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Native Americans Pick Art to Display in Traveling Exhibition

Art institutions in the United States are increasingly looking to Native American communities to organize public showings, or exhibitions, of ancestral art and artifacts.

Native American voices and artistry are at the center of one new traveling exhibition. Grounded in Clay opened on July 31 at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. It travels next year to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, before taking more stops at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Grounded in Clay explores pottery from the Pueblo Indian area of the American Southwest.

In Pueblo pottery traditions, artists use their hands to form clay into many shapes and sizes. Then they fire it inside a very hot stove called a kiln. The process permanently hardens the clay.

60 Native American artists, museum professionals, storytellers and political leaders worked together to develop the public showing.

Emerge Gallery to hold Student Art Exhibition

On Friday, the Emerge Gallery and Art Center will showcase its annual Pitt County Schools from K-12 Student Art Exhibition. The exhibition lasts until August 25.

The exhibition will display various talents in artwork made by students from Pitt County schools, from elementary through high school. The exhibition will be part of Uptown Greenville’s First Friday Artwork.

The event will be held at 404 South Evans Street in Greenville.

How Web3 is changing the art world

Artists commissioned for a "phygital" exhibition at Friends with Benefits' inaugural festival reflect on the decentralized future of digital art.

Inspired by the unrest, upheaval, and call to community defining 2020, Friends with Benefits founder Trevor McFedries started assembling a digital collective of collaborators that now includes members like Erykah Badu, Azealia Banks and David Rudnick. “DAOs are a model very inspired by co-ops and collectives that pre-date the web3 era,” says Lindsay Howard, their Head of Brand. “We call ourselves a social DAO because we’re not just about financial returns or speculation — we’re focused on merging culture and crypto. Our members range from business owners to designers to artists to basketball players, and we’re really interested in facilitating relationships between technologists and cultural creators. Putting artists and technologists in a room together is going to strengthen their work, and double both of their capacities and contributions.”

Mesmerizing works reflect impact of music, pandemic and politics

As COVID-19 was raging, artist Julia Hamilton devised a plan to honor the (at the time) some 400,000 victims of the pandemic.

She created a large, three-panel abstract painting in shades of blue with 400,000 pinpoint dots — “each signifying a lost soul.” And yes, she devised an ingenious plan involving a spread sheet and dried pasta to keep track of the dots.

As she painted a certain number of dots, she would transfer one piece of dried pasta out of a bowl, keeping track of when she reached 400 dots by when the pasta bowl was empty. Then on to another square and another bowl of pasta until all 400,000 dots had been painted.

The result is a mesmerizing, curiously lovely painting that looks like a seascape or an outer space scene, textured with all those tiny dots.

Art exhibition aims to fight breastfeeding stigma

An art exhibition opens in Dublin tonight which aims to normalise images of breastfeeding.

Dr Afif El Khuffash, a neonatologist and lactation consultant at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, is also a visual artist and his latest exhibition, entitled 'Fighting the Breastfeeding Stigma through Art' features images of women breastfeeding their babies.

Dr El Khuffash says some mothers say they are still asked to breastfeed in private and what he wants to demonstrate is that breastfeeding a baby is natural and should be celebrated.

Ireland still has low rates of breastfeeding compared with other countries and as well as visibiity, Dr El Khuffash says mothers need lots of other supports, both from midwives in hospitals and in the community after they are discharged.

The exhibition also supports 'PumpPal', an organisation set up by Jan Lane Martin whose second child Caleb was diagnosed with heart problems by Dr El Khuffash at just two days old.

She then had to pump milk for her newborn and found she didn't have a lot of the equipment needed to do so.

When Caleb was discharged, she devised the 'PumpPal' kit to help other parents in her situation.

The kit includes snacks, a sleep mask and ear plugs, a freezer bag and equipment to clean the pump and is being made available in hospitals that care for sick and premature babies.

This exhibition opens at the Copper House Gallery in Dublin tonight and runs until next Thursday to coincide with World Breastfeeding Week.

Andy Warhol’s college paintings prove that you have to trust the process!

Before making it big as the face of pop art, Andy Warhol studied commercial art at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University), where he studied from 1945 to 1949. Throughout those years, he made several paintings that eventually fell into the hands of his relatives, after he moved to New York. Now, his remaining family members plan to sell these artworks at auction.

For fans of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreens and Campbell’s soup cans, these paintings may be borderline unrecognisable. One, Living Room (1947), is a still life in muted watercolours, with nods to his Catholic upbringing. Another, 1948’s Nose Picker 1 (the first in a series of nose-picking-themed paintings) is similarly murky, though it bears hints at his humorous side.

Brazilian police find stolen painting worth almost £50m under bed

A painting by one of Brazil’s most celebrated artists – the pioneering modernist Tarsila do Amaral – has been found stashed under the bed of an alleged trickster who was part of a multimillion pound art heist built around the bogus predictions of a phoney clairvoyant.

The artwork, worth an estimated 300m reais (£48m), was reportedly found in Rio on Wednesday morning during a police operation targeting a gang of con artists who had preyed on the elderly widow of an art dealer and collector.

Four people were arrested, including the victim’s own daughter whom police accuse of stealing 16 paintings, worth an estimated 709m reais (£114m) from her 82-year-old mother.

‘Motherhood’ exhibit features paintings celebrating Black mothers

AJ McCreary wears many hats. The former candidate for Portland City Council is the executive director of the nonprofit Equitable Giving Circle. She’s also an artist and a mother. McCreary curated a show called “Motherhood” at Oregon Contemporary that runs through Aug. 27. She calls it “a celebration of Black motherhood – the bright moments, the soft moments, the unique journey that is nurturing in a world that is inhospitable to our seed.” We hear from McCreary and Alice Price, another artist whose work is in the show.