Erica Galvin

A Kyiv couple stage a socially charged exhibition in South Florida as their Voloshyn Gallery back home becomes a bomb shelter. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/vApiwGz via IFTTT

Roughly 25 works by the painter Maria Primachenko were destroyed at a museum in Ivankiv, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/5woWgOy via IFTTT

Two Russian artists have pulled out of the Venice Biennale and thousands are signing antiwar petitions. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/0WvnGs8 via IFTTT

Dutch officials, citing their “moral duty,” gave over the work which had been held by the Stedelijk Museum since 1940. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/eAH1NyK via IFTTT

The free, downloadable adult coloring books that the New York Academy of Medicine solicits from museums and university and state libraries for its # ColorOurCollections celebration each February enliven our month far more than any Valentine or Presidents Day sale. They’re not just a great way to while away winter’s last gasp. They’re also a wonderful portal for discovering cultural institutions that have thusfar flown beneath our radar, owing to size, geography, and/or field of study. It’s up to each institution to determine what – and how much – to include. Some color inside the lines by sticking to the subject for which they’re best known. Most take more of a mixed bag approach, flinging a variety of fascinating, unrelated images at the wall and seeing what sticks. Some offerings are but a single page. Others will have you wearing your crayons to nubs. With 101 participating organizations, it can be difficult to know where to start. Maybe we can help… Is medicine your th...

Humans and animals are intertwined. The relationship and interaction between the two has long fascinated Dutch photographer and filmmaker Charlotte Dumas (b. 1977), whose work is currently on show at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. Animals feature often in Dumas’ intimate portraits – relieved of the roles or symbolic functions imposed by humans. These creatures claim a pivotal and equally important role in the balance of nature, stimulating empathy in the viewer. Ao, the artist’s first large solo exhibition at the gallery, gathers photographs and three short films dedicated to the Japanese remote island of Yonaguni and the critically endangered breed of native horses which live there. In Shio (2018), small indigenous horses wander free along the coast. A 10-year-old girl enters the scene, creating a gentle game in which she tries, without succeeding, to lead the animals into the sea. Yorishiro (2020) includes another figure, Dumas’ daughter Ivy, five years old at the time. She walks throu...

Throughout his six-decade-long career, Bob Dylan has taken up quite a few causes in his songs. In the 1960s he was especially given to musical accusations of miscarriages of justice like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” which he recorded less than two months after the assassination of Medgar Evers. But he kept it up even in the 70s, as demonstrated by his 1976 album Desire. “Here comes the story of the Hurricane,” he sings on its opening track , “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done: put in a prison cell, but one time he could have been the champion of the world.” This “Hurricane” is, of course, former star boxer Rubin Carter , who’d been convicted for a triple murder at a Paterson, New Jersey bar a decade earlier. Today, many know the story of the Hurricane from the eponymous Denzel Washington-starring Hollywood biopic. By the time that film came out in 1999, Carter had long since been exonerated and made a free man, but when Dylan sang of his ha...

Why did Russia launch an unprovoked war in Ukraine and risk creating a wider global conflict? If you haven’t closely tracked the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, this primer offers some helpful context. In 30 minutes, the video covers the geopolitical, economic and environmental backstory. As you watch the explainer, it’s worth keeping one thing in mind: For years, European nations have long resisted bringing Ukraine into the NATO fold , precisely because they knew it would trigger a conflict with Putin. And there had been no recent plan to revisit the issue. All of this suggests that Putin has highlighted the NATO threat (amply discussed in the video) because it would provide him a useful pretext for an invasion. There was hardly an imminent threat. If you’re looking for other rationales not covered by this video, you could focus on two reasons provided by Hein Goemans , a professor of political science at the University of Rochester: Putin “wants to reestablish directly or indirect...

