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THE WASHINGTON POST By Elena Goukassian (Hadiye Cangokce) WASHINGTON, DC---There’s no way to miss it when you walk into “The Art of the Qur’an,” the Sackler’s newest exhibit. It’s a Quran from 1599, and it’s the size of a table. And it weighs more than 100 pounds. And it takes more than one person to turn its pages. “ The Art of the Qur’an, ” the first major exhibition of Qurans in the U.S., features more than 60 examples of the Muslim holy book from all over the Islamic world and from the eighth to the 17th centuries. Most are on loan from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul, which, Farhad says, has “the best collection of Qurans in the world.” [l ink ]

THE ART NEWSPAPER By Henrietta Sharp Cockrell Finial in the shape of the Hand of Fatima (Late 18th century to early 19th century)  OXFORD, UK---An exhibition exploring the overlooked field of divinatory arts opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, last week (until 15 January 2017). For " Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural ," Francesca Leoni, the museum’s curator of Islamic art, has gathered more than 130 objects from private and public collections throughout the British Isles, around a third of which are on view for the first time. Dating from the 12th to the 21st centuries, the exhibits represent a wide swathe of Islam, from China, South East Asia, Nigeria and the Sudan to the great cultures of Egypt, Turkey, Iran and India. Local British Muslim communities have also been involved in the exhibition and accompanying programme. [l ink ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Ernest  &  Gregory Disney-Britton Art of Week: Pablo Picasso’s “Crucifixion” (1930), an oil-on-plywood painting in the Musée Picasso in Paris measures 20 by 26 inches Our Uncle Bobby fears Hillary Clinton, and that fear will guide his vote on November 8. But what if we could all crucify the "fear" in our hearts and instead all be preparing to embrace the birth of a new era ahead? Crucifying fear is the idea behind this weekend's movie pick, "Birth of a Nation" and also the new play "Finding Home: 200 Years in Indiana." It is also the idea that  Pablo Picasso  explored in today's art of the week, " Crucifixion , " a small Surrealist painting completed in 1930. The overall theme of the work is the suffering of innocents like Jesus, His mother, Mary Magdalene, and the penitent thief. Using symbolic colors for the figures (e.g. red, white, yellow, blue),  Picasso  frames the fear of that day in black leading to ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Charles Isherwood Poster for "The Harvest" at Lincoln Center Theatre, Manhattan NEW YORK---Context is not everything when it comes to our experience of theater, but it’s not nothing, either. “ The Harvest ,” a new play by Samuel D. Hunter about a group of young evangelical missionaries in Idaho, has a serious context problem. These idealistic young Christians, all in their 20s, are heading off to save souls in a place referred to only as “the Middle East.” The primary plot strand in “The Harvest” — will Josh go, or will Michaela and maybe Tom persuade him to stay? — didn’t exactly have me gnawing my fingernails in suspense. In fact, considering the horrific stories coming daily from Syria and Iraq, it came to seem pretty inconsequential. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By A.O. Scott Sundance Hit 'The Birth of a Nation' Gets "Living" Poster Can going to a movie be a moral obligation? A political gesture? “The Birth of a Nation,” Nate Parker’s debut feature as a director, presents an unusually vexing and complicated case. In the months between its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January and its release this Friday, the movie — which dramatizes the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 — has found itself on both sides of the argument, simultaneously the must-see and the won’t-see movie of the year. But then, in August, details emerged about a sexual assault case involving Mr. Parker when he was a student at Penn State in 1999. [ link ]

THE GUARDIAN By Vanessa H Larson The single-volume Qur’an from late 16th-century Shiraz that was acquired by Sultan Selim II’s wife, Nurbanu. Photograph: Supplied WASHINGTON, DC---The last significant survey of Islam’s holy book in the west was held at the British Museum in London in 1976. Into that void comes the first major exhibit on the Qur’an in the United States, " The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts ," at the Sackler Gallery in Washington DC. On display are more than 60 richly decorated manuscripts that span nearly a millennium, cover a vast area of the Islamic world and encompass an array of styles and formats, from simple sheets of parchment to large bound tomes. The exhibit offers “an unparalleled view of some of the greatest [Islamic] calligraphy, illumination and binding”, said museum director Julian Raby. [ link ]

