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WALLPAPER By Jessica Klingelfuss 2018 Alpha Omega Prize Finalist:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XQ5S8WL Video still from The Night Journey . Courtesy of Bill Viola Studio and USC Game Innovation Lab It is one the first ever experimental art games ever made and for the past decade, Bill Viola’ s The Night Journey has been exhibited in venues around the world as a work in progress. Now, Bill Viola Studio and USC Game Innovation Lab have launched the award-winning game worldwide on Mac and Windows PC (and on PlayStation in the US), marking the first time home players have been able to experience it. Using both game and video technologies, The Night Journey tells the universal story of an individual’s journey towards enlightenment. It is cryptic from the start: there is no single goal to achieve, nor a narrative – linear or otherwise – to follow. [ More ]

HYPERALLERGIC By Zachary Small Rossella Lari with Plautilla Nelli’s “Last Supper” in studio (photo by Francesco Cacchiani, image courtesy Advancing Women Artists) Florence has a backlog of female artists from the Renaissance that you’ve never seen, and you’ve likely never heard about. Advancing Women Artists (AWA) is a foundation dedicated to supporting art and conservation, particularly when it comes to the restoration of artworks made by women from the 15th to 19th centuries. For 11 years, the foundation’s leader, Jane Fortune, has dedicated herself to tracking down, researching, and restoring these paintings by long-forgotten women artists that have been languishing in the storage attics and basements of Italy’s many museums for far too long.  Hyperallergic spoke with Fortune about the history of women artists in Florence and the challenges AWA has overcome in the once-male dominated field of conservation. [ More ]

MALDIVE INDEPENDENT The Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi has been ordered to remove sculptures from a newly built underwater art gallery in the resort’s lagoon.  The nearly 30 sculptures were made by British artist Jason deCaires Taylor for the semi-submerged Coralarium art gallery, the first of its kind in the world. The sculptures were based on casts of real people, about half of whom were from the Maldives. Their forced removal comes after the government faced criticism from religious scholars and opposition politicians who deem human-form sculptures anti-Islamic. The Dhivehi language lacks words for statutes, dolls or monuments and such objects are generally referred to as Budhu (idols), the worship of which is a sin in Islam. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Detail of Vincent Valdez’s work “The City I” at the Blanton Museum of Art. On his second day at the gallery, Ernest’s new co-worker brought his blanket to work. It’s not a small lap blanket for a winter chill. No, it’s a full-blown Linus van Pelt light blue blanket straight out of a “Peanuts” cartoon by Charles Shultz that he wears seated at his desk. When passing him, Ernest did a double-take. However, isn’t America used to men wearing bed sheets? While the blue blanket symbolizes purity, a painting unveiled last week in Texas depicts the white sheets of racism. Vince Valdez’s “City of Hope l,” now at the Blanton Art Museum is our art of the week.

HARRATZ By Naama Riba Moran Asraf's “Oneg Shabbat” at the 'Haredi-made' exhibit. Shlomo Shari Jerusalem’s Art Shelter Gallery is probably the only social art gallery of its kind to operate in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. Noa Lea Cohn, the gallery’s director and curator, is quite sure of this: “There was a similar one in Brooklyn but it closed. Let’s say chances are there isn’t another one like it.” The gallery, located in the center of the Mekor Baruch neighborhood in Jerusalem, was founded as an outlet for artists who came to realize they don’t have to choose between art and religion, Cohn explains. It was established by newly religious public figures such as (former famed actor) Uri Zohar, Mordechai Arnon and the late Yitzhak (Ika) Yisraeli, for whom the gallery was named. [ More ]

THE HINDU Vishnu Vikraman and Rajesh Pulappatta bring alive mural art in both traditional and contemporary paintings at Art Houz Master carpenter Perumthachan, an important figure in Kerala folklore, stares out of many mural paintings displayed at Art Houz gallery. Artist Vishnu Vikraman has dedicated his series to the legend of Perumthachan who is believed to have killed his own son out of jealousy. “There are many tellings of this story, but my version is based on K B Sreedevi’s novel Agnihothram. Perumthachan’s story continues to be source of artistic expression,” says Vikraman. One painting shows Perumthachan at work, and the others highlight the scenes where Kannan (his son) learns the art from his father. Kannan earns praise from the King and the public, and one sees the growing jealousy on Perumthachan’s face in the paintings. The final painting shows Perumthachan dropping his chisel that falls on his son and kills him!”[ More ]

