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V MAGAZINE By Thomas Herd "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written” Galatians 3:13 After a tumultuous life of substance addiction followed by a sobering prison sentence for drug trafficking, today, contemporary artist Louis Carreon focuses on reinventing the narrative of his art. Though his personal evolution is constant, today he draws from the adversities of his past to create his art. But in everything he does, redemption remains at the core—a theme he knows well. From of the throes of darkness, Carreon emerged as a visionary contemporary artist. Known to challenge the ideology of traditional gallery artists, Carreon’s art defies the norm with consistent tones of religion and spirituality. For more information on Louis Carreon and his upcoming projects, visit his Instagram page . [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Nina Siegal The Ghent Altarpiece, parts of which have been restored, at St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, before a ceremony to unveil it on Jan. 24.Credit... GHENT, Belgium — Hélène Dubois was frustrated. It was Friday morning, just hours before she was set to reveal the $2.4 million, multiyear restoration she had led on panels of one of the world’s great artistic treasures: “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the Ghent Altarpiece. But the lamb’s “new” face had already been seen by thousands, online. In the previous 48 hours, a side-by-side of the panel before and after restoration had gone viral on Twitter, with Smithsonian Magazine calling the new lamb “alarmingly humanoid” and users comparing it to the pouting fashionista Derek Zoolander. [ More ]

THE DAILY HERALD By Christopher Placek Anila Quayyum Agha's suspended 3-D cube, called "Shimmering Mirage (Red)," is part of a new art installation at Fashion Outlets of Chicago in Rosemont. Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery A new contemporary art installation is transforming the grand entrance of the Fashion Outlets of Chicago in Rosemont. Called "Shimmering Mirage (Red)" and "Descent into Light," the two-part installation includes a 3-D luminescent cube -- suspended and lit from within -- that will extend into a colorful mural on the sides of an escalator.  The piece is the latest in a series of contemporary art installations at the two-level, indoor shopping center. Named "THE COLLECTION: Where Art Meets Fashion," the program includes 19 permanent commissions and a rotating exhibition series located in glass cases in mall common areas. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Jason Farago Ceija Stojka, “Untitled/Vienna - Auschwitz.”Credit...Ceija Stojka/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildrecht, Vienna; Collection of Nuna & Hojda Stojka. Ceija Stojka International Fund, Vienna. Immediately after the war, writers and philosophers maintained that the death camps defied representation; no art could ever do justice to their horrors, and even the concept of poetry after Auschwitz, in Theodor W. Adorno’s notorious phrase, had become “barbaric.” One is the self-taught Austrian artist Ceija Stojka (1933-2013), a member of the Roma minority (sometimes derogatorily called “Gypsies”), who turned the ordeals of the camps into an art of immense power. At 10, she was deported to Auschwitz, the first of three camps she would outlast. She slept on the pathway to the gas chambers, and hid among heaps of corpses; she survived by eating tree sap. [ More ]

SOTHEBY'S HENDRICK DE CLERCK, THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS. ESTIMATE $250,000–350,000 Classical Greek and Roman mythology have inspired artists from the early Renaissance to the present, with its tales of romance, heroism, tragedy, and moral lessons learned by both gods and mortals. Along with religious subjects, mythological scenes were categorized as history paintings and held the highest rank in the hierarchy of artistic genres throughout the early modern period. These paintings required artists to be well-read in the classics and skilled in depicting the (often nude) human figure in complicated compositions. The following lots from the forthcoming Evening , Day and Online sales will take place through February 4. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Jason Fargo Gold figure pendant made by the Tairona people in north Colombia, 10th-16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art If you want to make sense of the Caribbean, you had better prepare for some island-hopping: This is a place where not just people but ideas and images are constantly on the move. That’s the premise and the appeal of “Arte del Mar: Art of the Caribbean,” a concentrated showcase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that plunges visitors into a sea of archipelagic thinking. It is the Met’s first show to reckon with the Caribbean as its own zone of contact, and includes not only art from the West Indies — specifically on the island of Hispaniola — but also from the Caribbean-facing coasts of mainland Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia. [ More ]