BLOUIN | ARTINFO  Yaacov Agam, Candelabra Agam, c. 1980 The Jewish Museum, New York. Gift of the Noon Foundation, Cecilia and Samuel Neaman, 1981 (Courtesy: The Jewish Museum, New York) NEW YORK---“Masterpieces & Curiosities: Memphis Does Hanukkah,” a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York will run through February 12, 2017. This edition centers on designer and artist Peter Shire’s Menorah #7 (1986) and connects Los Angeles’ native history, to the history and resonance of Memphis design. The Museum’s Judaica objects, textiles, and artworks that resonate with Shire’s artistic approach to form and materials, will be exhibited alongside an array of objects and ephemera relating to both Shire and the Memphis movement. [ link ]

NORTH DENVER TRIBUNE DENVER, CO--- Niza Knoll Gallery is bringing back the popular Holy Moly-Religious Commentary in Contemporary Art Juried Exhibition . Just like the call for entries exhibit launched in 2014, artists are invited to create original, compelling art that departs from traditional religious iconography and explores what religion means to them. Is it real, fantasy, calming, confusing, corrupt? What do you think? How do you feel? How do you interpret it? The selected works will be exhibited from December 16, 2016 through January 28, 2017 at 915 Santa Fe Drive. Deadline for entries is November 26th. Entries are accepted only through CaFÉ ( callforentry.org ). [link]

ARTDAILY Jeffrey Gibson, Come Alive! (I Feel Love), 2016. Acrylic felt, rawhide, wood, glass beads, stone arrowheads, steel wire, assorted beads, tin and copper jingles, artificial sinew, acrylic paint, druzy quartz crystal, steel and brass studs, 66.25 x 28 x 15 in. Collection of the Newark Museum, 2016. Image Courtesy Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photograph © Peter Mauney. NEWARK, NJ.- This fall, the Newark Museum unveiled its newly redesigned Native American galleries. Featuring more than 200 objects from throughout the United States and Canada, Native Artists of North America presents a fully reinterpreted selection of works from the Museum’s permanent collection, dating from the early 19th century to the present, including many objects never before exhibited. This long-term installation opened to the public on October 22, 2016. [ link ]

COLOSSAL By Kate Sierzputowski Tatiana Blass, “Penelope” (2011), carpet loom, wool yarn, chenille at the Chapel of Morumbi. Photos by Everton Ballardin In 2011, Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass pierced the walls of a Sao Paulo chapel with large masses of red yarn, letting the bright material trail into the surrounding grasses, landscape, and trees. Inside the chapel the work continued with a 45-foot-long carpet leading to a loom into which it was stuck. Immaculate on one side of the loom and in pieces on the other, strings of the dismantled rug traveled outside of the chapel through preexisting holes that made their way into the yard. The piece, just like the epic poem, leaves us to wonder whether the work is in a state of construction or unraveling, if the carpet is being built, or slowly torn apart. [ link ]

DESERET NEWS By S. Brent Plate, Religion News Service The Smithsonian first permanent curator of religion. Peter Manseau holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Georgetown University and whose many books include the history “One Nation, Under Gods” and the novel “Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter.”  The place of religion in museums has a long, troubled, and often strange history. Whether devoted to art, archaeology, or history, museum spaces can provide a neutral, public space to see the role of religion in the variety of human experiences. With a major new initiative recently announced at the Smithsonian Institution, Americans will now be able to more clearly see the role of religion in the history of the United States. The Lilly Endowment has provided a $5 million grant to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History dedicated to presenting religion as a vital element in American life. [ link ]

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By E.A. Carmean Jr. Far from being un-Christian, the distorted figures are little different from those in earlier religious art. PHOTO: SUCCESSION PICASSO/DACS LONDON/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES Pablo Picasso’s “Crucifixion” (1930), an oil-on-plywood composition in the Musée Picasso in Paris that measures just 20 by 26 inches, is one of his most confounding works. Created using the artist’s distinct Surrealist-influenced vocabulary, it has been the subject of important scholarly discussions and has appeared in major Picasso exhibitions.... In the “Crucifixion,” the principal figures of Christ and Mary Magdalene are in white at the picture’s center. Christ’s simple “ball” head reuses forms from Picasso’s 1915 Cubist portraits. The Magdalene is rendered in the organic forms found in Picasso’s contemporaneous Surrealist works, her open mouth screaming the unspeakable horror of the execution. [ link ]