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE By Kit Doyle Each week Religion News Service presents a gallery of photos of religious expression around the world. This week’s gallery includes images about abortion rights in Argentina, cave survivors becoming monks and more. Soccer coach Ekkapol Ake Chantawong and team members who were recently rescued from a flooded cave in Thailand have their heads shaved in a traditional Buddhist ceremony in Mae Sai District, Chiang Rai Province, Thailand, on July 24, 2018. The teammates and their coach prepared to be ordained to become Buddhist novices and monks. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

ARTNEWS By Sarah Coscone This Madonna and Child. reattributed to Giotto, is stuck in legal limbo thanks to a British judge's ruling that the UK does not have the authority to issue an export license. The judge found that the painting had been illegally exported from Italy. A UK judge says a Giotto painting worth £10 million ($13.2 million) isn’t going anywhere but home. In a decision delivered on Monday, Judge Justice Carr upheld the Arts Council England’s refusal to grant an export license for the work, which is currently in Britain. But unlike most export disputes in the UK, this isn’t a matter of trying to preserve a treasure for the nation. The question, instead, is whether the artwork was in the country legally to begin with. According to the ruling , the painting, titled Madonna and Child, was illegally exported from Italy in 2007. Therefore, the UK cannot grant a new export license other than to facilitate its return there, the  Guardian reports. [ More ]

BLOUIN | ARTINFO Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art , which is housed in the southern wing of the Pergamon Museum, has received a donation of $10 million by Alwaleed Bin Talal, the billionaire investor, philanthropist, and member of the Saudi royal family, in support of its exhibitions and educational programming. Gifted through his Riyadh-based charitable foundation — Alwaleed Philanthropies — the donation will be distributed over the next 10 years and will fund a permanent display of Islamic art to be installed at the Pergamon Museum, followed by a major renovation project, and the institution’s Multaka program, which trains refugees to be museum guides. [ More ]

ARTNET NEWS By Sarah Coscone Mexican American artist, Vincent Valdez working on The City I, a painting of modern day klansmen, in his studio in San Antonio. Photo by Michael Stravato, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. It’s not every day that an artist sets out to paint a 30-foot-long canvas filled with larger-than-life Ku Klux Klansmen staring ominously back at the viewer. And so, when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin purchased The City I from Vincent Valdez for $200,000, it knew it had to tread carefully. “Art raises uncomfortable questions at times, but the rewards that come from having difficult conversations are many and important,” said Blanton director Simone Wicha in a statement. She called the “City” paintings “an exploration of racism, one of the most persistent and challenging social issues of our day.” Valdez began his two-part “City” painting series in the fall of 2015, and the Blanton bought th...

ARTNEWS By Kate Brown Elizabeth Wicks restores Violante Siries’s Madonna. Photo: Francesco Cacchiani. Sometimes, all it takes is for someone to ask the right question. That is exactly what Jane Fortune did on a visit to Florence 12 years ago. While touring the Renaissance city’s exquisite museums and fresco-covered churches, the American philanthropist began to wonder, “Where are the women?” Her search for an answer set Fortune on a passionate quest to restore the lost legacies and artworks of Florence’s forgotten female artists, digging into museums’ archives and dusty deposits with her organization, Advancing Women Artists  (AWA). [ More ]

NIAGARA WHEATON FALLS BUFFALO---New York State Sen. Chris Jacobs and Assemblyman Robin Schimminger have secured $100,000 to support much-needed capital improvements to the Buffalo Religious Arts Center (BRAC) in the heart of the city's Black Rock neighborhood. Located in the former St. Francis Xavier Church on East Street, the Art Center has weathered through 105 years of harsh Buffalo winters. The funding will enable the church members to better protect and secure the stained-glass windows that were manufactured in Munich, Germany, in 1911. The BRAC was established in 2008, and, in addition to preserving the former church, the Art Center's mission is to collect and preserve fine art from the many houses of worship that were forced to close over the years. [ More ]

VOX By Jane Coaston “Untitled (Flag 2), 2017” by Josephine Meckseper  A traveling art exhibit featuring an artistic depiction of the American flag has angered conservatives. A lot. They’ve called it “outrageous” and “offensive” to “red-blooded American patriots,” and have even demanded that it be destroyed. The flag is part of a year-long exhibit of a serialized commission titled “Pledges of Allegiance,” in which 16 artists were tasked with creating a flag focused on “an issue the artist is passionate about (and) a cause they believe is worth fighting for,” while “speak[ing] to how we might move forward collectively.” “Untitled (Flag 2)” is actually the final in a series of flags displayed at the University of Kansas and other universities, an effort that began in 2017 and will end on July 30. [ More ]