John W. Spencer currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He’s also Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project , and host of the  Urban Warfare Project podcast . Ergo, he knows something about urban warfare. On Twitter , he gave advice to civilians resistors in Ukraine, especially Kyiv, on how to resist the Russian invasions. His tweet thread reads as follows: So I’ve been asked what my advice would be to civilian resistors in Ukriane, especially Kyiv. Someone with no military training but wanting to resist. Here are a few things #Kyiv #UkraineUnderAttack : You have the power but you have to fight smart. The urban defense is hell for any soldier. It usually take 5 attackers to 1 defender. Russians do not have the numbers. Turn Kyiv and any urban area leading to Kyiv into a porcupine. Go out and build obstacles in the streets! Start with any bridge you can find (they should have been destroyed). Block them with cars, tru...

A new London exhibition celebrates the creativity of artists in their studios. But ateliers in the city are vanishing, and artists are being pushed out. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/zS1tnIF via IFTTT

Civilian specialists are tracking the threat to landmarks in Ukraine as the U.S. Army struggles after more than two years to appoint new cultural heritage preservation specialists modeled after the “Monuments Men.” from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/FSR51mL via IFTTT

The 55 items seized by the Manhattan district attorney’s office are thought to have been stolen from archaeological sites and illegally brought into the United States. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/a51KMy8 via IFTTT

More than 200 props valued at roughly $200,000, including antiques, a replica of a Fabergé egg, silver and gold candelabra and part of a grandfather clock, were reportedly stolen. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/vTVP60y via IFTTT

Long devoted to the subject of Black girlhood, now the focus of two new exhibitions, Deborah Roberts reflects on what has changed and what hasn’t when it comes to self-representation, play and power. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/lWcbw5x via IFTTT

What does Turrell, the master of light, have in common with Ad Reinhardt, the master of dark? Benches, for starters. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/OiCtuEL via IFTTT

If you know nothing else about medieval European illuminated manuscripts, you surely know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s greatest cultural treasures” comments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from other manuscripts of the same period by the quality of its artwork and the sheer number of illustrations that run throughout the 680 pages of the book.” The work not only attracts scholars, but almost a million visitors to Dublin every year. “You simply can’t travel to the capital of Ireland,” writes Book Riot’s Erika Harlitz-Kern , “without the Book of Kells being mentioned. And rightfully so.” The ancient masterpiece is a stunning example of Hiberno-Saxon style, thought to have been composed on the Scottish island of Iona in 806, then transferred to the monastery of Kells in County Meath after a Viking raid (a story told in the marvelous animated film The Secret of Kells ). Consisting mainly of copies of the four gospels, as well as indexes called “canon tables,” the manuscrip...

What does Turrell, the master of light, have in common with Ad Reinhardt, the master of dark? Benches, for starters. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/tElcfJQ via IFTTT

His protean “Assembly,” at the Park Avenue Armory, bridges art, technology, performance, workshops — and offers an A.I. Being who will teach you how to vogue. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/hdyEDNB via IFTTT

With two-for-one cocktails at the Met museum and two-for-one Broadway tickets, New York arts institutions are trying to lure back locals after a long, tough winter. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/EAtkwoZ via IFTTT

In Berlin, residential landscapes composed from prefabricated concrete-slab towers are called “Plattenbau” (literally “slab buildings”). They are often considered synonymous with East-German architecture – and the slate-skied drabness it may evoke for some. Now, in a new book, Jessi Simon presents these structures in all their grid-like beauty. Berlin is a city fundamentally shaped by the regeneration projects of the post-WWII decades. Large-scale housing developments reflected a renaissance of modernist architecture. International Style and Constructivist trends of the 1910s – 1930s were reinvented for everyday urban residents, in an effort to rebuild a city hollowed out by bomb damage. As elsewhere, the results were mixed and divisive. When the online image bank from which this book grew was launched in 2020, reactions showed that “these buildings, some of which are now more than half a century old, still had the power to provoke unusually strong, often polarised responses”. “The...

