Art
Civil War Portraits of the Broken Bodies Sent Home
On the National Museum of Health and Medicine's Flickr, portraits of wounded Civil War soldiers show the grim resilience, military pride, and shocked resignation in their faces.
Allison Meier
Allison C. Meier is a former staff writer for Hyperallergic. Originally from Oklahoma, she has been covering visual culture and overlooked history for print and online media since 2006. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
Books
Lunar Mountains and Divine Spheres: 1,000 Years of Illustrating Outer Space
In a new book called Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, published this month by Abrams, Michael Benson examines over a thousand years of mapping the great beyond.
Art
Ann Hamilton's Distorted Scans of Natural History
Tails, feathers, claws, paws, and slender toes peak out from blurred scans of natural history specimens included in Ann Hamilton's new exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.
Art
Rare Portraits of Kings and Commoners from 20th-Century Nigeria
For over five decades Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge photographed the royal court and everyday life of Benin, Nigeria. Drawing on their collection of over 2,000 glass plate and large format film negatives, as well as around 100 prints, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art is exhibiting some o
Art
Natural History Watercolors by a 19th-Century Convict
In the most hellish penal colony of Tasmania, a convict named William Buelow Gould painted beautiful watercolors of the sea creatures that washed up on the shores.
Books
Cats, Cans, and More Curiosities from Toy Camera History
The colorful history of toy cameras, those affordable film cameras in plastic boxes, is being celebrated in a new book.
Art
Time for Death: Skeleton Alarm Clock Goes on Display in London
Would you like to wake from dreams with a reminder of your inevitable eternal sleep? An alarm clock currently on view at the British Library in London, which is part of the Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination exhibition, is a curious continuation of the memento mori tradition.
Art
Matisse's "Swimming Pool" Goes on View for the First Time in Two Decades
When Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs opened this past Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the artist's only site-specific cut-out piece went on public view for the first time in over 20 years.
Art
Two Time Capsules Opened After More Than a Century
The two oldest known and unopened time capsules were unsealed last week, one in New York and the other in Boston.
Art
An Edward Snowden Statue, Slow Dancing with Strangers, and More Art in Odd Places
This year, Art in Odd Places (AiOP) considered value, public space, and freedom along 14th Street, from the Avenue C Con Edison station to the High Line, even dipping into the Hudson River.
Art
An Anti-Zen Garden Full of Skulls and More Unearthly Unease
The beauty and hell of utopia and dystopia is the subject of Japan Society's Garden of Unearthly Delights, which opened today in Manhattan.
News
These Indonesian Cave Paintings May Overturn Eurocentric Art History
New dating of rock art in Indonesia shows that at the same time stampedes of bulls and horses were appearing in the Ardèche caves in France, similar art was being made in the Pacific region.