If you passed through the unlocked gate and rambling garden into Ruth Asawa’s Noe Valley home between 1966 and 2000, the 5-foot-tall Japanese American artist would likely have persuaded you to lie down on the kitchen table or living room floor and let her cover your face in plaster. Ethereal …
The two women are a coil of contradictions: Roman but also Greek, flesh but also stone. They both are confident, blessed with the poise of the noble and famous, yet also slightly shy. As if, after centuries of gazes, they can only appear before us slightly abashed. As if they …
Lonnie G. Bunch III has served as a museum director, educator and historian — all positions in which he has demonstrated a skill for diplomacy. But perhaps no amount of charm or discretion can help him avoid the fight he now faces over the direction of the Smithsonian Institution, the …
Welcome to the latest installment of “This Old House,” the Henry Clay Frick mansion edition. The sumptuous 1914 Beaux-Arts residence is reopening to the public on April 17 after a $220 million, four-year renovation, and with a series of member events this week. For the first time in 90 years, …
In the early 1900s, Franz Boas, who is considered one of the founders of American anthropology, became fascinated by a large shrine associated with Indigenous whaling rituals off the coast of British Columbia. He had been sent a photograph of the shrine, which belonged to members of an Indigenous group …
“I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why …
This week in Newly Reviewed, Max Lakin covers Enzo Shalom’s ghostly naturalism and two group shows drenched in nostalgia. Tribeca Enzo Shalom Through April 19. Bortolami, 39 Walker Street; 212-727-2050, bortolamigallery.com. The Surrealist Max Ernst considered frottage — the technique of rubbing over a textured material — an “automatic” form …
From his office on the top floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucian Simmons has a vantage point from which to survey the huge mission he has undertaken. Below him in gallery after gallery are the artworks and artifacts that the museum has collected across its 155 years in …
Centered on a blossom-shaped peninsula, Helsinki is as cool and calm as the slate-gray waters that surround it. For centuries, the city, like the rest of present-day Finland, was under foreign rule, first as a provincial outpost of the Swedish Empire and then as the capital of a Grand Duchy …
Stuart Pivar, a 94-year-old chemical engineer who lives in New York, has been collecting art and antiques since he was a child. He estimates he has picked up about 300 pieces over the years, including a portrait of himself by his friend Andy Warhol and paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jackson …