Author: Eliza Norwood
Imagine a world where an artist is considered an essential worker. The government commissions murals and sculptures for schools, libraries, and hospitals. Taxes fund free classes in pottery and printmaking at a community art center. The president of the United States promotes art as vital to a healthy democracy. This world flickered into view between 1933 and 1943, a decade when the US government treated art as a public resource rather than a private luxury. The output was staggering: hundreds of thousands of artworks—murals, paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs—by then-unknown artists like Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Jacob…
THEY SHOOK ON IT. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York’s City Council have approved $323.8 million in funding for culture, reports Hyperallergic. That’s a record amount of yearly funding. Specifically, the $323.8 million will go to the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), representing a seven percent increase over last year’s $299.6 million and more than $100 million more than the City Council initially proposed. In a statement, Mamdani said the budget was part of his mission to make life more affordable for New York artists. “A crushing affordability crisis has threatened to drive out the very artists who have long defined…
Art Gallery of Ontario deputy director and chief curator Julian Cox will leave his post this April after eight years in the role, marking the latest departure at the Toronto museum since it became embroiled in a controversy over a failed plan to acquire a work by Nan Goldin. It was not clear whether Cox’s departure was in any way related to the Goldin controversy, which stemmed from a decision not to add a recent work to the collection following her comments on Israel’s war in Gaza. According to a Globe and Mail report, internal communications from the museum’s director, Stephan Jost, said that certain members of…
Herbert Lust, a major collector of modern and contemporary art who befriended Alberto Giacometti, Robert Indiana, and other artists, died on May 12 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York Times reports. He was 99. Lust often described his life in the art world as something of an “accident.” On multiple occasions, he recounted how in 1949, while on a Fulbright scholarship to study literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, he ended up at a luncheon sitting next to Giacometti. Intimidated by the crowd, the then-22-year-old invented what he called “a cock-and-bull story” of his origins: that he was a…
Fragments of an equestrian statue of King George III, which loomed over Bowling Green in New York City until it was toppled in 1776, open “Democracy Matters,” the inaugural exhibition in the new Tang Wing for American Democracy at the New York Historical. Most of the statue was melted down and reformed into musket balls, and several of these are on display in the opening section of the show across from four large intact pieces of the original. These are framed by an animation of silhouetted figures gathering around the statue in protest, lassoing it with a rope, and then…
Tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry when it goes on view at the British Museum this fall sold out in just over 24 hours this week, reports the Telegraph. The museum said it was the biggest day of ticket sales in its history. Depicting the Norman conquest of England 1066 and made there in the 1070s, the Bayeux Tapestry (technically an embroidery) is an astonishing 230 feet long and, according to the British Museum, features 58 detailed scenes, each rendered in colored wool on flax. On loan from the Bayeux Museum in Normandy, it will be displayed at the British Museum from September 10, 2026,…