THE TELEGRAPH By Alastair Sooke, art critic The Intrigue by James Ensor, the title piece of Luc Tuymans's new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts LONDON---well-dressed couple are making their way through a crowd. Yet something strange and sinister is going on. This group of grotesques – painted in furiously bright colors and seen close up, squashed against the picture’s surface so that we seem to be shoulder to shoulder with them – could be the cast of a sweaty nightmare. In fact, they are bourgeois Belgians, letting off steam during the topsy-turvy carnival celebrations of Mardi Gras. Known as The Intrigue, and created in 1890 by the fantastical modernist Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949), this disturbing picture is the centerpiece of a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, curated by Ensor’s countryman, the celebrated contemporary painter Luc Tuymans . [ link ]

ARTNET NEWS By Blake Gopnik Detail of THE DAILY PIC (#1660) is part of the Last Supper Series (1996) PITTSBURGH---This is probably the touchstone piece in the important show called “Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body” that opened Friday at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh. Incredibly, it is the first exhibition to bring Warhol into contact with the corporeal issues that have been hot in the art of the last several decades. Warhol comes off, as he should, as the first of the great postmoderns. Today’s Pic is part of the Last Supper series that Warhol worked on in 1986, only months before his unexpected death. The painting in today’s Pic, for instance, was actually executed with glow-in-the-dark paint. [ link ]

ARTDAILY Single-volume Qur’an. Copied by Khalil Allah ibn Mahmud Shah; Illuminated by Muhammad ibn Ali; Turkey, Istanbul, September 1517; Ink, color, and gold on paper; Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul, TIEM 224 WASHINGTON, DC.- The first major exhibition of Qur’ans (Korans) in the U.S., “ The Art of the Qur’an: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts ,”will open at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Oct. 22 and continue through Feb. 20, 2017. The exhibition was organized by the Sackler in collaboration with the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul. It will feature more than 60 of the most important Qur’an manuscripts ever produced from the Arab world, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Celebrated for their superb calligraphy and lavish illumination, these manuscripts span almost 1,000 years of history—from eighth-century Damascus, Syria, to 17th-century Istanbul. [ link ]

BLOUIN | ARTINFO By Doug Harvey A still from "The Day of Forevermore," in which the Witches and the Devil devise a plan for Forevermore Acres. (Lee Ann Nickel) “Try it again without the death metal voice, Doug!” I’m inside a bulky latex ram-horned devil mask, wearing a swanky maroon dinner jacket and cravat, tending bar for a coven of witches in a ruinous hut in a crumbling bohemian compound in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and Lee Lynch is getting sarcastic. Five hours earlier I’d caught a ride with my bandmate, the sculptor Daniel Hawkins, up the winding precipitous incline to the Zorthian Ranch, a definitively unfinished art environment dating from the antebellum heyday of West Coast Assemblage. Daniel was multitasking various production duties on artist Marnie Weber’s first full-length feature film, for which I’d been recruited to do a cameo. [ link ]

ARTDAILY Officials unveil the restored exterior panels of "The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb" at Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent on October 12, 2016. GHENT (AFP).- A painstaking restoration of a 15th-century Flemish masterpiece is revealing the long-lost detail and splendor that helped make the altarpiece one of the world's most stolen artworks. "The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb" by the Van Eyck brothers was unveiled 600 years ago at Saint Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent, but since then its full glory has dimmed, after being split into pieces, seized by Napoleon, then the Nazis, and nabbed by thieves. "You could say it is like the rediscovery of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel after its restoration," Marie Postec of Belgium's Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage told AFP. [ link ]

ARTNET NEWS By Caroline Elbaor Norbert H. Kox, Revive (2015). Courtesy Galerie Toxic. PARIS---The 2016 Outsider Art Fair (OAF) previewed in Paris yesterday with an impressive display by 40 international galleries, most of them focused on “mediumistic” (or spiritual) themes. As such, the fair overall is permeated by a sense of the intangible and sublime. Originally founded in New York City in 1994, the Outsider Art Fair stretched its reach to Europe in 2012—the same year that its ownership changed hands to Wide Open Arts, headed by CEO and dealer Andrew Edlin— adding a Paris iteration. Under Edlin’s tenure, programming has expanded to include talks and curated sections. [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Ernest  &  Gregory Disney-Britton Anila Quayyum Agha's "All the Flowers Are For Me - RED" (2016. Laser-cut stainless steel and blub, 60 x 60 x 60 in. God is in the details of " Walking With My Mother's Shadow " by artist  Anila Quayyum Agha , an intricately detailed exhibition that opened in New York City this week.  Her "Kaaba" is dark and dense but delicately patterned with copper beads. Her "Flowers Are Mine" cutouts are lacelike serenity, and her installations featuring 600-watt lights inside square and triangular cages cast dazzling patterns of intricate flowers across the gallery spaces. Using paper, embroidery, beads, mixed media, encaustic paint, and most recently steel, she weaves the geometric details of Islamic Art to create a new form of unity and order. Born in Pakistan,  Agha  was raised at the edges of Islamic life, and today she lives in Indiana where  72% identify  as Christian. Her art re...

