In Édouard Manet’s painting “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian” — actually a series of works completed between 1867 and 1869 — a firing squad dramatically executes the Hapsburg royal and two generals. Maximilian became Emperor of Mexico at the urging of Napoleon III, following the second French intervention in the country between 1861 and 1867….
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) knew how to appropriate most ardently. The renowned artist once said, “It’s hard for me to think of artists who weren’t influential on me because I’m such a blatant thief.” Next month, a major retrospective highlights Thiebaud’s six-decade career, featuring around 60 quintessential works…
In 1971, Faith Ringgold (1930-2024) received her first public art commission. New York City offered the late artist a $3,000 grant to paint a mural at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island. After going inside and speaking with those incarcerated in the notorious prison, Ringgold decided to base the work around a request from…
Directed by Taliesin Black-Brown and narrated by Ramiro Vargas Chumpí Washikiat, “I Am the Nature” poetically plumbs the human interconnection with nature through the eyes of the Indigenous Achuar people. The short documentary honors the philosophy of a culture whose ancestral lands extend across the modern borders of Ecuador and Peru, deep in the Amazon…
Whether a self-taught artisan or a contemporary art titan, one can make artwork just about anywhere. As the saying goes, the only limit is your imagination. And when art and life intersect, sometimes the distinction between the two disappears. As the National Trust for Historic Preservation can tell you, homes and studios from rural Kansas…
In a 1906 essay, psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch coined the term “uncanny,” or unheimlich, meaning “unhomely” or “not home-like” in German. He defined the psychological phenomenon as the experience of something new or unknown that might initially be interpreted negatively. Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud popularized the word with the publication of his…