Art and Museums

Whether as warming layers that comfort us during sleep, decorative furnishings on our walls and floors that enhance our waking hours, or shields providing protection from the elements or evil spirits, textiles are present throughout all moments of our lives.  more »

Val Castronovo writes: A tribute to art and a tribute to science, the elaborate gilded works on display date from the early 16th to the 19th century. Their provenance: England, France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. They were valued as much for their artistry and craft as for their functionality. They signified a person’s wealth and taste. Napoleon, Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the daughters of Louis XV were just some of the many rich and famous people who coveted them. more »

We admit, with all apologies, this NYC exhibit that closed earlier this month, but hope to make it up by some history and images:   The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (MFIT) preseneds Shoe Obsession, an exhibition that examined our cult… more »

Some of the most striking surrealist drawings were exquisite corpses, a game that involved collaboration and chance. In the game — the name of which derives from a sentence created when the surrealists first used the process to write poetry: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine — each participant made a drawing on a section of a folded sheet of paper without seeing the others’ drawings. The resulting hybrid creatures generated by the game influenced surrealist imagery, reappearing in artists’ individual works. more »