THE GUARDIAN By Ashifa Kassam in Toronto Heather Wise, the local artist who sculpted the new baby Jesus head, said the project was ‘an honour of my entire art career’. Photograph: Marina von Stackelberg/CBC CANADA---About a year ago, the head of baby Jesus was knocked off again. This time, it seemed, the vandals had taken it with them. The statue stood headless for months as the church’s priest, Gérard Lajeunesse, asked local businesses about crafting a new head. It would have to be custom-made, he was told, and could cost as much as C$10,000 ($7,500). It was around then that he received a knock on his door from a local artist. Heather Wise had been walking the church’s grounds with a friend when she noticed the headless statue. The new head was attached about two weeks ago. Reaction was swift; parishioners reacted with hurt, surprise, and disappointment, Father Lajeunesse told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. [ link ]

HYPERALLERGIC By Carey Dunne McDermott & McGough, “Hic Habitat Felicitas” / Temple of Onan” (detail) (1984 / 2016) (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted) In the Book of Genesis, God strikes down Onan , the second son of Judah, for the crime of masturbating. In " Velvet Rage, Flaming Youth, and the Gift of Desperation ," a show by artist duo McDermott & McGough at James Fuentes Gallery , Onan gets a gaudy shrine: Three gold-framed paintings picture him masturbating into cotton candy-colored clouds. They’re hung above a carved wooden table composed of phalluses sprouting from breasts, modeled after a table from the collection of Catherine the Great. This very literal celebration of self-love is the centerpiece of a show filled with similarly campy critiques of homosexual oppression through the ages. [ link ]

REUTERS By Philip Pullella Rome ‘decorum cops’ remove mural showing Pope Francis as graffiti artist By Philip Pullella October 19, 2016  ITALY---A larger-than-life mural showing Pope Francis as a sneaky graffiti artist painting peace signs on a wall near the Vatican was taken down by Rome’s “decorum cops” on Wednesday just hours after it went up. The mural showed the pope on a step ladder playing a game of tic-tac-toe by painting circular peace signs in place of zeros as a Swiss Guard in a billowing uniform acts as a lookout against witnesses or police. Street artist Mauro Pallotta, who signs his work “Maupal”, painted it on paper in his studio and pasted it up with glue and lacquer on a corner near the Vatican overnight.  [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS At the left side King David plays the harp over the Beth haMik- dash, the Temple built by his son Shlomo. In the lower half Yaakov, the father of the 12 Tribes, sleeps at Bethel and sees angels climbing up and down in a line leading straight to a big menorah with the words ami yisrael , My People, Israel. NEW YORK---The Brooklyn Jewish Gallery at CKI presents "Works by Shoshannah Brombacher," opening October 22 with a sale to benefit Congregation Kol Isreal. Brombacher is an artist, author and storyteller. Her favorite medium is oil, pastel, crayons and/or ink, and her subjects are mainly Jewish life, holidays and (Chassidic) tales, classical music, travel impressions (cities, like Prague) and illustrating poetry and stories in several languages. The Brooklyn Jewish Art Gallery at CKI is a not for profit that seeks to give a showcase for Jewish Impressionist Artists. Congregation Kol Israel was built in 1924 and is a historic landmark designated by the...

