Books
A Mysterious 17th-Century Artist Who Saw Visions in Firewood's Rings
In What Heaven Looks Like art historian James Elkins imagines the artist behind a series of 17th-century visions painted from the ends of firewood logs.
Allison Meier
History
UC Berkeley Uses Optical Scanning to Recover Indigenous Voices from Wax Cylinders
Among the wax cylinders in UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology are songs and spoken-word recordings in 78 indigenous languages of California.
Art
An Exhibition Turns a Tibetan Art Museum into a Musical Instrument
The World Is Sound at the Rubin Museum asks visitors to listen to Tibetan Buddhist art with their whole body.
History
What Sewing Samplers Tell Us About Women's Lives from the 17th to 19th Centuries
A sewing sampler can be the only trace of a 17th- to 19th-century woman's existence, and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge is recovering this lost history through over 100 examples.
Art
Images from Boston’s Island of Exile
Mark Lamster's The Island That Nobody Knows explores Boston's Deer Island, a former prison and quarantine site that now houses the city's sewage plant.
Performance
A New Opera Tells the Story of a Paleoart Pioneer Through His Granddaughter's Eyes
On Site Opera's Rhoda and the Fossil Hunt in the dinosaur hall of the American Museum of Natural History explores the paleoart of Charles Knight.
Art
The Smithsonian Conserves Blood Pools and Charred Skeletons from 1940s Crime Dioramas
For the first time all 19 surviving Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are going on public view, with an exhibition opening in October at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.
Art
A Project on the Arctic's Vanishing Ice Launches with an Olafur Eliasson Talk
The Arctic Imagination project is a collaboration between six international libraries that draws attention to the Arctic's disappearing ice.
Art
Watch Alexander Calder's Kinetic Sculptures in Rarely Activated Motion
Watch Alexander Calder's kinetic sculptures in rare activations through videos shared by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
History
The First Printed Illustration of a Modern Dissection
Published in the late 15th century, the Fasciculus Medicinae contains the earliest depiction of a modern dissection, a groundbreaking representation for anatomy.
Art
Drive a Hand-Drawn Tram for Cats in This Illustrated Game
Artist Alexander Perrin's Short Trip is a hand-drawn interactive game in which players drive a trolley for cats.
Art
You're a Medici. Can You Support the Renaissance's Best Artists, or Will You Be Exiled?
ARTé: Mecenas from Triseum is a game on the economies of art, set in the tumultuous Italian Renaissance, in which you are a Medici patron.