National Iris Day: Muhammad Zaman
The iris is a beautiful flower that was first planted in the United States in Virginia in the 1600s. The flower started being commercially imported around 1869. The iris is the symbol for the city of ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Yamaguchi Katsuhiro
Katsuhiro Yamaguchi was a key figure in the transition to modernism in Japanese art after World War II (1939–1945). He incorporated his view of modernist experiment almost as a science into nume ...
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Curator's Corner
National Pet Day: Isoda Koryūsai
National Pet Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated on April 11. It was founded 2005/2006 by animal advocate and pet and family lifestyle expert Colleen Paige. The day is dedicated to all types of pe ...
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Curator's Corner
Artists with August Birthdays: Sakai Hōitsu and George Bellows
Monthly artists’ birthdays are a good way to introduce you to a variety of artists I actually adore, while contrasting art from vastly different cultures. I’m not going to call it “i ...
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Curator's Corner
Architecture as Sculpture: Hoysala Empire
When Western art history books talk about “architectural sculpture,” it is usually in the context of Romanesque and Gothic churches/cathedrals in Europe. When one is looking at temple arch ...
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Curator's Corner
Happy New Year: Japanese Surimono
Since I’m feeling lazy this week, I’m showing you Japanese New Year cards (surimono) again. I think they’re lovely, and who wouldn’t want to receive one of these color woodcut ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 11: Unknown Impressionists
Art in the 1800s brought us the terms Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism, covered in my New Slant on Art History. The second half of the century saw a major shift in how artists used art to portr ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 6: The 1600s
I think an alternate term for art of the 1600s is needed other than “Baroque.” Baroque is the established stylistic term for the period roughly 1600–1750 in Western art. The term com ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 5: 1400s/1500s II
Sometimes I wonder if, unfortunately, most Westerners only know about Korea in relation to that unfortunate war in the 1950s or because of contemporary politics in North Korea. This is yet anothe ...
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Curator's Corner
Survey No. 1: Ancient
When I was in grad school, I was a teaching assistant in an art history survey course that had the neatest syllabus at which I ever squinted at eight in the morning. It did not go chronologically thro ...
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