FINANCIAL REVIEW By Jan Dalley American artist James Turrell's light installation at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery Memorial Chapel in Berlin (2016). In 1941, when Henri Matisse was recovering from cancer surgery, his advertisement for "a young and pretty nurse" was answered by Monique Bourgeois. An unusual friendship grew, and several years later, when Bourgeois had entered the order of Dominican nuns at Vence, in the south of France, she asked the 77-year-old Matisse for help in designing a chapel that the nuns wanted to build for their school. The result, the Chapelle du Rosaire, finished in 1951, is a small, white, L-shaped building whose fiercely plain interior is flooded by glorious light from Matisse's stained-glass windows, created in just three colours – blue, yellow, green – that evoke the Mediterranean setting. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Ted Loos Gary and Denise Gardner in their home with Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture “Mother and Child,” left, and Charles White’s 1950 graphite drawing “Untitled.” Credit: Catlett Mora Family Trust/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, (Catlett sculpture); Photograph by Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times CHICAGO---The collectors Denise and Gary Gardner are very public in their support of “Charles White: A Retrospective,” an exhibition now at the Art Institute of Chicago that will travel to the Museum of Modern of Art in the fall. They are listed as “lead individual sponsors.” More privately, the Gardners own a couple of works by White. The Gardners display more than 100 artworks at home — a few are out on loan — and many of them hang in a large basement gallery they retrofitted as their collection grew. Their focus is squarely on African-American artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Amy Sherald, ...

THE GRIO By George Johnson God Is Trans art exhibit by Genesis Tramaine. BROOKLYN---"God is Trans" interrupts the notion that God is male and ask the viewer to see God outside of traditional gender binaries but as trans; a spirit that occupies both genders and everything in between. Most importantly in the additional messaging is that this exhibit is a SAFE SPACE, not just for Queer folks but for “God lovers” as the artist states. Upon entering the Richard Beavers Gallery in Brooklyn, there are about 20 paintings around the rectangular room, all envisioning images of Jesus, Mary, and other principle reference points of Jesus in the Bible— depicting Jesus at various stages of his life from a young child at the age of 8 well into his adulthood. The artist, Genesis Tramaine , talked about her inspiration for the bringing this art to life. [ More ]

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By Robert E. Gordon ‘Last Supper’ (1495-98), by Leonardo da Vinci Traditional analysis of the “Last Supper,” which was completed in 1498, has emphasized its subject matter, composition and style. But a deeper look brings out the true genius of the work: the relationship between art and architecture, the way science can bring man closer to God, and an outline of the quintessence of the divine. The first thing one notices is that the imagery of the Last Supper is aligned with the room’s architecture. The artist captures the anxiety and tension of the announcement by squeezing all 13 men into an uncomfortably small space. The other way derives from the second light source at the rear of the image. The sun in Leonardo’s conception is crucial to communicating the most important aspect of the entire fresco: Jesus’ impending death as a consequence of the betrayal he announces. [ More ]

TRICYCLE By Tenzin Dorjee Larung Gar – 05 by Gyatso Chuteng. Acrylic on canvas Larung Gar, the largest Buddhist academy in the world, has long been a reluctant theater for the unceasing struggle between Tibetan spirituality and Beijing’s brutality. This embattled mountain hermitage in eastern Tibet is the subject of a New York art show currently on view at Tibet House. Using several thousand fragments of incense sticks, Gyatso has painstakingly produced aerial views of the thousands of mud dwellings that populate Larung Gar—each work resembling an architectural mandala. The completed Larung Gar series is now on view at Tibet House through July 26. Essence also features the works of Japanese artist Yasuko Ota alongside those of Gyatso Chuteng. [ More ]

CHRISTIE'S Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study, 1955. Oil on canvas. 42¾ x 29¾ in (108.6 x 75.6 cm). Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia (UEA 30) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd Themes of religion, faith and divinity have pervaded art throughout the centuries. Sacred Noise , a dedicated exhibition of 30 works at Christie’s in London is a show that closed on July 21. The exhibit charted the reinterpretation and subversion of these themes in the 20th century. Ranging from Francis Bacon’s anguished Popes to Damien Hirst’s 1994 formaldehyde works titled after the disciples, the show explored how the European legacy of religious painting was reborn and redefined in post-war and contemporary art. Bacon, Fontana, Warhol, Hirst and Cattelan are just a very few of the artists who shook the canon through their engagement with religion. [ More ]

