Indigenous Peoples Heritage Month I
The actual title is “National Native American Heritage Month.” There are so many outstanding examples of the artistic contributions First Nations cultures have made to the history of this ...
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Curator’s Corner
Hispanic Heritage Month: Maya Culture
For today’s Hispanic Heritage Month post, let’s look at the Maya culture. The early Pre-Classic Mayans occupied Chiapas in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala until between 400 and 50 BCE, whe ...
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Curator’s Corner
Hispanic Heritage Month: Zapotec
We’re going to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15th through October 15th) with a blog series featuring art gems from a variety of cultures in Mexico. The cultures of ancient Me ...
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Curator’s Corner
A Winter Bench
Dutch artists have been innovators in design since forever. Artists of the De Stijl movement of the early 1900s are standouts in this category. The works of that movement characteristically feature de ...
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Curator’s Corner
A Meal and a Plate for It
This week, I’m going to recognize Thanksgiving with works of art, rather than odes to a holiday that has evolved from “giving thanks for blessings” to gluttony and narcissism (gee, n ...
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Curator’s Corner
Porcelain in the West
What do you think of when I say “porcelain”? “American” is probably not the first word that springs to mind when paired with “porcelain.” We all know that China dev ...
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Curator’s Corner
Some Flourish While Others Decline
It drives me absolutely nuts as an art historian the way Western art history textbooks treat Mesoamerican and South American cultures in a peripheral way, yet fawn all over ancient Greece and ancient ...
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Curator’s Corner
Not an Easter Egg
On our planet, the egg has been almost universally viewed as a symbol of rebirth and fertility since ancient times (imagine ancient eyes seeing something living come out of something hard and apparent ...
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Curator’s Corner
Vietnam, part 2
Yesterday I told you about the Champa kingdom that flourished in Vietnam. For the second post in my series on Vietnamese art, I will introduce you to the development of ceramics in Vietnam. ...
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