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…
ChatGPT, DALL-E 2 and the collapse of the creative process
In 2022, OpenAI – one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research laboratories – released the text generator ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E 2. While both programs represent monumental leaps in natural language processing and image generation, they’ve also…
Remembrance Day: How a Canadian painter broke boundaries on the First World War battlefields
“I cannot talk, I can only paint.” This is how Canadian battlefield painter Mary Riter Hamilton (1867-1954) summarized her urgent response to witnessing the large-scale destruction of the First World War. The 51-year-old artist began painting the devastated regions of…
Contemporary Muslim artists continue to adapt Islamic patterns to challenge ideas about fixed culture
What is culture? In today’s globalized world, we are familiar with seeing various cultural objects and ornamentation outside of their original location or context. If culture is not fixed and bound to a particular location, how does culture move and…
Why the growth of AI in making art won’t eliminate artists
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been in the news, most recently concerning the Hollywood actors’ strike about the potential impact of AI in filmmaking. Another story involved AI being used to replicate the voice of the Canadian rapper Drake in…
How Yorkshire influenced the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore
When Barbara Hepworth died in 1975, fellow sculptor Henry Moore wrote an obituary in The Sunday Times with the headline, The Shaping of a Sculptor. Not only did it prominently feature their shared birthplace of Yorkshire, but the paper’s clever…
Anxiety can often be a drag on creativity, upending the trope of the tortured artist
In the U.S., anxiety disorders affect about one-third of the population. So it’s no surprise that a good number of artists and writers also suffer from anxiety and depression. But whereas some critics see Vincent Van Gogh’s striking paintings and…
