Maya Lin is a contemporary Asian-American artist and architect best known for her powerful
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C. Incorporating both industrial materials and altercations to the landscape, Lin’s work balances emotional resonance and scientific precision. “I feel I exist on the boundaries. Somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west,” she has explained. “I am always trying to find a balance between those opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet.” Born on October 5, 1959 in Athens, OH to Chinese immigrants who had fled their country a decade earlier. During high school, Lin attended art classes at Ohio University where she learned bronze casting. While an undergraduate at Yale University, Lin was selected by the committee of the Veteran’s Memorial Fund out of over 1,400 anonymous entries, to design a monument for those who had died or went missing in the Vietnam War. Her selection
Karl Wirsum
The Chicago-born artist Karl Wirsum, a member of the legendary Hairy Who art group, died on 6 May, aged 81. Spending most of his career in the Windy City, Wirsum became a beloved artist and professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, as evidenced by the outpouring of appreciation on social media from scores of former students and fans. “Karl was an artist of major consequence,” says James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “His visionary, imaginative, utterly original take on figuration both epitomized a Chicago school and registered in a national and international consciousness.”
The Newark Museum is putting Thomas Cole s The Arch of Nero (1846) on the auction block at Sotheby s, carrying an estimate of $500,000-$700,000
An open letter signed by more than 50 art historians, curators and researchers was submitted today to the Newark Museum of Art protesting its plan to sell works from its collection, most prominently Thomas Cole’s 1846 painting
The Arch of Nero, organisers say.
The letter, addressed to Linda Harrison, director and chief executive of the museum, denounces the sales, known as deaccessioning, as a “senseless monetisation” of the art. Among the works being offered by the institution are examples by Albert Bierstadt, Mary Cassatt, Burgoyne Diller, Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Thomas Moran, Georgia O Keeffe, Frederic Remington and Charles Sheeler.
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Maybe the word most associated with Georgia O’Keeffe is “vagina,” but it could just as easily be “cash.” Sold in 2014 for $44.4 million, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting by a woman. A single white trumpet flower, cropped so close against an emerald tumult as to seem almost like a periscope peering out of a sea, it now hangs in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas. A companion piece, less expensive, less vaginal, belongs to the Indianapolis Museum of Modern Art, about twenty minutes from where I grew up, in a suburb where fathers presented their daughters with promise rings.