BLASTING NEWS By Joan Altabe The artist Vincent Valdez works on an eight panel painting of modern day klansmen in his studio in San Antonio. Photograph: Michael Stravato/Blanton Museum of Art The Blanton Museum in Austin, TX reports a purchase of a 30-foot long painting that views the KKK in an unusual way. Instead of lynchings and burning crosses, you get a casual, moonlit glance at a handful of klansmen loitering by a Chevy Silverado, holding cell phones or cans of beer - not unlike a group of teenagers hanging around a street corner. But rather than biker jackets and jeans, the garb is long white robes and face masks with eye-holes. And even though there's no violence in sight, the picture is full of foreboding. The title of the painting, “The City,” also makes no reference to the Klan. Artist Vincent Valdez , a Mexican-American living in San Antonio, told the Texas Observer that he created the work in reaction to the way that Trump fans the flames of white nationalism. [...

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Face in Dirt),” from 1991, shows the artist sinking into the earth (or is he rising, Lazarus-like, from it?) in Death Valley.  We love chocolate, pizza, vodka, and basically everything that kills our bodies but tastes delicious! Yesterday though, Ernest accepted the challenge of the Whole30 diet, and we thought this self-portrait of David Wojnarowicz  rising Lazarus-like from the dirt fit the moment. The program is 30-days without processed food to reduce acid reflux, inflammation, clear up your skin, and revitalize energy stores. Facing challenges are why we are drawn to Wojnarowicz’s prophetic images. Condemned by conservatives, he challenged Christians to do better. That’s why his museum retrospective “History Keeps Me Awake” is our art of the week.

THE HINDU By Navina Ja "In sync with season" - A miniature painting showing Krishna enjoying Megh Malhar The fever of monsoon has captivated the Indian imagination for centuries. From films to a large number of social and cultural gatherings aspire to celebrate the sensuality associated with the meteorological phenomenon. It is fascinating to trace the manner in which Indian texts on arts have visualised, the monsoons as audio-visual experiences which became guidelines for individual artists and community celebrations represented inrepositories of famous compositions. Years ago, while researching the cultural heritage of Varanasi, Ustad Bismillah Khan described the mood of monsoons and ended with playfully singing in my ear,“The rain clouds gathered, there was buzz that the famous sail parties (as monsoon stag picnics were called locally) were organised by the merchant elites of Benaras around small waterfalls, ponds and garden homes were on. [ More ]

ARAB NEWS By Zaid M. Belbagi A member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Hindu nationalist party and the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is controversial. Now in the highest office of state, his government has doggedly pursued Hindu nationalist policies, seeking to tear apart India’s diverse cultural and religious fabric. The 17th-century architectural marvel of the Taj Majal has found itself at the center of these debates. Built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, questions over whether it is a tomb or a temple, its ownership, its cultural significance and its upkeep have contributed to the 400-year-old monument being dragged into court cases over some of these issues. To add fuel to the fire, Surendra Singh, a legislator from the ruling nationalist party, has declared that the great Moghal mausoleum — one of the seven wonders of the modern world — should be renamed after the Hindu deities Ram or Krishna. [...

Al JAZEERA By Steve Chao Investigating how antiquities stolen from the Himalayas end up in museums and private collections around the world. On the global art market, Himalayan statues of religious deities fetch millions of dollars. But to the Nepalese, they are living gods who have been stolen from their communities. In this exclusive Al Jazeera investigation, 101 East senior presenter and reporter Steve Chao takes viewers on abreathtaking journey across the Himalayas, to reveal how the art world's hunger for ancient artefacts is destroying a centuries-old culture.As he seeks to expose the international black market in religious treasures, Chao travels across Nepal from its capital Kathmandu to remote and ancient Buddhist temples in Mustang. Since the 1980s, authorities estimate thieves have plundered tens of thousands of Nepalese antiquities. About 80 percent of the countries religious artefacts have been stolen and sold into the $8bn-a-year illegal black market in art. [ ...