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO (Left) Barack Obama, 2018 Kehinde Wiley. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; and ((Right) Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018 Amy Sherald. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. CHICAGO -- In summer 2021, the Art Institute of Chicago welcomes two acclaimed portraits to its galleries: Kehinde Wiley’s painting of President Barack Obama and Amy Sherald’ s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. On loan from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery , the Obama portraits come to Chicago for the first stop of a five-city tour. Not only do the portraits feature history-making subjects but they were made by groundbreaking artists. Wiley and Sherald are the first African Americans to be commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to create official portraits of a President or First Lady. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's "Madaonna of the Rosary With Angels" (1735). Sale estimate in excess of $15 million.  Collecting is something we love to do together, and we love getting to know the artist first. But you can't meet an Old Master, and one of them has work at auction this week. Born in Venice in 1696, Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo was a painter and  printmaker  who painted with the emotion of Titian and Tintoretto. Sotheby's estimates that Tiepolo's "The Madonna of the Rosary with Angels" will sell for over $15 million on Thursday. We won't be bidding, but we will be  watching   and that makes Giambattista Tiepolo,  our artist of the week .

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Ted Loos Dani Levinas in the home he and his wife, Mirella, share in Washington with their art collection. From left, Richard Deacon’s “X-Copper” (2017); on wall, Bruno Dunley’s “The Lake” (2017); Jorge Méndez Blake’s “The Art of Loving” (2009) and Waltercio Caldas’s “Untitled” (1993). Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times Among his many roles, Mr. Levinas — an avid art collector and the chairman of the board of the Phillips Collection, the modern-art museum in Dupont Circle. For the last 50 years, he and his wife, Mirella, 69, have been buying art, much of which is in their Georgetown home, a grand old residence that has been made over into an ultramodern showplace. The Levinas collection numbers in the hundreds, and about two-thirds of it is by Latin American artists. Some of the makers, like the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora and the Chilean artist Iván Navarro , are quite established, but others would qualify as new names ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Milton Esterow The estate of Roy Lichtenstein says his “Crying Girl,” (1963), an offset lithograph, is one of the artist’s works that forgers have tried to fake most often. Estate of Roy Lichtenstein In Basel, the Swiss authorities are prosecuting a local art expert who they say sold hundreds of fake prints that he passed off online as the work of Roy Lichtenstein , Andy Warhol , Paul Klee , Pablo Picasso and others over 10 years. The term “print” is a broad one, traditionally used to describe a number of types of original fine art works such as etchings, lithographs and woodcuts that are produced in limited editions through a range of processes. In each case, the artist creates an image and works with a publisher or printer to produce the set number, often destroying the plate, the stone or other matrix used after printing. Often the artist will sign and number each print with a marking that says it was, say, 12 of 200. (12/200.) The fakes, on the other ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Alex Marshall A series of brass plaques are the most famous of the items known as the Benin Bronzes, but the looted hoard also includes items made from wood and ivory. The Benin Bronzes are not actually from the country of Benin; they come from the ancient Kingdom of Benin, now in southern Nigeria. They’re also not made from bronze. The various artifacts we call the Benin Bronzes include carved elephant tusks and ivory leopard statues, even wooden heads. The most famous items are 900 brass plaques, dating mainly from the 16th and 17th centuries, once nailed to pillars in Benin’s royal palace. There are at least 3,000 items scattered worldwide, maybe thousands more. No one’s entirely sure. Their importance was appreciated in Europe from the moment they were first seen there in the 1890s. Curators at the British Museum compared them at that time with the best of Italian and Greek sculpture. [ More ]

CHRISTIE'S Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980), New Jerusalem . Acrylic and ink on pieced card. 6¾ x 7¾ in (9.5 x 19.6 cm). Estimate $3,000-5,000. Offered in Outsider Art on 17 January 2020 at Christie’s in New York Following a series of divine revelations in 1957, Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900–1980) began to paint. ‘Jesus just took my hand,’ she maintained. For the next 16 years, the self-styled ‘Bride of Christ and housekeeper for Dada God’, who dressed only in a white nurse’s uniform, imparted her ecstatic visions of a New Jerusalem on old scraps of cardboard and paper. On 17 January, three paintings by this remarkable self-taught artist were offered in the Outsider Art sale at Christie’s in New York. In 1939, she settled in New Orleans — ‘the headquarters of sin’ — where she became a fixture in the French Quarter, jangling her tambourine and exhorting the public to ‘wake up and hear about Jesus’. [ More ]

