Dec 04 2025
Robert Singletary could turn weather into a subject all its own. Snow falls so thickly that the landscape nearly vanishes. Fog dissolves the boundary between water and sky. Rain, clouds, moonlight, and darkness transform familiar stretches of the Chesapeake Bay into places that seem suspended between observation and memory. Born in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1945, …
Dec 03 2025
Kenneth McGowan photographed places where reality was supposed to look artificial and artificial things were designed to pass for reality. Movie sets, fake trees, masks, studio backlots, amusement attractions, stuffed Pink Panthers, and fragments of Hollywood spectacle became subjects for a photographer fascinated by the visual strangeness of Southern California. Born in Ogden, Utah, in …
Nov 30 2025
You can hear Bob Moore on some of the most recognizable recordings ever made in Nashville, even if you have never heard his name. His upright bass anchors Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” Elvis Presley’s “It’s Now or Never,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and an extraordinary …
Nov 29 2025
Robert D’Alessandro found one of his most enduring subjects almost everywhere he looked: hanging from houses, painted across clothing, attached to cars, displayed outside businesses, carried by individuals, and woven into the visual fabric of American life. The subject was the American flag, a symbol so familiar that it could easily disappear into the background …
Nov 28 2025
Evald Okas seemed unwilling to settle into a single way of making art. He painted portraits, nudes, city scenes, industrial landscapes, historical compositions, and monumental murals. He worked in etching, drypoint, lithography, book illustration, and ex libris design. He traveled whenever circumstances allowed, filling his work with impressions of Paris, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and …
Nov 25 2025
Dawoud Bey has spent more than five decades asking deceptively simple questions about photography. Who gets pictured? Who gets to control the way they are seen? What happens when a camera treats an ordinary person with the same seriousness traditionally reserved for celebrities, politicians, and historical figures? And can a photograph make a history visible …
Nov 24 2025
Eduard Ole’s long career moved through nearly every major transformation experienced by Estonian art in the 20th century. In the 1920s, he helped introduce the sharp geometry and experimental spirit of European Cubism to the newly independent country. A few years later, his paintings softened into the elegant figures, subdued colors, and streamlined sophistication associated …
Nov 23 2025
Few composers could suggest an entire landscape with as little musical material as Manuel de Falla. A distant rhythm, a repeated piano figure, the snap of percussion, a melody bending unexpectedly around a note, or a brief flash of orchestral color can suddenly evoke a garden at night, a flamenco dancer, an Andalusian village, or …
Nov 22 2025
Miguel Covarrubias seemed capable of turning almost anything he encountered into a new field of study. In 1920s New York, he became one of the Jazz Age’s most celebrated caricaturists and drew dancers, writers, actors, musicians, politicians, and the nightlife of Harlem. In Bali, he moved beyond travel sketching to study dance, religion, ritual, costume, …
Nov 19 2025
For roughly two decades, Esta Nesbitt worked inside the polished world of American fashion illustration. Her drawings appeared in publications including Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and The New York Times Magazine, where elegance, line, clothing, and the idealized human figure were central to the job. Then, during the 1960s, she began moving in an entirely different …