MICHIGAN LIVE By John Kissane Detail of the Tiffany window at Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids. (Eric Tank) GRAND RAPIDS, MI---Temple Emanuel sits on Fulton Street, in a tree-lined neighborhood filled with brick houses. Recently, I parked my car in the back lot and walked past the playground, noting the stickers on the windows, which depicted Jewish symbols; walked past the inviting patio, where white hydrangea threatened to overtake the benches; and walked up to the entrance, where a single work of art -- a sculpture by Calvin Albert -- stood sentry. The dark bronze sculpture, titled "Burning Bush," did have something fiery in its twists and folds. A nearby plaque advised that Albert was born in Grand Rapids, and that the piece had been commissioned by the Temple, where he and his family worshipped. [ More ]

ARTSHUB By Gina Fairley James Turrell's architectural light installation at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Photograph: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA. BRISBANE, Au---American artist James Turrell is no stranger to Australia. His light works have been included in many museum shows, most significantly his 2014 retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, as well as the permanent Skyspace, Within Without (2010) also in Canberra. Turrell's work also features in architectural installations at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart. Now a new commission in Brisbane for the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) is garnering international attention. More than a decade on that vision has been realised. ‘[It] completes a major aspect of the architects’ original design intention,’ Saines added. While the idea of an illuminated façade was first pitched in 2001, it was not until 2017 that James Turrell was formally commissioned to realise a concept for the building, as part of GOMA...

CHRISTIES While America was enamoured of Corita Kent, the church authorities looked on with growing dismay. James McIntyre, Archbishop of Los Angeles, considered the modernising nuns of the Immaculate Heart insubordinate and frivolous. In 1960s Los Angeles, Sister Corita Kent gained national fame and stirred up the Catholic authorities with vividly coloured prints that conveyed a message of hope and protest.  In 1962, two transformational events occurred in Kent’s life. First, she saw Warhol’s Soup Can show at the Ferus Gallery in LA. It was a kind of epiphany for her. ‘It shook me up,’ she later said of his work. ‘He’s telling us what life is like for him... Maybe we need [something] to shake us up a bit.’The message was clear: the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary wanted to embrace the present day and the streets of the city. From now on, their fiesta was to be joyous and colourful, and impossible to ignore. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Holland Cotter Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz, 1983-1984 Acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 60 × 40 in; 152.4 × 101.6 cm Like an irate guardian angel, the American artist David Wojnarowicz was there when we needed him politically 30-plus years ago. Now we need him again, and he’s back in a big, rich retrospective, “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Wojnarowicz (pronounced voyna-ROH-vitch),who died at 37 in 1992, was one of the most articulate art world voices raised against the corporate greed and government foot-dragging that contributed immeasurably to the global spread of AIDS. Yet he was far from a one-issue artist. He was born in Red Bank, N.J. in 1954. His father, a merchant marine, was an abusive alcoholic. After his parents divorced, Wojnarowicz lived in foster homes and went to Catholic school. [ more ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Kevin Sack Curving, high-backed benches and a fountain are features of the proposed memorial at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., seen in an artist’s rendering. Credit Dbox for The Mother Emanuel Nine Memorial/Handel Architects CHARLESTON, S.C. — Three years after a racist blood bath in its fellowship hall — and 200 years after its defiant founding as one of the South’s first black congregations — Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., unveiled designs on Sunday for a contemplative memorial to the nine victims and five survivors of the horrific attack. As envisioned by the architect Michael Arad, who also designed the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, sections of the church’s parking lot would be transformed into two meditative spaces, one a stone memorial courtyard, the other a grassy survivors’ garden. Together they would speak to the suffering and resilience of a church that has out...