SOTHEBY'S GIOVANNI BATTISTA MORONI | THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST Estimate: 200,000 - 300,000 USD Recently discovered, this exceptional canvas depicting the Resurrection of Christ is one of Giovanni Battista Moroni's earliest known works. Dating to circa 1545-1548, it predates his painting of the same subject today in the Chiesa di San Martino in Sovere (early 1550s, fig. 1) and it provides a rare glimpse into Moroni's youthful development as an artist, which unfolded primarily in Brescia under the tutelage of Alessandro Bonvicino, known as Moretto di Brescia. The muscular physique and figure of Christ parallels comparable figures found in Moretto's Passion of Christ with Moses and Salomon (circa 1541-1542) in the Church of Santi Nazaro e Celso in Brescia as well as his Christ at the Column (circa 1540-1550) today in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. [ More ]

THIS IS COLOSSAL By XGrace Ebbert All images © Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nugyen, shared with permission For their recent installation “Study in Pattern,” artists Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen (previously) expanded on the idea of constructing an enormous tree comprised of long wood strips in studio. The result is an arboreal project that occupies almost an entire room with outstretched portions extending up to the ceiling and toward each corner of the space. The experimental project was developed for the Islamic Arts Festival in Sharjah, a United Arab Emirates city that is part of the Dubai-Sharjah-Ajman metropolitan area. To engage the traditions of Islamic art, Kavanaugh and Nguyen told Colossal they incorporated Arabesque elements into “Study in Pattern.” [ More ]

THE GUARDIAN  By Naaman Zhou A detail of the restored original of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece (1432) by the brothers and Flemish artists Hubert van Eyck and Jan van Eyck at the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK) in Ghent. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images A restoration of one of the world’s most famous paintings has been described as “a shock for everybody” after it revealed a depiction of a sheep with extremely human-like eyes. The Ghent Altarpiece, completed by Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432, is a 15th-century masterpiece in St Bavo’s Cathedral in Belgium, widely considered to be the first major artwork to use oil paint. For centuries, its central panel – titled Adoration of the Mystic Lamb – featured a demure sheep (the Lamb of God) being sacrificed on an altar as a representation of Jesus Christ. The sheep was painted over by a different artist in 1550, but a multi-million-dollar restoration has now revealed the original, startling fac...

ARTFIX DAILY Vajrabhairava, 1400–1500 or later. China. Wood with paint. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund, 93.13a–oo. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco opens your eyes with Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment , featuring almost 100 vibrant paintings, sculptures, and textiles from hundreds of years ago to today. This New Year, the Asian Art Museum invites visitors to slow down, look hard, and “wake up” from the ordinary world. Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment , on view Jan. 17 – May 3, 2020, showcases how integral artistic endeavor is to Tibetan Buddhist spiritual practices, underscoring art’s power to focus and refine our awareness. [ More ]

GIOVANNI BATTISTA TIEPOLO, MADONNA OF THE ROSARY WITH ANGELS, 1735. ESTIMATE IN EXCESS OF $15 MILLION. Sotheby’s is pleased to announce two major works that will highlight the Master Paintings Evening Sale in New York , January, 29, 2020.  Heading the auction is the masterpiece The Madonna of the Rosary with Angels by Giambattista Tiepolo – the last major altarpiece by the Venetian artist in private hands. The painting, composed in 1735, dates from a period that is considered to be the Tiepolo’s most significant. The canvas displays an early maturity for the artist; the emotion and grandiosity of the Venetian masters Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese are apparent in Tiepolo’s works of the 1730s. [ More ]

