Art
As Russians Steal Ukraine’s Art, They Attack Its Identity, Too
KHERSON, Ukraine — One morning in late October, Russian forces blocked off a street in downtown Kherson and surrounded a graceful old building with dozens of soldiers. Five large trucks pulled up. So did a line of military vehicles, ferrying Russian agents who filed in through several doors. It was a carefully planned, highly organized, […]
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Turning Trash Into Poetry
PARIS — Compared with the junk she’s found in other cities, “Parisian trash is sturdy,” Ser Serpas said. She speaks from experience — at 27, the itinerant artist and poet is admired in European and North American art circles for precariously poised arrangements of urban discards found near the venues where they’re shown. They become […]
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In Hale County, Alabama, Two Visions of Place
Hale County, Ala., holds a special position in American visual culture. This is where Walker Evans made his photographs of white sharecropper families for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with James Agee’s text, a core document of Depression-era poverty. It is where William Christenberry, who grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa with roots in the […]
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AI’s Best Trick Yet Is Showering Us With Attention
One thing about inhabiting a face is that we can never quite see it the way others do. Mirrors give us a reversed image. Photographs freeze us in time at odd angles and, sometimes, in pitiless detail. Staring into a phone camera, preening to check our makeup or undereye circles, gives us a hyperreal mirror, […]
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A Hamline Adjunct Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.
To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took […]
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Paul G. Allen’s Art at Christie’s Tops $1.5 Billion, Cracking Records
Just when it seemed the high-flying art market couldn’t soar any higher, paintings and sculptures from the collection of the Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, hit the $1.5 billion mark at Christie’s New York on Wednesday night, making it the biggest sale in auction history. The first of two Allen sales, it shattered a six-month-old […]
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AI-Generated Art Won a Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.
This year, the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition gave out prizes in all the usual categories: painting, quilting, sculpture. But one entrant, Jason M. Allen of Pueblo West, Colo., didn’t make his entry with a brush or a lump of clay. He created it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns lines of […]
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For Black Artists, the Great Migration Is an Unfinished Journey
JACKSON, Miss. — Midday, midweek, in mid-90 degrees midsummer, the streets of a downtown historic district of this Southern capital are all but empty. They’re like a film set, perfect in period detail but past-use and abandoned. A patch of sidewalk embedded with the mosaicked words “Bon-Ton Café” marks the spot of what was, a […]
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Tiona Nekkia McClodden Is Not Running Away
PHILADELPHIA — The artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden hit the gun range on a sweltering Monday in July. The air was sticky inside the facility, but her routine would not be denied. She shoots every week and avoids weekends, when the range gets crowded and loud with men firing off assault-type rifles, inviting sensory overload. It […]
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