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Michael Hardy Vincent Valdez’s “The City I,” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Tex., depicts a modern-day Ku Klux Klan gathering. Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times AUSTIN, Tex. — The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin knew it had a painting on its hands that required sensitivity: a 30-foot-wide panorama by the Houston-based artist Vincent Valdez that imagined a modern-day Ku Klux Klan gathering. And a string of recent art-world controversies had emphasized the need for such curatorial caution.  So after acquiring Mr. Valdez’s four-panel painting in 2016, the Blanton spent two years preparing for the work’s public debut on July 17. To display the painting, the curators had a special gallery built with a sign warning that the work “may elicit strong emotions.” Such warnings are relatively rare. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS WASHINGTON, DC — Officially opened to the public on July 1, 2018, Museum of the Bible’s newest exhibition, Sacred Drama: Performing the Bible in Renaissance Florence , offers a rare opportunity to learn about Sacred Drama (Sacra Rappresentazione), a theme never before featured in an exhibition in the United States. Sacred dramas were theatrical performances of Old and New Testament stories and the lives of the saints. Religious communities used sacred dramas to provide moral instruction and civic education to children, the future citizens of Florence. Museum of the Bible is pleased to be the first institution to bring this little-known, yet very influential Renaissance-era cultural experience to U.S. audiences. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS Image from the exhibition WASHINGTON, DC---In its new exhibit, the Museum of the Bible presents a selection of archaeological remains from the Land of Israel in the first century CE. They tell the story of the developments in this era and bear witness to the glory of Jerusalem during the reign of King Herod and the Roman procurators, examine the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome and the fall of Masada, and, finally, trace the continued existence of Judaism after the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, and the rise of Christianity. The exhibit and its artifacts are under the auspices and courtesy of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [ Tickets ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, as the Virgin Mary during a 2002 photo shoot. Nika Nesgoda We discovered the new  Whole Foods grocery in downtown Indianapolis this week, and we love it. We are late adopters, but we had to praise that delicious buffet and share that Amazon even delivers their groceries. Isn’t that great? We also didn’t know that President Trump’s mistress, Ms. Stormy Daniels once posed as the Virgin Mary. This week, Daniels was arrested at a strip club in Ohio, but sixteen year's ago, she and several other adult film stars posed for photographer Nika Nesgoda to recreate Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary. Prints from that Cibachrome series are available through the McNeil Art Group beginning at $1,800. So, we made some new discoveries this week inspired by old ideas, and that’s why Nika Nesgoda’s “Virgin Mary” is our art of the week .

JAPAN TODAY Monk with a mission: Akiyoshi Taniguchi is the head priest at Chohouin Temple in Tokyo. An self-described 'photo boy,' he built a white room that serves as a photography gallery on the premises of his temple. | DAN SZPARA Follow the Sumida River southwest from Asakusa and you’ll soon reach Kuramae, an old working-class neighborhood filled with small factories, wholesale shops and temples. The head priest there is 58-year-old Akiyoshi Taniguchi , a monk who also runs a small gallery on the premises called Kurenboh . A photography enthusiast, Taniguchi combines his love of the art with his role as head priest at Chohouin, his family’s Pure Land Buddhist (jōdoshū) temple where he was “born into and grew up in.” After the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the monk donated his entire collection — by this time some 700 to 800 prints — to the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.... and now he wanted to share his love of photograp...

THE BUSINESS LINE National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai MUMBAI, India---Indian museums house an enviable range of collections of art and cultural objects spanning the vast history of India. Such collections, however, are poorly documented making them vulnerable to possibilities of theft or illicit culture trafficking. The recent case of the Chola Bronze of dancing Shiva which was stolen and smuggled out of India, and then sold to the National Gallery of Australia is a case in point. The statue has since been returned after India established its provenance and requested the government of Australia. Application of new technological tools to document museum collections can help a great deal in establishing art authenticity.[ More ]

THE NEW YORK JEWISH WEEK By Leah Finkelshteyn Jeane Vogel – View From The Women’s Section (2014) It was Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik’s work Nevertheless She Persisted , at “The Invisible Jew,” an exhibit organized and sponsored by The Jewish Arts Salon which [closed on Thursday] at Detour Gallery in Redbank, NJ, that started me musing on comic books, disappearing heroes, visual signals and communal boundaries. The artist’s collage includes excerpts from comic book panels, and depicts a woman holding up a sword—shades of Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. Brynjegard-Bialik’s is among 38 artists from the United States, Israel and Europe, both men and women, exploring the demarcation lines of tradition, culture and Jewish law that shape the lives of Orthodox Jewish women. Indeed, there is a growing trend both in the United States and Israel to erase women from haredi print media, in the name of hyper-modesty. [ More ]

ARTDAILY Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, from Hungarian Anjou legendary single leaves, Italy or Hungary, 1325-1335, The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.360.21. Photography by Janny Chiu, 2017. NEW YORK, NY.- From dragons, unicorns, and other fabled beasts to inventive hybrid creations, artists in the Middle Ages filled the world around them with marvels of imagination. Their creations reflected a society and culture at once captivated and repelled by the idea of the monstrous. Drawing on the Morgan Library & Museum's superb medieval collection as well as loans from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Medieval Monsters: Terrors, Aliens, Wonders—on view this summer—examines the complex social role of monsters in medieval Europe. It brings together approximately seventy works spanning the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and ranging from illuminated manuscripts and tapestry to metalwork and ivory. [ More ]

