Bringing art into public spaces can improve the social fabric of a city
You don’t need to look far to see the impact of art in public spaces. Art can connect us to place and record history as it unfolds. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, stories on the importance of public art are being…
What it reveals about the challenges of sculpting famous people
The excitement around the uncloaking of a statue of Diana, Princess of Wales, at Kensington Palace on what would have been her 60th birthday seemed to spread around the world last week. But it wasn’t just the prospect of the…
How could an Italian gallery sue over use of its public domain art?
Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus resides within the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. It is believed to have been painted in the mid-1480s and as such is classed as being in the public domain, free from copyright around the world….
How a volcano and flaming red sunsets led an amateur scientist in Hawaii to discover jet streams
On the evening of Sept. 5, 1883, people in Honolulu witnessed a spectacular sunset followed by a period of extended twilight described as a “singular lurid after sunset glow.” There were no signs of anything else out of the ordinary,…
How photography can build peace and justice in war-torn communities
It’s not easy for most people to think about what peace and justice mean to them, or how to express it. But that’s what we ask people in war-torn communities to do, all around the world. One place we did…
Nigerian art activist, scholar and bridge builder
Nigerian contemporary visual artist and scholar Yusuf Grillo died on 23 August 2021, aged 87 years. Art scholar Sule James explains Grillo’s influence and impact on art on the continent. Who was Yusuf Grillo? Yusuf Grillo was not only an…
We discovered the earliest prehistoric art is hand prints made by children
Fossilised footprints, and more rarely, hand prints, can be found around the world; left as people went about their daily business, preserved by freak acts of geological preservation. In new research our international team have discovered ancient hand and footprints…
What this collaboration between artists and health-care leaders teaches us about living through COVID-19
A new project that spotlights the strain from COVID-19 on our health systems and the people who work in them has invited health-care leaders and artists to create artworks that illuminate what it has been like leading, working and living…
a Black British artist you need to know about
From the ongoing debacle of the Windrush scandal to the UK government’s dubious race report and the pervasive online abuse endured by Black British footballers – what does it mean to be Black and British today? And what has this…
French Dispatch: four artists whose work was shaped by mental illness
Wes Anderson’s new film The French Dispatch is about the final issue of a magazine that specialises in long-form articles about the goings-on in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé. The film is an anthology of shorts representing three of the…
