London Design Biennale – how a forest in a courtyard is challenging the city’s Enlightenment principles
The art director of this year’s London Design Biennale, Es Devlin, intends to challenge archaic design principles and highlight current climate concerns by planting 400 trees in the heart of the capital. The artist’s installation of “The Forest for Change”,…
The Hekking Mona Lisa – where the value of a painting, even a very good copy, lies
The Mona Lisa, housed in the Louvre in Paris, has been copied many times. The most famous of those copies has to be the Hekking Mona Lisa, named after its previous owner, the antiquarian Raymond Hekking (1886-1977). It’s set to…
Why this Rodin scholar would gladly see the back of The Thinker
I’m a Rodin scholar with a secret: I don’t like The Thinker. I’ve always been vexed by the fame of this sculpture by French artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) of a hyper-muscular man lost in thought. It wears a red “Make…
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…