THE GUARDIAN By Jonathan Jones Spark of life … Adam and God. Photograph: Lee Martin/Alamy Stock Photo How did a church in a quiet Sussex borough end up with an astonishing, hand-painted copy of the world’s most famous ceiling?  The Sistine Chapel is easy to find. Just follow the A259 through Goring-by-Sea until you see the low, spireless red brick English Martyrs Church. Enter this Catholic place of worship – and look up.. It’s Michelangelo’s masterpiece all right, superbly replicated by the Sussex church’s deacon, Gary Bevans.One difference is that, because Bevans was painting on wood rather than plaster, he couldn’t use the classic fresco technique, having to opt instead for acrylics. But he caught Michelangelo’s mood. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Marjorie Perry For an exhibition called "Love is Blue," ART.Des displayed a sculpture, The Innocence, in the foreground by the artist Yang Yang and an oil painting by an artist who prefers to remain unnamed. Credit: Marjorie Perry From the outside, the facade of Destination (a prominent Beijing venue that expressly welcomes gay people) is downright drab. But inside this four-story cultural center on the east side of the city, the works in the nonprofit art gallery can push boundaries. Since the center’s opening, its clientele has remained mostly gay men, but it’s more than just a place to find a date. The center provides anonymous H.I.V. testing, practice rooms for a men’s choir, yoga and dance classes. And on the third floor, the art gallery, ART. Des , provides a window into the current state of gay art in Beijing. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Malcolm X from '48 Portraits (underexposed)', 2012 Ink jet print on pulped encyclopedic paper 22 × 24 1/2 in 55.9 × 62.2 cm Edition 2/2 We met Samuel Levi Jones , a major star in contemporary art on Thursday at an Indianapolis public school where he installed his striking " 48 Portraits (Underexposed) ." The work is a direct response to Gerhard Richter's  " 48 Portraits " (1971) that depicts only white males. Trained as a photographer, Jones is best known for reconstructing  historical texts into patchwork paintings of equality. Samuel Levi Jones talked with kids at Edison School of the Arts, and that makes him, our artist of the week.

ARTNEWS By Sarah Douglas Pamela J. Joyner with William T. Williams’s Eastern Star, 1971. ©NATHANAEL TURNER Pamela Joyner has some advice for collectors who are just starting out: “Figure out where the vacuum is, where the void is, where the need is. So whatever the void is, find the need and fill the gap.” That’s what she told an audience last year in San Francisco, where she and her husband, Alfred J. Giuffrida, are based, and that is exactly what she did 20 years ago, when she began a collection of abstract art by African-American artists that now encompasses more than 300 works by artists like Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam, and Mark Bradford. There is no trifling objective behind the couple’s acquisitions. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Hilarie M. Sheets The SoHo home of Kathy and Steven Guttman with artwork from left: Arlene Shechet’s “Not Knot” (2010), Camille Henrot’s “Overlapping Figures” (2011) and Amy Sillman’s “PAT”(2017). The floor lamp is by Studio BBPR. Camille Henrot/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Brittainy Newman/The New York Times Sometimes, it’s refreshing to mix up your surroundings, rearrange the furniture and shuffle the art. But few people have the flexibility that Kathy and Steven Guttman do. “We’re always moving something,” said Mr. Guttman. The Guttmans frequently rotate works from their collection of more than 1,000 objects of contemporary art and eclectic design among their four homes in the United States and France. Early acquisitions included abstract paintings by the Washington-based artists Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam and pieces of English furniture. [ More ]

THE ARLINGTON CATHOLIC HERALD By Nora Hamerman “The Adoration of the Magi,” c. 1537-38, by Spanish sculptor Alonso Berruguete is a painted wood with gilding depiction of the Holy Family. St. Joseph peers over Mary’s shoulder as she looks down at the babe squirming to receive the gift of the oldest king. NORA HAMERMAN | COURTESY For the first time, the work of celebrated Spanish sculptor Alonso Berruguete is being featured at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Not only did Berruguete bring the emotional power and physical realism of the Italian Renaissance to Spain, he brought Christ back to the center of Spanish religious art. As liturgical Christmastide draws to a close Jan. 12, Berruguete’s moving paintings, sculptures and drawings invite us to contemplate the mystery of salvation from the birth of Christ to his death and resurrection. “ Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain ” is in Washington until Feb. 17 at the National Gallery of Art, which is fre...