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Amy Qin A scene from a 2014 production of “Confucius” at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing. Credit Liu Haidong CHINA---Among the qualifications Kong Dexin had to direct and choreograph a flashy new dance-drama about the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, one in particular stood out. According to Ms. Kong, 34, she is a 77th-generation descendant of that revered sage, known in Chinese as Kongzi, or Master Kong. Xu Ning, vice president of the state-backed China National Opera and Dance Drama Theater, which commissioned the work, said that when Ms. Kong proposed the idea, “all of us — including the officials at the Ministry of Culture — were a little perplexed.” He added, “It runs counter to the Chinese view of Confucius as very serious and very staid.” [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Dwight Garner Patricia Wall/The New York Times “So many poets have the courage to look into the abyss,” Kenneth Koch wrote in an appreciation of the French poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse, “but Perse had the courage to look into happiness.” The painter David Salle , in his new book “ How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking About Art ,” goes bravely in search of happiness, too. His quarry is aesthetic bliss. He stalks it through museums and galleries on both coasts as if he were David Attenborough tracking a curious swan. Mr. Salle’s mission in “How to See” is to seize art back from the sort of critics who treat each painting “as a position paper, with the artist cast as a kind of philosopher manqué.” Mr. Salle is more interested in talking about nuts and bolts, about what makes contemporary paintings tick. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Elisabeth Povoledo The “Portinari Tryptich,” right, by the Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, in one of the reopened halls. ITALY---If awards were given out among Italy’s art-rich museums, the Uffizi Gallery here would certainly vie for the greatest-hits prize, with such an abundant collection of Renaissance artworks that visitors often bypass seminal paintings in their rush to gawk at people pleasers like Botticelli’s “ Spring ” or “ Birth of Venus .” For example, two Botticelli “Annunciations,” painted 20 years apart, are now on display facing each other. “People who see this will automatically want to see that, and compare them, and ask, what is the same, what’s different,” he said. [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS Postcard for opening reception on Thursday, October 20 at Aicon Gallery NEW YORK---Aicon Gallery presents " Walking with My Mother’s Shadow ," the first major New York solo exhibition by Indiana-based artist  Anila Quayyum Agha . In 2014, Anila’s now iconic sculptural installation Intersections was awarded the top awards at the ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, MI, and was also voted the Alpha Omega Prize Artist of the Year . Last month, one of Agha's works was also offered by Christie's  auction house. Her current work in this exhibition reflects on the complexities of love, loss, and gains; experienced by her over the past year. The exhibition opening tonight is Agha's first major solo exhibition in New York City and with Aicon Gallery .

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE By Ruth Graham When Larycia Hawkins, the first black woman to receive tenure at Wheaton College, made a symbolic gesture of support for Muslims, the evangelical college became divided over what intellectual freedom on its campus really meant. Three days after Larycia Hawkins agreed to step down from her job at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Wheaton, Ill., she joined her former colleagues and students for what was billed as a private service of reconciliation. Wheaton had spent the previous two months embroiled in what was arguably the most public and contentious trial of its 156-year history. In December, Hawkins wrote a theologically complex Facebook post announcing her intention to wear a hijab during Advent, in solidarity with Muslims; the college placed her on leave within days and soon moved to fire her. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Scott Reybun “Garten,” at left, a 1982 abstract painting by Gerard Richter, was sold to an anonymous bidder for £10.2 million at Sotheby’s during “Frieze Week” in London. Credit Toby Melville/Reuters During “Frieze Week,” a 1982 abstract by Gerhard Richter became the object of a 10-minute duel between two telephone bidders at Sotheby’s Friday evening auction of contemporary art. “Garten,” estimated at 3 million pounds to 4 million pounds, was finally knocked down for £10.2 million with fees, prompting whoops and applause from the packed salesroom. The painting had last been seen at auction in 1987, when it sold at Christie’s for £49,500. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Paul Sullivan Michel Witmer, a collector in New York City, was persuaded to buy a work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, an artist he had never liked, at a museum show. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times For most art lovers, museums are a place to indulge a passion or seek solace from the world outside. But for art collectors like Jorge Garcia, they offer a level of objectivity about an artist’s work that galleries lack. Not to mention what a museum curator’s imprimatur can do to the value of the art. Mr. Garcia, a regional sales manager in Miami for an environmental consultant, says that before he buys artworks — and he has bought hundreds — he studies the artists to find out where they are from, where they studied art, what shows they have had and which gallery represents them. But then, Mr. Garcia says, he goes further. He looks at the museum shows the artists have had, or better yet, those they are scheduled to have. [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Ernest  &  Gregory Disney-Britton "Untitled" (Paradise) 2014 by Cecily Brown, Watercolor, ink, ballpoint pen on paper, 14 1/8 x 20 1/8. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Genevieve Hanson London-born painter,  Cecily Brown  has said that learning to draw is teaching yourself how to see. Such preparation is the idea behind “Rehearsal,” an exhibition that recently opened at the Drawing Center in Manhattan. The show includes more than 80 drawings and sketchbooks by the artist as she searched for lessons in gestures and lines. Her influences include the 19th-century Spanish artist Francisco Goya and Franz von Bayros , an early-20th-century “ decadent art ” illustrator of pornographic scenes. The erotic and also the tender and sweet are recurring themes which call to mind humanity's  rehearsal  in the Garden of Eden. Her work has shown in museums and galleries worldwide and this week,  Cecily Brown's  " Paradis...