CITYBEAT "Shimmering Mirage" by Anila Quayyum Agha Photo: Provided CINCINNATI, OH---New York’s Aicon Gallery is hosting a pop-up exhibition of South Asian artists at Pendleton’s Marta Hewett Gallery through Sunday. Called Delicate Bond of Steel , the goal of the exhibit is to explore the “historic cultural and artistic ties that continue to bind South Asian nations such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, despite the traumatic partitions and redrawing of borders,” according to a release. On view are works by Anila Quayyum Agha , G.R. Iranna, Arunkumar H. G., Gigi Scaria and more. Through July 15. Free. Marta Hewett Gallery, 1310 Pendleton St., Pendleton, facebook.com/martahewettgallery. [ More ]

THE NEW TIMES YORK  By Jason Farago A European porcelain figure of an “oriental woman” from around 1860, right, is among the objects on display in the exhibition “Mobile Worlds” at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany. Credit Geneviève Frisson/Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe HAMBURG, Germany — When Europeans of the 18th and 19th centuries established their grandest museums, each building meant to unite the world’s cultural heritage under a single roof, they had no doubt as to who should explain it all: themselves. But the museums’ old assumptions, their methods of classification and display, remain largely untroubled. How might you reorganize a universal museum for the 21st century, an age of migration and of perpetual exchange? One of the boldest answers yet is to be found in “Mobile Worlds,” at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, an applied arts museum in the northern German city of Hamburg that has a similar standing to the Victoria & Albert Museum in Londo...

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Brett Sokol Tamara Warren and Lee Quiñones in their Brooklyn home with his “Midsummer’s Dream” behind them. Credit Cole Wilson for The New York Times Some painters measure their work in inches. Lee Quiñones gauges his earliest pieces by subway-car length — his canvas of choice 40 years ago. Now 58 and a living legend of the 1970s graffiti wars, Mr. Quiñones is done with slipping into New York train yards by night. Today you can find his work in museums from the Whitney to Berlin’s Staatliche. This summer he’s represented in a Howl! Happening gallery show, curated to accompany the documentary “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” which places Mr. Quiñones firmly within the period’s East Village canon. His own newer, introspective paintings, blending figuration with ethereal elements, are there as well. That combination, and his history of straddling the worlds of graffiti and contemporary art, is central to his c...

ARTDAILY Menorah of the Tabernacle (Book of Leviticus) from the Rothschild Pentateuch, France and/or Germany, 1296. Leaf: 10 7/8 x 8 1/4 in. (27.5 x 21 cm). Ms. 116 (2018.43), fol. 226v. LOS ANGELES, CA.- The J. Paul Getty Museum announced today the acquisition of the Rothschild Pentateuch, the most spectacular medieval Hebrew manuscript to become available in more than a century. The acquisition was made possible with the generous support of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. “The Rothschild Pentateuch will be the greatest High Medieval Hebrew manuscript in the United States, and one of the most important illuminated Hebrew Bibles of any period,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Its richly illuminated pages – a great rarity in the thirteenth century – make it a work of outstanding quality and importance that represents the pinnacle of artistic achievement of its day. It will be one of the most signal treasures of the Department of Manuscripts and indeed of ...

HUFFINGTON POST By Carol Kuruvilla An Indiana judge has ruled against the First Church of Cannabis, an Indianapolis church seeking to offer its members marijuana as a holy sacrament. Judge Sheryl Lynch of the Marion Circuit Court decided Friday that the state of Indiana had a “compelling interest” in preventing marijuana possession, the Indianapolis Star reports . Allowing religious exemptions for marijuana use would have an overall negative impact on society, Lynch said. She also argued that an exemption would put Indiana’s police officers in the difficult position of having to evaluate the sincerity of a marijuana user’s religious faith. [ More ]

ARTNEWS By Mid Awake Aida Muluneh, The Departure, 2016. Behind a corrugated metal gate on an otherwise nondescript swath of land in the Old Airport neighborhood of Addis Ababa is an extraordinary sight: a utopian project taking the form of earthen buildings and gardens nurtured in the name of art. This is the site of the Zoma Museum, a new eco-homage to Ethiopia’s indigenous architecture as well as a distinctly African home for contemporary art. “All people want to do is work, earn a living, educate their children,” said artist Aida Muluneh, sitting behind a desk at her creative consulting office in Addis Ababa. “We need leadership that will take us to the next frontier. We’re really at the crossroads.”[ More ]