THE OAKLAND PRESS By Alejandra Molina Religion News Service The exhibition of "10 Columns" by artist Phillip K. Smith III, which features glowing mirrored panels that shift colors, at Bridge Projects in Los Angeles. RNS photo by Alejandra Molina LOS ANGELES -- For Linnéa Spransy, who grew up in a Christian commune in Oregon with a rock musician father, religion and art have always been intertwined. "Religious lifestyle, and expression and art were all the same thing," Spransy told Religion News Service. Spransy is one of the directors of Bridge Projects , a new Southern California gallery that seeks to link art with spiritual and religious traditions. Bridge Projects directors Spransy and Cara Megan Lewis, who are both artists, said they wanted to create a space where people can talk about spiritual and religious perspectives. Lewis, whose background is in commercial galleries, said she's seen how artists have felt the need to "suppress their faith ...

ARTNEWS By Carmen Hermo Rafa Esparza’s building: a simulacrum of power, 2014. An insistent rootedness in the histories, land, and life of Los Angeles can be felt in rafa esparza’s performances, installations, and paintings, which are all focused on his brown, queer community. His works open the possibility of sharing resources and destabilize artistic authority, and they put the spotlight on brown Americans of Mexican, Central, and South American origin or descent, predominantly queer folks, living in a city whose artists and longtime inhabitants are fighting erasure and gentrification. Esparza sees collaboration as an essential part of a practice centered around community. [ More ]

ARTNET NEWS By Sarah Cascone Kent Monkman, Welcoming the Newcomers (2019). Photo by Anna Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When visitors enter the Great Hall of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art this month, they will be greeted with something unusual: a pair of monumental history paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman . The massive canvases—almost 11 feet by 22 feet—seek to do nothing less than turn conventional Western art history on its head. The exhibition, titled “mistikosiwak (Wooden Boat People),” comprises two massive paintings, Welcoming the Newcomers and Resurgence of the People. Both paintings star Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, a representation of indigenous Two Spirit traditions. [ More ]

THE INDEPENDENT By Charles Donelan Innumerable Life/Buddha MMMMCM-01, 2018
Light Emitting Diode, IC, electric wire, stainless steel, transformer. LED type "Time Hundred" (Red) 49 plates | Credit: Courtesy Lisson Gallery Entering this new immersive exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, one experiences an unmistakable sensation of mastery, although not of a typical sort. Tatsuo Miyajima has been creating his distinctive installations for several decades now, and he has arrived at a striking level of expressiveness and concentration through variations on a single process. Miyajima is a major artist with something very timely to say, and he says it with admirable concision. The show, like the Buddhist practice that underpins it, invites both distanced contemplation and sensual apprehension. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Christopher's Udemezue's "Brian Williamson" from Top-A-Toppa series Faith. Creativity. Equality. Diversity. Courage. Ernest shared his five most important values during a recent two-day civic leaders retreat. Those same values seem to describe the work of photographer Christopher Udemezue (aka Neon Christina). Born in Long Island, NY, he has turned the trope of "religious martyrdom" into an exploration of the tension between his Jamaican heritage and his queer identity. Confronting oppression is a recurring theme. Art in America recently profiled him , and that makes Christopher Udemezue , our artist of the week.

BLUE & WHITE COMPANY Stained glass windows in Saint Denis in France, 12th century. It may be hard to imagine now but stained glass was at one time considered and respected as a form of painting. It was not only a way to decorate church interiors, but also used to tell stories and to emotionally engage with people. The way stained glass has historically been made has not changed much today. The artist first produces a ‘cartoon’, an initial sketch of the desired pattern. Irregularly shaped pieces of coloured glass are then joined with lead to replicate the sketch and details are later refined with a fine brush. The colours of glass were determined by glassblowers who included various metal oxides to the molten glass, producing definite hues in the finished sheets. The technique of glassblowing is age-old. [ More ]