SAINT LOUIS REVIEW By Joseph Kenny Erika Diettes Sudarios #1 2011 digital photograph on silk 7.48 x 4.4 ft image courtesy of the artist MISSOURI---The photographs by Colombian artist Erika Diettes in "Sudarios" are of women who were forced to witness the torture and murder of their loved ones during Colombia's 50 years of civil conflict. The display is carefully designed to make the portraits come alive. Diettes displays "Sudarios" only in churches and sacred places, appropriate because the women's lives and the lives lost to war are sacred. MOCRA is the former chapel for the Jesuits studying for the priesthood or brotherhood. Father Dempsey brought the exhibit to MOCRA , the third place it's been displayed in the U.S., with the help of the Martha Schneider Gallery in Chicago. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Jason Farago Valentin de Boulogne’s “Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian” (1629-30). Credit Vatican Museums, Vatican City NEW YORK---A canon is not a static list of dead white men. It’s an assertion of who from the past can speak to the present, and its shape is always up for negotiation. “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” a big Baroque blast of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art , is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to a French painter whose theatrically lit tableaus of musicians, cardsharps and saints now stand in slight obscurity. Toward the end of his short life Valentin got his most important commission, for an altar of the recently completed St. Peter’s Basilica. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Jon Hurdle An image of the god Shiva. Credit Sabina Louise Pierce for The New York Times PENNSYLVANIA---The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s renowned collection of South Asian art had a problem: Despite a dazzling array of artifacts that thrilled scholars and absorbed curators, it made no sense to the general public. The result is the reimagined, re-lit and in some places rebuilt series of galleries that reopened on Oct. 2 after an 18-month, $2.7 million makeover, the first for 40 years. The approximately 200 objects on display in the new galleries are presented in two major themes: “Art and the Divine” and “Art, Power, Status,” showing how different civilizations have used art to relate to God and to assert wealth and power. [ link ]

THE NEW YORK By Will Heinrich “Untitled (Paradise),” 2014, by Cecily Brown, is part of “Rehearsal,” a show of this painter’s work at the Drawing Center. Credit Courtesy of the artist NEW YORK---The London-born painter Cecily Brown is known for stormy, intensely colored canvases, usually abstract, which depend for their effect not on any overall argument or scheme but on a sheer profusion of rapid, discontinuous strokes. They stand or fall according to some mysterious magic achieved by no one choice but by all of the artist’s choices together. Some are thin, some are earnest, some are charming, but whether you like them or not, what they really demonstrate is the power of repetition — a power on even clearer display in “Rehearsal,” an expansive tour of Ms. Brown’s drawing practice ably curated by Claire Gilman at the Drawing Center . [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Karen Rosenberg John Singer Sargent’s “Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children” (1896) is the focus of a show at the Jewish Museum. Credit Tate Britain UNITED KINGDOM---This well-to-do, well-connected family of German Jewish origin — Mrs. Meyer; her Hamburg-born husband, Carl; and their two children — had just bought Shortgrove, a country estate in Essex that completed the Meyers’ real-estate portfolio and complemented their aristocratic aspirations. Some decades later, it entered the collection of Tate Britain as a bequest from Mrs. Meyer. Now it is in another appropriately aristocratic setting, the dining room of the former Warburg Mansion — now a gallery at the Jewish Museum — where it is the heart of the engrossing and intimate exhibition “ John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children .” [ link ]

ARTDAILY Detail of Fray Juan Bautista Maíno, The Adoration of the Kings , 1612 - 1614. Oil on canvas, 315 x 174.5 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado © Museo Nacional del Prado. UNITED KINGDOM---Exhibited in the UK for the first time, ' The Adoration of the Shepherds' and 'The Adoration of the Kings' are on display in Room 1 of the National Gallery this autumn and through the Christmas period. The loan of these two remarkable paintings from the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid provides a rare opportunity to present the work of the Spanish painter Fray Juan Bautista Maíno , an artist of exceptional talent whose name remains largely unfamiliar outside Spain.  Maíno’s two Adorations are highly significant in the context of Caravaggio’s extended influence across Europe. [ link ]

