How women put hair to the fore in fight for equal rights
Cutting your hair or letting it grow, dyeing it or showing off they grey, sporting a mane or covering it. These are everyday acts with which millions of women claim their identities, try to fit in, fight for their rights…
Kenya’s Samburu warriors still practise a rock art tradition that tells their stories
The Samburu people in northern Kenya’s Marsabit county are pastoralists. They migrate from place to place in search of pasture and water for their cattle, goats, sheep and camels. As part of their lifestyle, Samburu boys go through an initiation…
From Indiana Jones to Netflix’s Beef – how ‘collectors’ of cultural artefacts have gone from heroic figures to villainous thieves
Warning: the following article contains spoilers for Beef. Created by Korean director Lee Sung Jin and starring a predominantly Asian cast, Netflix drama Beef has won plaudits for its gritty yet humorous portrayal of Asian American life. The show explores…
Six decades, 210 Warlpiri speakers and 11,000 words: how a groundbreaking First Nations dictionary was made
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names of deceased people. The symbol † next to a personal name is a conventional respectful indicator that the person has died. The first large dictionary of the Warlpiri…
Reclaiming Dada women’s art history shouldn’t mean amplifying orientalism and sexism
Digital archives have become powerful platforms for women artists who were excluded from official art history, allowing them to claim their rightful place posthumously. This is evident in dedicated digital projects for early-to-mid 20th century avant-gardists like artist, writer and…
Seeing what the naked eye can’t − 4 essential reads on how scientists bring the microscopic world into plain sight
The microscope is an iconic symbol of the life sciences – and for good reason. From the discovery of the existence of cells to the structure of DNA, microscopy has been a quintessential tool of the field, unlocking new dimensions…
Enthralling, dystopian, sublime: NGV Triennial has a huge ‘wow’ factor
If the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2017 Triennial broke attendance records with more than 1.2 million visitors, it is nothing short of a miracle the 2020 Triennial is taking place at all. To bring together more than 100 artists, designers…
The boab trees of the remote Tanami desert are carved with centuries of Indigenous history – and they’re under threat
Australia’s Tanami desert is one of the most isolated and arid places on Earth. It’s a hard place to access and an even harder place to survive. But sprinkled across this vast expanse of desert, sweeping for thousands of kilometres…
The folly of making art with text-to-image generative AI
Making art using artificial intelligence isn’t new. It’s as old as AI itself. What’s new is that a wave of tools now let most people generate images by entering a text prompt. All you need to do is write “a…
In a Roman villa at the center of a nasty inheritance dispute, a Caravaggio masterpiece is hidden from the public
I teach Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, so when I was visiting Rome in January 2023, how could I not try to see a notorious villa that was up for sale and involved in a nasty inheritance dispute? The Villa…