NEW CITY ART By Alisa Swindell Alexis Peskine, “Aljana Moons – Twins Carriage,” 2015 From the legacy of Octavia Butler’s novels to the music and visual output of Janelle Monáe to the international success of “Black Panther,” Afrofuturism is having a moment in popular culture. Afrofuturism is a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery for a concept that brings together African mythologies, science fiction, technology and mysticism for an aesthetic and philosophical movement. Curated by Sheridan Tucker Anderson, the curatorial fellow for Diversity in the Arts, “In Their Own Form: Contemporary Photography + Afrofuturism” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography gathers Pan-African photographers working in an Afrofuturist aesthetic. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES By Annalisa Quinn Bernardo Bagulho THE HEART IS A FULL-WILD BEAST  And Maketh Many Wild Leaps  New and Selected Stories  By John L’Heureux  After death, we live on in the memories of those we leave behind, a Jesuit priest says at the beginning of John L’Heureux’s short story “Answered Prayers.” Over the course of this cheerfully grotesque tale, it becomes clear that he was right, if not in the ways he hoped. When a drunken driver kills the priest, he can’t get over the guilt. The priest’s face appears to him all the time, but especially — inevitably, horribly — when he tries to have sex. “So this was it,” the priest thinks, called away from his eternal reward to ruin the man’s night yet again. “I’m gonna be summoned every goddamn time!” This ironic deity presides over “The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast,” a new collection of L’Heureux’s short fiction. [ More ]

LION'S ROAR By Andrea Miller Syakanyoraizou. Work by Koun Seki. Artworks depicting buddhas and bodhisattvas are wordless teachings. In their facial expressions and gestures, we can see what we’re aiming for in our lives and practice—be it compassion, equanimity, meditative focus, or even wise anger. But who are the people who create these contemplative artworks? In Carving the Divine, a new, award-winning documentary, we meet some of these artists. Specifically, we’re offered a rare and intimate look at the lives and artistic process of traditional Japanese wood carvers. In this interview with director Yujiro Seki, he reveals what compelled him to make this film and what he learned in the process. [ More ]

ART IN AMERICA By Wendy Vogel Christopher Udemezue: Untitled (underneath the palm tree leaves where they can’t find us), 2018, mixed mediums, 40 by 30 inches. Christopher Udemezue describes a stark binary in perceptions of Caribbean culture, contrasting the pleasures of flavorful food and island music with the darkness of colonial violence and persistent homophobia. His practice mines his identity as a queer Caribbean-American. Udemezue’s first solo exhibition , in 2015 at Bushwick’s Stream Gallery, fused his interests in gender, sexuality, and ethnic heritage. Paying homage to the heroic resistance of a group of impoverished gay and trans youths in Kingston, Jamaica, known as the Gully Queens, the artist photographed friends in poses that borrowed from art historical tropes of religious and political martyrdom.[ More ]

THE FORWARD By Irene Connelly Jacqueline Nicholls's The caption for this drawing, created for Kiddushin 9, reads in part “pay first - then sleep with her any way that you want. you’re the buyer.” One afternoon on the London Underground, Jacqueline Nicholls found her eye drawn to a mother and teenage daughter sitting across from her. It also reminded her of a Talmud passage she’d read that morning, Eruvin 82, which posed the kind of odd question typical of Talmudic debate: When can a child be considered independent of its mother? Across the Atlantic, Nicholls — an artist, Jewish educator, and self-described “maverick” Talmud scholar — will host her own, slightly more intimate celebration. When she embarked on Daf Yomi in 2012, she didn’t just commit to reading the entire Talmud; she also decided to create artistic interpretations of each page and share them on social media each day. 2,711 artworks later, she’s exhibiting the fruits of this mammoth endeavor, which she calls “Dr...

THE  NEW YORK TIMES By David Belcher The Louvre Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.Credit... DOHA, Qatar — The future of the art world may be in a vast desert landscape where audacious museums are melding both local culture and the outside world in a way that feels fresh and revolutionary. Galleries are embracing not only pre-Islamic art and culture where it was forbidden for centuries, but also contemporary global art, creating an array of works to take in. That mash-up of sensibilities also lies at the core of global criticism surrounding human rights violations in the region, from the exploitation of laborers from Asian and African countries to discrimination against gays and women. Those issues are at the heart of the region’s growing pains. [ More ]

ARTSY.COM By Alexxa Gotthardt Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647-1652 Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome When famed Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini unveiled Apollo and Daphne in 1625, the marble work was resoundingly hailed as a meraviglia—a marvel. Contrary to more rigid Renaissance sculptures of the same subject, the muscled body of Bernini’s David (1623) reels back, limbs torqued and straining in space, as he prepares to launch his stone at Goliath, while the titular saint in Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-1652) twists rapturously, head thrown back in abandon. But nowhere in Bernini’s oeuvre is his fascination with metamorphoses more fully expressed than in Apollo and Daphne. [ More ]