ARTDAILY Inmaculada Concepción. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664). Óleo sobre lienzo, 101,2 x 77,3 cm h. 1635. Donación Plácido Arango Arias, 2015. / The Immaculate Conception. Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664). Oil on canvas, 101.2 x 77.3 cm. Ca. 1635. Donación Plácido Arango Arias, 2015. SPAIN---Following the generation donation made last year by Plácido Arango, the Museo del Prado is organising a new special presentation which on this occasion brings together a group of works within the donation that all share the same subject-matter, that of the Immaculate Conception, one of the most frequently depicted themes among Spanish Golden Age artists, which they used to express changing ideals of female beauty. Painted between 1630 and 1680, this specially selected group of works allows for an understanding of how the subject of the Immaculate Conception varied between two types. [ link ]

ARTDAILY Mercury ca. 1570–1580 Johann Gregor van der Schardt (Netherlandish, ca. 1530–after 1581) Bronze Lent by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 95.SB.8. CALIFORNIA---Long shrouded in secrecy, alchemy was once considered the highest of arts. Straddling art, science, and natural philosophy, alchemy has proven key to both the materiality and creative expression embedded in artistic output, from ancient sculpture and the decorative arts to medieval illumination, and masterpieces in paint, print, and a panoply of media from the European Renaissance to the present day. Drawing primarily from the collections of the Getty Research Institute as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum , the exhibition The Art of Alchemy examines the impact of alchemy around the world on artistic practice and its expression in visual culture from antiquity to the present. [ link ]

ARTNET NEWS By Ben Davis, October 7, 2016 Agnes Martin, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 7, 2016–January 11, 2017. Photo David Heald. NEW YORK--- [Agnes] Martin , for her part, spoke frequently about the importance of renouncing “pride” and ego in her art, and one gets the sense that the grid attracted her because it was ego-less, eliminating overheated, subjective effects. “The object of painting,” she would say, “is to represent concretely our most subtle emotions.” The result is that each canvas unfolds as a story, the drama of the human mind straining towards a state of clarity. And the movement between each canvas testifies to how such clarity is a process perpetually pursued, not a state finally achieved. They are solitary paintings, maybe, but they communicate beautifully. [ link ]

THE TELEGRAPH By Alastair Sooke Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ , 1602, on show as part of Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery CREDIT: THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND UNITED KINGDOM---Few artists get the juices flowing quite like Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). He behaved like a devil, but could paint like an angel. And this dualism has made him a figure of perpetual fascination. Make no mistake, though: Beyond Caravaggio at the National Gallery is not a monographic show devoted to this charismatic Italian, who revolutionised art history by painting directly from life and experimenting with dramatic effects of lighting. Rather, it is about something subtler: Caravaggio’s impact upon his immediate circle and followers. Indeed, of the 49 paintings in the exhibition, only six are by Caravaggio . [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Michael Schwirtz The Salt Lake Temple in Salt Lake City. Utah’s sizable Mormon population is deeply unsettled by a sense of Donald J. Trump’s moral shortcomings. Credit Rick Bowmer/Associated Press As Republicans across the country contend with the fallout from a newly released recording in which Donald J. Trump made vulgar and sexually degrading comments about women, perhaps nowhere was reaction more swift and decisive than in Utah, home to a sizable Mormon population already deeply unsettled by a sense of the candidate’s moral shortcomings. On Saturday, the Deseret News , a media outlet owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, broke with an 80-year tradition of refraining from presidential endorsements to publish an editorial calling on Mr. Trump to step aside . [ link ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Holland Cotter A detail from “Untitled #5” (1998), one of more than 100 works by Agnes Martin in a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. NEW YORK---It makes sense that the Abstract Expressionist she was personally closest to was another misidentified Minimalist, Ad Reinhardt, whom she met in the 1960s, at the time he was making his “black” paintings. They shared in interest in the spiritual utility of art, an interest that, in her case, had distinct, if informal, Buddhist underpinnings. There were other, greater differences. For Reinhardt, art was a speculative, philosophical endeavor with political dimensions. For Martin — who insisted, problematically in my view, that artists should stay out of the world, have no political responsibilities — art was something more basic: a lifesaver. “Banish punishing thoughts” could be the motto of her late career. [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Ernest  &  Gregory Disney-Britton Artist Mark Daniell with "Sweet Spot" This week's art of the week is a meditation on color by artists Shawn Causey and Mark Daniell at ArtPrize 2016 in Grand Rapids, MI. This room-sized, shimmering color installation of 3,700 thin multicolor nylon cords hangs from ceiling to floor in mesmerizing color. The installation is was one of the  20 finalists  for ArtPrize 2016. There are 19 miles of cord in the piece. It can be extended two stories high, and when we stepped inside, the colors transported us to another spiritual plane as our motions activated the piece in ever-changing perspectives of new colors. We traveled to Grand Rapids this week to experience the flickering effect that compelled thousands of viewers to simply slow down and find their own "sweet spot" of color. Each October, our subscribers select the contemporary religious artwork of the year ( vote  Alpha Omega Prize 9) , but ...

