Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c.1484–86) is one of the most popular emblematic paintings of the Renaissance period. The Birth of Venus (c.1484–86) follows the long tradition of Velazquez, Rubens, Titian, and even Praxiteles of portraying the goddess Venus, also known as Aphrodite according to Greek mythology. This tempera on canvas painting was inspired by the poem Stanze per la Giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici. This poem was written between 1475–1478 by the Florentine Renaissance poet, Angelo Poliziano, who was additionally known for being a good friend of Lorenzo di Medici. Several factors have contributed to the popularity…

Earlier this year, from April 19 until October 27, 2019, the Solom R. Guggenheim Museum’s Samuel J. and Ethel Lefrak Gallery hosted Loophole of Retreat, an exhibition by the winner of the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago). Loophole of Retreat consisted of four sculptures that actively challenged hegemonic ideas of the black body through the usage of traditional elements from artifacts and other artistic manifestations of West Africa and the African diaspora. …

From the 1930s until the 1950s, several members of the African diaspora turned to Aimé Césairé’s Négritude movement in order to decolonize Black contributions in the Western world. Among those interested in the idea of Négritude was Wifredo Lam (1902–1982), an Afro-Cuban painter. After Lam met Césairé in 1941, he became fascinated by the need for the African diaspora to reclaim the original African meaning in Cubism — a meaning that Cubism actively ignored by appropriating African figures as trivial and primitivist adornments. Around this time, Lam moved to Cuba to create paintings that would move him “closer to his…

During this international symposium, The Restitution Debate: African Art in a Global Society, I had the opportunity of listening to Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy reflect on their report, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics. After they presented their report on November 2018, I actually wrote an article responding to it so this opportunity of being able to be in the same room listening to these two authors provide updated feedback on this same report, was a pretty surreal experience.

My biggest takeaways came from Felwine Sarr’s and Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi’s presentations. What I liked…

Acclaimed Russian-American art professor and scholar H.W. Janson wrote “not every beholder responds to the works of this withdrawn, introspective artist. For those who do, the experience is akin to a trance-like rapture” [1]. However, Rothko’s №16 (Red, Brown, and Black) (1958) challenges this claim by successfully inciting an affective response through use of common symbols that are able to transmit certain feelings. This ideology suggests that Rothko’s №16effectively uses color and texture to depict variations of the same shape in order to inflict powerful impressions, like a sense of unbalance and tension. …

Voluspa Jarpa (b. 1971), a contemporary Chilean painter and visual artist famous for targeting issues with gender, race, identity politics, and colonialism; will have the honor of representing the Chilean pavilion at the fifty-eight Venice Biennale from May 11, 2019 until November 24, 2019. Growing up between Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile, being part of Chile’s creative scene during the artistic revival 1990s, and being one of the first generation of Chileans who were able to study under a democracy following Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990), Jarpa’s art has always had a connection with history, time, and issues of identity.

In…

Since its first group show in 2017, STATE Festival, the autonomous artist AICAN, the Artificial Intelligence Creative Adversarial Network, has revolutionized the way that technological advances influence the way art is made. This can be seen in AICAN’s first solo exhibition, Faceless Portraits Transcending Time, at New York’s HG Contemporary gallery. In this, the viewer observes twenty-one prints in canvas that use creative adversarial network (CAN) algorithm to reinforce how the value of contemporary art depends more on the ideas behind them, rather than on the artist’s mechanical skills and production process.

AICAN was developed by Professor Ahmed Elgammal, the…

In the past four decades, Joan Semmel (b. 1932) has created a place for herself in the feminist art scene with her reinvention of the female nude in paintings. Her latest exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, A Necessary Elaboration, shows nine nude oil on canvas self- portraits of Semmel’s own body through a combination of abstract brushstrokes and a vibrant color palette.

A Necessary Elaboration explores Semmel’s liberated depiction of the female nude by showing the artist’s body as an instrument of sexuality that transcends age and the inevitable physical manifestations of age. Semmel’s focus on using her paintings to…