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST By Kamala Thiagarajan Ganeshan Palsamy turned to cow dung art after a bitter harvest when he’d been forced to sell 300kg of a vegetable for 10 rupees in profits. Photo: Kamala Thiagarajan Ganeshan Palsamy lays out his wares on a white sheet on the red cement floor of his two-room home in the southern Indian city of Madurai. Spread out in front of him is a year’s worth of his handiwork. There’s a Buddha’s face, with clearly defined features; a Hindu temple pyramid, a wall hanging of ducks floating on a pond, a giant hand with thumb and forefinger pressed together and Hindu religious symbols.As far as artists go, Palsamy is unusual. Though Palsamy has no political leanings, he is one of a growing number of organic farmers across the country who are benefiting from government handouts targeting India’s growing bovine businesses. [ More ]

ARTLYST By Revd Jonathan Evens "Repent and Sin No More" (1985) and Julia Warhola portrait (1974) by Andy Warhol In 1987, in a eulogy given at a Memorial Mass for Andy Warhol, the art historian John Richardson revealed the extent of Warhol’s Catholic devotion and faith. Richardson shared with the congregation of 2,000 at New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral that Warhol had attended Mass several times a week at the St. Vincent Ferrer parish, ‘was responsible for at least one conversion,’ ‘took considerable pride in financing a nephew’s studies for the priesthood,’ and ‘regularly helped out at a shelter serving meals to the homeless and the hungry.’ The curators of next year’s Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern note that Warhol grew up in Pittsburgh to Carpatho-Rusyn parents who were devout followers of the Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic Church. [ More ]

THE NEW YORK TIMES  By Phoebe Reilly The creator of “The New Pope,” Paolo Sorrentino, said that much of the inspiration for Malkovich’s character came from Malkovich himself: “elegant, suave and ironic, at once light and profound. Gianni Fiorito/HBO LOS ANGELES — Oddballs, schemers and psychopaths: In the course of his long career, John Malkovich has convincingly played them all. But whether this makes him an unusual, or unusually perfect, choice for the role of Supreme Pontiff in HBO’s “The New Pope,” he would rather not consider. “I don’t think about how I’m perceived,” Malkovich said. “It’s not my business. You like Jackson Pollock? I’m good with ‘ The Night Watch .’ We all have preferences.” The series’s creator, Paolo Sorrentino (“The Great Beauty”), on the other hand, was unequivocal in his enthusiasm for Malkovich as Sir John Brannox, an English aristocrat and former punk musician who reluctantly takes over for Jude Law’s Pope Pius XIII on Jan. 13, when the show retur...

NEWCITY ART By Chris Miller David Bekker, “Neilah,” from the Collection of Ezra & Eve Perkal/Image: Koehnline Museum of Art European Jews have been indispensable to modernism: as painters (Modigliani), sculptors (Lipchitz), dealers (Kahnweiler), patrons (Guggenheim) and critics (Greenburg). Yet even as they contributed to that international phenomenon, their own community was experiencing a series of disasters that would be worse than anyone could have imagined. Jewish artists who responded directly to the persecution, flight and relocation of their people remain outside the canon of art history. But it was the modern expressive visual language that many used to tell their story.[ More ]

NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER By Jay Coop Indiana artist Daniel Mitsui carefully crafts each work of art, including Our Lady of Seattle, the Sacred Heart and other saintly depictions, including St. John the Baptist and St. Francis. (Courtesy of Daniel Mitsui) A captivating new drawing of Our Lady of Seattle, created for St. Luke Church in Washington, is rich in details and symbols. To wit: On the border of the illustration, pairs of animals approach Noah’s Ark. The artist, Daniel Mitsui , who is married with four young children, is no monk, and he prefers not to talk at length about his Catholic faith because he does not want to leverage his devotion as a way to attract clients. But his idiosyncratic yet traditional Gothic art, inspired by illustrated manuscripts, panel paintings and tapestries from more than 800 years ago, has drawn a devoted following. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton Enrique Martínez Celaya's "Untitled," 2014 (14-309); Single-color lithograph; 8 1/2 x 11 inches; Soft white Somerset satin; Collaborating Printer: Bill Lagattuta; Signed edition 29 of 45 This much is true. Today is the 12th Day of Christmas , so Christmas is over. We’ll miss our daily gift exchanges, but we’ve learned so much about the 12 artists whose works were shared. Two of those 12 visiting artists to the Tamarind Institute inspired our lithography exchange idea: Cave and Celaya. “Untitled” by Nick Cave was the art of the week for the first five days , and that makes “ Untitled ” by Enrique Martínez Celaya , the art of these final seven days of Christmas week .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton holding up the last of his 12 days of Christmas gifts,  "Benin Head" #29 of 45 by Robert Truitt On this  12th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by  Robert Truitt . Born in 1975 in Houston, TX, Pruitt makes drawings and sculptures about the complexity of the Black body and Black identity, often informed by science fiction, hip hop, and history. Represented by Koplin Del Rio in Seattle, Pruitt’s work is in the collections of The Studio Museum of Harlem and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Today's gift is from a suite of eighteen lithographs by visiting artists at the Tamarind Institute .

THE NEW YORK TIMES Show Us Your Walls By Ted Loos Left, Edgar and Joyce Anderson’s “Timepiece” (1985, sculpture), with Sandy and Louis Grotta. From left, on the wall, Peter Voulkos’s “Wood Fired” (1981), “Wood Fired” (1980), “Wood Fired” (1978) and “Gas Fired” (1978/79). Center, large ceramic by Toshiko Takaezu (1970s-80s); table by Edgar and Joyce Anderson. Andrea Mohin/The New York Times HARDING TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Shy recessive types can appreciate art at a safe remove from the action, but collectors usually need to get off the sofa to capture the object of desire. The practice rewards moxie. Sandy and Louis Grotta, who have been collecting almost as long as they have been married — 64 years — possess that quality in abundance, having filled their home with some 300 pieces of crafts and jewelry. In the late 1950s, they happened to go to the Museum of Contemporary Crafts after a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, and lightning struck. [ More ]

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton holds his 11th Day of Christmas gift by Hayal Pozanti, a  two-color lithograph created in 2014 at the Tamarind Institute.  On the 11th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a signed limited-edition print by  Hayal Pozanti . Born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1983, today she lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Pozanti paints colorful, abstract compositions featuring bold, interlocking, and overlapping forms redolent of machine parts and technology. Represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery , her work is in the permanent collection of the Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles, and other museums. Today's gift is from a suite of lithographs by visiting artists at the Tamarind Institute .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton's lithograph of Mary Snowden's "Untitled" (2000) On the  10th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by Bay area artist Mary Snowden . Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1940, she is perhaps best known for her humorous collages about the suburbs and motherhood, oil paintings, and her art stitchings. More recently, she has been depicting rural farm life. Notably, she was the first female artist to win the SECA Award from the Museum of Modern Art in 1974.  Today's  gift , created by Mary Snowden  is from a suite created by artists at the  Tamarind Institute .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney-Britton at home in Indianapolis holding a print by Elena Climent (#29 of 45) On the 9th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a signed limited-edition lithograph by Elena Climent . Born in Mexico City in 1955, she is a self-taught artist motivated by the desire to reclaim things from her past that have been lost to her. It is through the act of reproducing and arranging these delicate, detailed, and evocative still lives that she reclaims her inheritance. Climent works in oil, watercolor but also drawing, and she has a studio in New York City. Today's gift  was created in 2001 as part of her visit to the Tamarind Institute .

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS By  Gregory Disney-Britton Gregory Disney's Britton hold up "Slightly Ahead of Season" by Indiana-born artist William T. Wiley  On the 8th Day of Christmas , my true love gave to me, a limited-edition print by  William T. Wiley . Born in Bedford, IN in 1937, he is most associated with the California Bay Area where he is also known for watercolors that combine Buddhist iconography and ark political humor. There is a recurring spiritual journeyman character in some of his works, a lanky cone-headed figure named Mr. Unnatural. Wiley's work is in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Today's gift , "Slightly Ahead of the Seasons" is from the Tamarind Institute.