Blogs

Curator's Corner

Gem of the Month: Seto Ware

Monday, June 30, 2025 | Karl Cole

Let’s welcome the coming month of July with a gorgeous example of ceramics from Japan. Japanese ceramics have an incredibly long history and tradition of excellence. This tradition dates back to ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Barbara Chase-Riboud

Thursday, June 26, 2025 | Karl Cole

The tradition of African American women sculptors goes all the way back to the 1800s with Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), continues through the Harlem Renaissance in the person of Augusta Savage (189 ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Juan Sánchez Cotán

Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | Karl Cole

Juan Sánchez Cotán was a Spanish Baroque painter who helped popularize the still life genre in Spanish Baroque painting. Spanish Renaissance and Baroque art were greatly influenced by th ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Ferdinand Bol

Tuesday, June 24, 2025 | Karl Cole

Ferdinand Bol was one of the outstanding history, portrait and still life painters to emerge from the studio of Rembrandt (1606–1669). In addition, he carried on the excellent development of the ...

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Curator's Corner

A Consummate Realist: Joseph Raffael

Monday, June 23, 2025 | Karl Cole

Photorealism was a style that evolved during the 1960s in reaction to the prevalence of total abstraction seen in Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, and Minimalism—movements that dominated tha ...

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Curator's Corner

National Pink Day: Art by CERN

Monday, June 23, 2025 | Karl Cole

Throughout the world, artists are making urban spaces, and just any drab blank building walls—interior and exterior—dynamic and full of positive energy with murals, i.e. street art. Street ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Jimmy Ernst

Friday, June 20, 2025 | Karl Cole

Jimmy Ernst was the son of pioneering German Surrealist artist Max Ernst. In the late 1940s he emerged as a major force in American Abstract Expressionism. ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: James M. Flagg

Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | Karl Cole

James Montgomery Flagg was an artist, illustrator, and comic book artist. He is perhaps best known for his poster designs for World War I (1914–1918) in which he created by far, the most iconic ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Francisco Oller y Cestero

Tuesday, June 17, 2025 | Karl Cole

Like many of the countries colonized by the Spanish during the 1400s and 1500s, Puerto Rico has had a rich artistic culture. Spanish culture overran the native Taino culture, and established an artist ...

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Davis Desk

10 Things Art Educators Should Do in the Summer

Monday, June 16, 2025 | Cindy Todd

During the school year, art educators spend so much time and energy on lesson planning and student projects that their own artistic practice and inspiration often fall by the wayside. For art educator ...

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Curator's Corner

Fiercely Independent: Ellen Day Hale

Monday, June 16, 2025 | Karl Cole

Out of nine children, Ellen Day Hale was the only daughter of the noted orator and author Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909). She came from a family filled with notable figures. Her great ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Raymond Pettibon

Monday, June 16, 2025 | Karl Cole

Art history is full of examples of the cultural preoccupation with the use of written language within the visual arts field—from illustrated scrolls of ancient Egypt to the Pop Art obsession wit ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Jost Amman

Friday, June 13, 2025 | Karl Cole

Like the German Renaissance, the Swiss Renaissance witnessed the flourishing of all the graphic arts, which included woodcut, engraving, etching, and drawing. One of the rich characteristics of German ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Anni Albers

Thursday, June 12, 2025 | Karl Cole

Anni Albers is notable as one of the class of Bauhaus fiber artists who helped elevate weaving and other fiber disciplines to the status of fine art in Western art. After moving to the United States, ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | Karl Cole

Nay, who was forbidden by the Nazis to paint or even buy art supplies after 1937, painted abstractions secretly in a French sculptor’s cellar while serving as a cartographer in the German army i ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Marion Post Wolcott

Tuesday, June 10, 2025 | Karl Cole

Starting in the middle of the 1800s, women were encouraged to pursue photography as an art form because it could be learned at home, and women would not have to risk seeing a nude model at art academi ...

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