TIME By Susanna Schrobsdorff Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, as the Virgin Mary during a 2002 photo shoot. Nika Nesgoda Sixteen years ago, artist Nika Nesgoda made a series of Cibachrome photographs, in which — taking a page from Caravaggio — she recreated iconic paintings of the Virgin Mary using adult film actors as models. Back then, Nesgoda’s printer refused to make prints of her Virgin Mary photographs. We can maybe forgive the printer’s prudishness. This was long before a site called Pornhub had 28.5 billion visits a year, and before we talked about Game of Thrones sex scenes over dinner, and certainly before we had a President admitting on Twitter to paying hush money to a porn star just before commemorating the National Day of Prayer in the Rose Garden (where he said, rather hopefully: “America is a nation of believers, right?”).[ More ]

WCPO Dozens of protestors held a demonstration against the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown on Saturday. WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. -- Dozens of protesters gathered for a rally nearby as the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky celebrated its two-year anniversary Saturday. The rally was organized by the Tri-State Freethinkers . One of the leaders of that group said they are taking a stand for science literacy. "They're telling people the earth is 6,000 years old, that the Grand Canyon was formed in 40 days. This is nonsense,” said Jim Helton, co-founder of the group. “This goes against basic science. And they're lying to the children and to the people around here about science, and that is dangerous and immoral."[ More ]

HARPER BAZAAR By Rebecca Anne Proctor ALulwah Al Homoud. Haq. 2018. Wood and acrylic. 150x120cm. The work of Dubai-based Saudi artist Lulwah Al Homoud combines geometric abstraction with influences from traditional Islamic art Geometric patterns dance before us like performers on stage. Exquisitely patterned forms emerge and dazzle our eyes until we can’t look anywhere else. This is the experience of looking at a work by Saudi Arabian artist Lulwah Al Homoud . Through her intricate work she uses Arabic letters to create complex abstract works on paper, synthesising characteristic motifs from Islam with the rhythms found in calligraphy and geometry, transforming them into a new visual vocabulary. “I research the hidden rules of creation—not the outer appearance of things, but how they are created mathematically, from a seed to a tree or a seed to a flower,” says the artist. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Verneida Britton wrapped in her beach-towel, "The Virgin Martyr St Cecelia" by Kehinde Wiley. Photo taken by her son, Greg Disney-Britton at Newport on the Levee.  Visual artist Kehinde Wiley forever changed the way we see portrait painting. He re-conceptualized history to form a contemporary vision, and inspired us to do the same in our own lives. This weekend, as we celebrated our son Kai’s job promotion he interviewed his grandmother sharing family history. Today, we’ll dine at his grandfather’s (1936-2009) favorite restaurant, Frisch’s Big Boy for what would have been his 82nd birthday. Next month, we’ll take Kai’s nana to Tybee Beach for her 80th birthday wrapped in Kehinde Wiley’s “The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia.” It's a beach towel version of Wiley’s 18-foot original , and that's why Kehinde Wiley’s “ The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia ” is our art of the week.

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By James Estrin “Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C. 1967.” Credit The Estate of Diane Arbus John P. Jacob first saw Diane Arbus’s work in 1980 while taking a college photo class to help him in his chosen career of architectural preservation. The effect of her images was so powerful that he dreamed about them every night for the next week. He then decided to dedicate his life to photography, eventually becoming the curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her images brought Mr. Jacob and Mr. Selkirk together in the making of “ Diane Arbus: A Box of Ten Photographs ,” published recently by Aperture and the Smithsonian American Art Museum to accompany an exhibition at the museum. Mr. Jacob wrote the essay for the book and curated the exhibition, which runs through January. Mr. Selkirk, who is the only person to have printed Ms. Arbus’s negatives since her death in 1971, was a source for Mr. Jacob. [ More ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By George Gene Gustines Michael Finn in his study with his treasures. Behind him are three commissioned pieces, with each panel depicting Golden Age comic book heroes from different universes celebrating the Allied victory in World War II. Credit Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times BRYN MAWR, Pa. — Batman has the Batcave. Superman has the Fortress of Solitude. Michael F. Finn has two upstairs rooms in the house he shares with his family here. One room, where Mr. Finn reads and relaxes, is a paradise of rarities. On a wall is the cover, drawn by Fred Ray, of the 1941 Superman No. 12, a surviving piece of art from the industry’s earliest days, when original pages were destroyed, used to sop up ink or given away. Mr. Finn bought this pencil-and-ink cover at auction last year for $77,675. Like many superheroes, Mr. Finn has a dual identity. He is a lawyer as well as a fan. He pays for them with his legal services. [ More ]