Category: visual

The Chapel of the Good Shepherd, as the Nevelson Chapel is formally named, dates from 1977 and is part of St. Peter’s Church, a Lutheran parish known for its modernist sanctuary and weekly Jazz Vespers, located in the basement of a midtown Manhattan office tower. – Artnet

While taking a routine inventory of the Belgian capital’s public art, researchers from the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage determined that a work on display at Saint-Gilles City Hall, long believed to be a copy, is actually the oldest known original version of 17th-century artist Jacob Jordaens’s The Holy Family. – Smithsonian Magazine

Maybe Hawkins should have asked more questions, he thinks now. Why did “Comte” need the mural painted so quickly? Why over Thanksgiving weekend? And why was he offering so much money? – Artnet

“[Princeton undergraduate Alice] Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

A consensus has been building over the past few years that statues, ceremonial objects, and other items taken from Africa during the colonial period should be given back — but few items have actually been transferred so far, largely due to European laws on museum deaccessions. Naomi Rea reports on why, next year, the logjam may finally break. – Artnet

“We don’t build them much anymore, but Americans invented, perfected and exported this unique building style to the world (where it continues to prosper). Birthed in brash excess, atrium hotels were first seen as too gaudy by the modernist architectural establishment and as too profligate by penny-pinching chain hoteliers. To varying observers, they suggest everything from Disney to dystopia. But in their heyday, these buildings promised — and delivered — a spectacle like no other.” – Bloomberg

“Joshua Hawkins said a man named “Nate” hired him last month to paint a mural on his building and offered Hawkins more than he was asking to do it. Hawkins said he met that man twice, first when the man dropped off paint and the first half of the payment, and again when the man brought the final payment before the piece was finished.” – Central Illinois Proud

Peggy McGlone and Sebastian Smee report on how director Christopher Bedford’s plan to raise $65 million to fund diversity-equity-and-inclusion projects by selling paintings by Andy Warhol, Brice Marden and Clyfford Still was conceived, approved, attacked, and withdrawn. “There’s one thing the Baltimore episode made clear: Even the most noble of causes, including paying the mostly minority guards a living wage and improving access for the community, can’t be funded by monetizing the collection.” – The Washington Post

“An anonymous collective called The Most Famous Artist says it was behind … the original steel stele in Utah as well as the replica that popped up in Atascadero, California, before being swiftly dismantled by a band of Christian zealots. And now — as if there were any doubt as to where this was headed — the collective is selling facsimiles for the low, low price of $45,000.” – Artnet

David Lew, aka Shark Toof, created a piece for the Chinese American Museum in 2018. “Eighty-eight empty canvas sacks were adorned with hand-applied gold leaf paint and suspended on burlap twine with wooden clothespins. It was meant to evoke the history of Chinese immigrants in the laundry business.” Maintenance workers took them down and threw them away. – Los Angeles Times