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.
Art
While searching for Orion or the Great Dipper, it's easy to forget that these constellations are just the arbitrary imaginations of astronomers drawing with stars. While Ptolemy referred to mythology for the classic constellations, later stargazers turned to their own visual culture. Up in the heave
News
A New Jersey Frank Lloyd Wright house is relocating to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, through an acquisition announced this Wednesday.
News
China's destruction of some 6.1 tons of seized ivory earlier this month may have seemed like a small dent in a country where around 70% of the illegal trade is concentrated, but it was an encouraging sway in the right direction.
Art
Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was designed to look like the most foreboding of fortresses on the outside, and a cathedral-like place of reflection on the inside.
Opinion
Using spit and soot, artist James Castle communicated with the world. Castle, who was deaf, spent his life in Idaho, using art as his main outlet; he never signed, spoke, or wrote in any direct way.
Books
In photographer Elinor Carucci's new monograph Mother, she chronicles nine years of motherhood, from the tentative expectancy of pregnancy to the whir of raising children in the bustle of New York City.
News
Renderings released for the MoMA expansion, Castro makes an arts appearance, illegal ivory destroyed in China, groundhogs infest the Crystal Bridges green roof, and more from the week in art news.
Art
The museums of New York City sprung out of wealth and curiosity, but few of the turn-of-the-century boosters were quite so eccentric or prolific as Bashford Dean. The expert in both fish and armor — and armored fish — was the major proponent and collector behind the Arms and Armor Department at the
Art
Completed in 1883, the 26 plates Gustave Doré illustrated for Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" were actually not published until after his death on January 23 of that year.
News
Sometimes museums and archives don't know the treasures they already have, collecting dust on some forlorn shelf or hidden away in a forgotten box. Through mislabeling or earlier disorganization, great works of art and history are sometimes lost for years before being "discovered" right inside the m
Art
Victorian photography studios loved a good illusion, whether it was to accommodate the long exposure time, or play with it.
Art
"If I win, the tiger wins," photographer Steve Winter said at his talk earlier this week at the Explorers Club in New York. For two decades he's traced tigers through the forests of Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, and India, on a quest for images that would stop people in their tracks, to spend more t