APOLLO MAGAZINE By Susan Moore Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue , 1502, Andrea Mantegna. Musee du Louvre, Paris Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto lays claim to being one of the most influential works of European literature, not least due to the artistic response it provoked – from the Tiepolo frescoes in the Villa Valmarana to the celebrated illustrations of Gustave Doré . Rather than examine this critical history, Guido Beltramini and Adolfo Tura’s exhibition at the Palazzo dei Diamanti, marking the 500th anniversary of the publication of Ariosto’s epic poem in Ferrara in 1516, instead delves into the poet’s imaginative universe. The show’s premise and subtitle is ‘Cosa vedeva Ariosto quando chiudeva gli occhi’ (what Ariosto saw when he closed his eyes). Its evocation of the fantastical realms that the poet created for his chivalric romance is achieved through an examination of the very real world of Ariosto, and the literary and visual sources that fir...

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By Ernest Disney-Britton "You Will Have to Sing" (2015) by Devan Shimoyama, 64" x 54". Oil, glitter, and colored pencil on canvas with Ernest Disney-Britton at iMOCA @devanshimoyama "I wondered when I would meet you." INDIANA---On October 7, artists Devan Shimoyama and Tom Hubbard were featured in a gun show in Indiana. The gun show was an exhibition at the Indianpolis Museum of Contemporary Art about guns, and included both a touring exhibition created by UICA (The Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts) and a new work commissioned by IMOCA. Not everyone has the same opinion about guns. I'm oppossed but a huge number of my fellow church members are gun owners, and so as a Christian, I was drawn to this exhibition raising questions about this controversial topic. Shimoyama's self-portrait of a black figure with arms raised speaks powerfully on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. Hubbard's ceramic guns printed wi...

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR By Regina Haggo Barmherziger Samariter / The Good Samaritan, from Das Kestnerbuch (1919) / The Kestner Book CANADA---The Nazis called it degenerate art. Expressionism, the art of the personal and political, of misery and hope, is showcased in a thoroughly ambitious exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art . "Living Building Thinking: Art and Expressionism," has taken over the museum. The exhibition takes a generous definition of Expressionism, starting with an example of German religious art from the early 16th century and ending with some contemporary Canadian examples. Expressionism is typically described as an early 20th-century avant-garde movement with strong ties to Germany. It flourished from about 1905 to 1937, when the Nazi party tried to wipe it out. [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS Series of new works by Daniel Mitsui ILLINOIS---In August, Chicago-based artist Daniel Mitsui and his wife welcomed their fourth child, a daughter, Lux Helena. During weeks before and after the birth, Mitsui has made many new, smaller original drawings that are now available for sale including eighteen of these appear in his September 2016 e-newsletter. On Saturday, October 1, 7:00 p.m., Mitsui will be speaking about sacred art in the hall of St. Peter Church in Memphis, TN as a guest of the Wojtyla Institute .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS Corita Kent (American, 1918–1986) christ and mary, 1954 Color screenprint on laid paper 12 13/16 in × 19 1/2 inches OREGON---This fall, the playful and powerful Pop art of Corita Kent continues at the Portland Art Museum. Kent, a nun widely known as Sister Corita, was an important artist, teacher, and activist who gained international fame in the 1960s for her vibrant, revolutionary screenprints. She began screenprinting in the 1950s, creating dense, expressionist work based on Biblical passages. By the 1960s, Kent had embraced L.A.’s jumbled, chaotic cityscape as a source of inspiration and was incorporating text into her work. [ link ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS "Head of Christ" (1910) by Henry Ossawa Tanner Etching on cream laid paper, NEW YORK---This autumn's auction offerings include Henry Ossawa Tanner's  " Head of Christ " (1910) from Swann Auction Galleries on October 6th. Swann was founded in 1941 as an auction house specializing in Rare and Antiquarian Books and is now the largest specialist auctioneer of Works on Paper in the world. "Head of Christ" by Turner (1859 - 1937) is a richly inked proof, with dark edges and hand-wiping. It comes with a hand-written note in ink by the owner that was authenticated by Jesse O. Tanner, the artist's son, on the frame back. Today's  auction estimate is $5,000 - 7,000.