Music painted on the wall of a Venetian orphanage will be heard again nearly 250 years later
Imagine Lady Gaga or Elton John teaching at an orphanage or homeless shelter, offering daily music lessons. That’s what took place at Venice’s four Ospedali Grandi, which were charitable institutions that took in the needy – including orphaned and foundling…
Just Stop Oil attack the Rokeby Venus: how the group is using the suffragettes’ disruptive tactics to shape public opinion
Two Just Stop Oil protesters have smashed the glass on the Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez at the National Gallery in London. This, you might be surprised to hear, is not the first time this painting has been the target…
How fame has changed for artists since Antiquity
From the end of Antiquity (5th century CE) until about 1250, image-makers were more or less anonymous craftspeople. Traditional images from the Byzantine world dominated art in this period. When it came to art, what mattered was the skilful repetition…
How ‘La Catrina’ became the iconic symbol of Day of the Dead
On April 13, 1944, thousands of people clashed with police on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago. The melee was unrelated to U.S. participation in World War II, labor unrest or President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial move to…
Portraits of a Pioneering Generation – collaborative approach reveals the people behind the paintings
Scotland’s first Black professor, Sir Godfrey Palmer, described the Windrush: Portraits of a Pioneering Generation exhibition as “an acknowledgement that we are the same people from the past … who wouldn’t have [had] our portrait put up in this way”,…
This engineering course has students use their brainwaves to create performing art
Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. Title of course: “Arts and Geometry” What prompted the idea for the course? After a serious injury in 2016, I started drawing and painting during…
Unmasking Banksy – the street artist is not one man but a whole brand of people
The graffiti artist known as Banksy might be unmasked in an upcoming defamation case over his use of Instagram to invite shoplifters to go to a Guess store because it had used his imagery without permission. The case could be…
controversial delayed Tate show asks ‘what would it be like to be evil?’
American painter Philip Guston’s (1913-1980) work was filled with creative innovation. But the paintings he is best known for are the series of cartoonish hooded figures begun in the late 1960s. Guston called these painted characters “hoods”. They represented members…
Swiss-Haitian artist renegotiates colonial history in activist exhibition
In 2008, Sasha Huber, a Swiss-Haitian multimedia visual artist based in Finland, began a project to challenge the problematic legacy of Swiss-American glaciologist and natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873). Agassiz was a devout creationist who lectured on his belief in…
David Bowie: five must-have items for the V&A’s new centre
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has announced the opening of a new David Bowie Centre for the Performing Arts in 2025 at V&A East Storehouse in east London. This follows the news that the museum has acquired –…
