The preternaturally astute portrait painter John Singer Sargent is often identified as an American, but he belonged to no one country. Born in Florence, Italy, to expat parents who moved the family around Europe with the seasons, Sargent (1856-1925) spent a formative decade in Paris before making London his base …
Salman Toor needed a better perspective. Backing slowly away from his easel, the 42-year-old artist closed one eye and raised a thumb. He arched his back to gain a few more centimeters of distance and then snapped upright. Exasperation led to acceptance. He buried any doubts and raised a paintbrush, …
Zurab K. Tsereteli, a Georgian-Russian artist whose towering monuments and heroic statues pleased the authorities in the Kremlin but drew scorn from Moscow to New Jersey, died on Tuesday at his home outside Moscow. He was 91. His death was announced by Sergei Shagulashvili, his assistant. President Vladimir V. Putin …
Earlier this month the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrated the opening of an exhibition by the painter Amy Sherald — Michelle Obama’s official portraitist — with a champagne toast over lush arrangements of daffodils and yellow ranunculus. At the Museum of Modern Art, another recent blowout event honored an …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. “What is your wildest dream for our future?” That is the question written boldly on the 16-by-11-foot blue wall that is featured in “Dreamseeds,” an interactive art and sound installation. Here …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. When Daniel Merritt became chief curator of an art museum at 32, he did not expect his profession to require him — or the public — to put on skis. But …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. In the Gilded Age, when newly wealthy Americans sought to advertise their social status here and abroad, several of them turned to what had long been a practice of the established …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. On the campus of Yale University, two art museums housed in landmark modernist buildings — each designed by Louis I. Kahn — sit directly across the street from one another. One, …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. Back in the 1960s, a prominent Detroit obstetrician had two passions — delivering babies and collecting artifacts that told the African American story. And just as those babies grew up, so …
This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times. “Welcome to the laboratory!” That’s how the artist Ann Craven, 58, greeted me when we met in the stairwell of her archive in Harlem. The space looked like a mausoleum: rows …