We’ve all have heard of the fuchsia, a flower (or genus of flowering plant) native to Central and South America but now grown far and wide. Though even the least botanically literate among us know it, we may have occasional trouble spelling its name. The key is to remember who the fuchsia was named for: Leonhart Fuchs , a German physician and botanist of the sixteenth century. More than 450 years after his death, Fuchs is remembered as not just the namesake of a flower, but as the author of an enormous book detailing the varieties of plants and their medicinal uses. His was a landmark achievement in the form known as the herbal, examples of which we’ve featured here on Open Culture from ninth-  and eighteenth-century England. But De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes, as this work was known upon its initial 1542 publication in Latin, has worn uncommonly well through the ages. Or rather, Fuchs’ personal, hand-colored original has, coming down to us in 2022 as the source...

Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/RvinVE2 via IFTTT

This week’s Nakedly Examined Music podcast features the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Paula Cole. After backing Peter Gabriel in the early 90s on his Secret World tour, she had major hits with “ I Don’t Want to Wait ” (later the theme song of Dawson’s Creek) and “ Where Have All the Cowboys Gone .” She has released ten studio albums since 1994. https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/NEM_ep_165_1-7-22.mp3 On this podcast, you’ll hear four full songs with discussions of their details: “Blues in Gray” from Revolution (2019), “Father” from 7 (2015), and “Hush, Hush, Hush” from This Fire (1996), plus “Steal Away/Hidden in Plain Sight” from American Quilt (2021). Intro: “I Don’t Want to Wait,” also from This Fire. For more, see paulacole.com . After her hit-making, her style took a rather sharp turn with the 1999 Amen album; here’s “ I Believe in Love ,” a disco tune from that. Her Revolution album has some much more directly political songs ...

Distant relatives are seeking to gain control of the outsider artist’s estate from a former landlord, who says that Darger gave the art and literary works he created to her husband. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/P6bcxdS via IFTTT

An Instagram post has boosted preservation efforts for a midcentury-modern home in Illinois. But a plan for its future would need to be in place by April 1, or it might be razed. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/N0BFUKJ via IFTTT

The purchase of a roundel for $23 million is the museum’s second largest ever, and fulfills a former curator’s dream after losing out in a 2003 auction. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/m570NLG via IFTTT

Image bySociety for Culture, Art and International Cooperation Adligat, via Wikimedia Commons You could say that Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. And given that he was born in Japan to Japanese parents, grew up in Japan, and lives in Japan still today, you’d have geography, culture, and biology on your side. Yet Alfred Birnbaum, one of Murakami’s own English translators, has called him “an American writer who happens to write in Japanese.” To understand how this could be requires a consideration of not just Murakami’s writing, but the writers whose books inspired him. Take the hard-boiled novelist Raymond Chandler, whose  The Long Goodbye  appears on the list of Murakami’s five favorite books just posted at Literary Hub . “I have translated all the novels of Raymond Chandler,” Murakami once said. “I like his style so much. I have read The Long Goodbye  five or six times.” He must have read it for the first time in Kobe, where he grew up in the 1950s and 60s, ...

“The first thing that caught my attention when I received the first draft of the book was its title,” writes Havana-born activist artist Leonor Anthony in the foreword to Vanishing Cuba, the latest volume from New York-based photographer Michael Chinnici. “What is it, in fact, that is vanishing?” Over the course of 24 trips, Chinnici captured tens of thousands of photographs of the island. Vanishing Cuba is the result: a comprehensive image collection charting “the changes the country faces as it emerges from more than 60 years of isolation.” Yet this volume is not only about the region’s complex political history. Through intimate portraits and street photography, it takes stock of life today – whilst looking to the future. Shown here are a selection of shots from the book. Vintage television sets, ornate staircases and mid-century hair salons are amongst the subjects documented by Chinnici on his travels. In some cases, these elements are found in a state of decay: crumbling and co...

