gustav Klimt: Gold in Motion, which recently opened in lower Manhattan at the Hall des Lumières…
Current and coming: Maya gods at the Met
In an act of vandalism on par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria, during the sixteenth century Spanish conquistadors and priests destroyed the Maya codices, or the written sum of that civilization’s history and literature…
Shadowy Figures
When Charles Scribner’s Sons decided to publish an illustrated book on hoofed mammals in 1953, it was probably not a subject with promising financial prospects—a worthy scientific treatise, perhaps, but certainly not something expected to appeal to the general public. Yet when the book appeared, its dazzling black-and-white graphics made it one of Scribner’s most appealing offerings of the year…
Current and coming: Making Icebergs at Olana
Olana—the historic estate of Hudson River school artist Frederic Edwin Church, with its faux-Persian mansion surrounded by a landscape devised by the painter as a living work of art—is hosting winter art exhibitions for the first time…
Current and coming: In Stitches at Colonial Williamsburg
Stitched in Time: American Needlework features some sixty examples of bed rugs, samplers, quilted petticoats, embroidered hand towels, crewelwork, mourning and commemorative needlework, and more.
Living with antiques: A Labor of Love
Restoring the Daniel Hiester house, an eighteenth-century Pennsylvania gem