How do we get each other to see what they don’t want to? How can we talk about growing wealth disparities, the climate crisis, and the inevitable fall of humanity in a way that doesn’t paralyze us? To these artists, the answer is humor. Lea Devon Sorrentino and Natalie Hijinx, both members of Vox Populi in Philadelphia, opened two solo exhibits this April featuring interactive, multimedia installations. Sorrentino’s exhibit Remote Work and Hijinx’ HITBOX use humor and absurdity to expose the underlying structures that shape our current and future realities. Remote Work was born from a realizat ..read more

Emanuel Gollob’s Doing Nothing with AI was selected to be part of FUTURES, the inaugural exhibition at the Smithsonian Arts and Industry Building, which reopened last fall after more than twenty years undergoing repairs. The exhibition invites visitors to look optimistically toward the future, providing a space for imagination and rehearsal where inclusiveness and sustainability are at the forefront of innovation. It tests the potential benefits of technology outside the monopoly of a few individuals and corporations, and as a form of worldbuilding integrated within multiple fields and sources ..read more

One of the irrefutable bestsellers of art history is Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950). The book is a survey of the history of art from ancient times to modernity. It remains critically acclaimed after almost 70 years because it provides a singular explanation for the entire flow of art history.  In other words, Gombrich appears to provide one common theory that constitutes the backbone of why artistic style transitions from one to another. The author essentially argues that art history has always been an alternation between ‘art that attempts to represent the truth beyond the real ..read more

As I was packing for my trip from Istanbul to Philadelphia this January, my mother and I found ourselves staring at the bulky luggage that was essentially filled with thick, heavy books, which, ironically, was a situation I had been trying to avoid.  I was very motivated by this ambition of becoming a “paperless” student — I would ditch all those heavy textbooks and unindexed notebooks in favor of my iPad that I could carry anywhere. I turned this premise of not having to carry around books or journals into a source of pride, as I procrastinated while watching all the YouTube videos about ..read more

What if I told you that anyone could be an artist? Now, it doesn’t require years of art school or even the most primitive painting supplies, just some compiling computer code and the ability to describe what you want illustrated. In April 2022, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI revealed DALL-E 2, the second-generation successor to DALL-E: an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a language description. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman with a mission of creating artificial intelligence that imparts a positive long-term impact on human ..read more

The new Barnes exhibition uses innovative conservation efforts to reveal Modigliani’s unique artistry and behind-the-canvas decisions. The much-celebrated Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), with his famous “long-face” style of sculptures and paintings of subjects with elongated faces and necks has had his artistry discussed and examined through many exhibitions and publications. As many leading international museums and foundations attempted to bring together his work, a new group of scholars have been coming up with innovative methods to better understand and convey M ..read more

We often think of Resilience as toughness: the ability to overcome, to persevere, to recover from difficulties. Our challenges are to be conquered and left behind. It’s the ability to not let our stories and our setbacks define us. In actuality, this definition is incomplete. Resilience is not simply overcoming; this idea of challenges as something that we simply “get through” in a linear projection neglects the very forces that make us who we are: memory, change, and the ability to adapt. Our traumas shape our routines, belief systems, and the way we relate to one another. 2020 was a year of ..read more

Disorienting: that’s what it was like to hear early reports of Russian troops stationed on Ukrainian borders in mid-January. I was 13 when Euromaidan started, when my parents first explained Donbas and my teachers began asking me about Crimea — honestly, I didn’t know what to say then. Watching this wave of news happen again today prompted my search for a person whose work felt… Ukrainian. I came to find Manuel Herz’s Babyn Yar Synagogue, a project that captures the overwhelming intensity of death, of fear, of the Holocaust, of Ukraine, of religion and ritual and sacrifice and memory. The stor ..read more