It turns out that we Homo sapiens are not the only species to explore art and its abstractions.
Author Archives: Lydia Pyne
Lydia Pyne is a writer and historian in Austin, TX, interested in the history of science and material culture. She is the author of Bookshelf (Bloomsbury 2016), Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils (Viking, 2016), and Genuine Fakes: What Phony Things Tell Us About Real Stuff (Bloomsbury, 2019). (Website http://pynecone.org Twitter @LydiaPyne)
Diedrick Brackens Explores the Warps and Wefts of Black and Queer Histories
In darling divined, Brackens teases out the symbolism, allegory, and parable long associated with global cosmologies of tapestry weaving.
A Pocket Guide to Women Artists Overlooked by History
Concise, pithy, and accessible, Susie Hodge’s The Short Story of Women Artists introduces readers to artists forgotten and obscured, many of whom are now rightly being reassessed.
Eileen Gray, an Architect Ahead of Her Time, Reclaims the Spotlight
By every measure, Eileen Gray ought to be as well-known as her Modernist male contemporaries. An exhibition at Bard’s Graduate Center offers a smart correction to the historical record.
Conserving the Art and Legacy of Spain’s First Recorded Female Artist
Once the official sculptor in the court of the last Habsburg king, Luisa Roldán is easily the most famous sculptor you’ve never heard of.
Interactive Installations Prod Visitors Out of Their Comfort Zones
speechless: different by design is unrelenting in its demands that visitors interact with the exhibitions.
Belated Acclaim for Dorothy Hood’s Surreal Abstractions
The exhibition Illuminated Earth asks audiences to consider not only Hood’s dynamic and commanding murals as the thought-provoking pieces they are, but also how artistic legacies are made and remade over time.
In Maria Antelman’s Work, Technology Is More Than Just a Tool
One of the most evincing themes in Mechanisms of Affection is how easy it is for computers, digital spaces, and technology writ large to be anthropomorphized.
Subverting the Whiteness of Antiquity
Lily Cox-Richard questions — and successfully subverts — a long-held association between the aesthetic qualities of classical sculptures with physical whiteness.
Mapping Non-European Visions of the World
Maps drawn by Indigenous artists at the behest of the Spanish in the 16th century illustrate the amalgamation of visual traditions during the early years of contact between Indigenous groups and colonizers.
The Proliferation and Politics of Copies During the Renaissance
Copies, Fakes, and Reproductions challenges viewers’ assumptions that “copies” must be “fakes” and therefore “bad.”
Dismantling the Narrative of Soviet Socialist Realism Versus American Abstract Expressionism
A new book injects nuance into reductive historical interpretations of how the Cold War affected global art in the second half of the 20th century.