Image via Wikimedia Commons You may have come into contact at some point with Tracey Emin’s My Bed , an art installation that reproduces her private space during a time when she spent four days as a shut-in in 1998, “heartbroken”: the bed’s unmade, the bedside strewn with cigarettes, moccasins, a bottle of booze, food, and “what appears to be a sixteen year old condom”…. If you were savvy enough to be Tracey Emin in 1998—and none of us were—you would have sold that messy room for over four million dollars last year at a Christie’s auction. I doubt another buyer of that caliber will come along for a knock-off, but this doesn’t mean the messes we make while slobbing around our own homes are without their own, intangible, value. Those messes, in fact, may be seedbeds of creativity, confirming a cliché as persistent as the one about doctors’ handwriting, and perhaps as accurate. It seems a messy desk, room, or studio may genuinely be a mark of genius at work. Albert Einstein ...

The Kunsthalle Praha opens in a former power station with a show exploring how electricity transformed art. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/hU256NZ via IFTTT

When David Lynch’s Hollywood version of Dune opened in theaters in 1984, Universal Studios distributed a printed a glossary to keep its audiences from getting confused. They got confused anyway, in part because of the film’s having been hollowed out in editing, and in part because the sheer elaborateness of Frank Herbert’s alternate reality poses potentially insurmountable challenges to faithful adaptation. Even many of the original Dune novel s’ readers needed more help than a couple pages of definitions could offer. Luckily for them, the same year that saw the release of Lynch’s Dune also saw the publication of The Dune Encyclopedia , authorized by Herbert himself. “Here is a rich background (and foreground) for the Dune Chronicles, including scholarly bypaths and amusing sidelights,” Herbert writes in the book’s introduction. “Some of the contributions are sure to arouse controversy, based as they are on questionable sources.” He couldn’t have known how right he was. To...

Six site-specific permanent artworks will celebrate the city’s energy and diversity. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/tKfd8zR via IFTTT

Is David Byrne the same as he ever was? Where is David Byrne’s big suit? Did David Byrne design bike racks? Above, David Byrne answers burning (or, perhaps better said, Byrne-ing) questions about himself. This video comes from the WIRED Autocomplete Interview series , where famous people answer the internet’s most searched questions about themselves. Enjoy! If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter,  please find it here . If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site . It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal , Patreon , Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto . Thanks! Related Content  David Byrne’s Unusual Forms of Visual Art: Bike Racks, Corporate Signs & Powerpoint Presentations How David Byrne and Brian Eno Make Music Together: A Short...

Actress Eartha Kitt amassed dozens of stage and screen credits , but is perhaps most fondly remembered for her iconic turn as Catwoman in the Batman TV series, a role she took over from white actress Julie Newmar . The producers congratulated themselves on this “provocative, off-beat” casting, executives at network affiliates in Southern states expressed outrage, and Kitt’s 9-year-old daughter, Kitt Shapiro,  understood that her mother’s new gig was a “ really big deal .” As Shapiro recalled to  Closer Weekly : This was 1967, and there were no women of color at that time wearing skintight bodysuits, playing opposite a white male with sexual tension between them! She knew the importance of the role and she was proud of it. She really is a part of history. She was one of the first really beautiful black women — her, Lena Horne , Dorothy Dandridge — who were allowed to be sexy without being stereotyped. It does take a village, but I do think she helped blaze a trail. ...

Building a house in the Graduate Hospital neighborhood of Philadelphia was a business opportunity — that’s all. But something changed along the way. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/If8Y0C2 via IFTTT

Pastel skylines. Otherworldly plant life. Portraits brimming with emotion. The World Photography Organisation reveals this year’s finalists and shortlist for the Sony World Photography Awards. It’s a line-up which, as the Jury explains, reveals “the importance of photography in interpreting our world, bringing vital humanitarian, environmental and emotional issues to the fore.” Working across landscape, portraiture and architecture, many of the 2022 shortlist respond to tensions between humanity and nature – whilst occupying the complex spaces in-between. Discover a selection of images below. Landscape | Jonas Daley “Orogeny” is the primary mechanism by which mountains are formed on continents. A photographer from China, Jonas Daley captures red rock systems developed during the Jurassic and Tertiary geologic periods, formed in the Himalayan orogeny. “With the uplift of the Earth’s crust, the hillside retreated – mainly through the collapse process,” Daley explains. “The remaining r...