Quiet Moonlight is Sun Wang’s debut solo exhibition featuring paintings with dynamic storyboards and disorienting vignettes which address social-economic as well as cultural struggles and themes, including religion, mythology, war and the rise and fall of regimes across countries. His goal is to create polyphonic narratives through images and brushstrokes without using a single authoritative voice. In 2020, Wang was selected as a recipient of the 20/20 Emerging Artists Fellowship, celebrating artists at a critical point in their career.
He uses the storyboard to explore multiplicity to examine cultural exchanges between the East and the West, especially in the post-industrial world where technology and media narratives influence the cultural communication between Eastern and Western cultures. By using a time-space transition between the grids, Wang seeks to frame historical figures and events within a post-global context, connecting myths and contemporary events with history to ex
Farther Afield: Art the Old-Fashioned Way Brian Allen
Photograph courtesy of the Florence Academy of Art.
I’ve been intrigued by the Florence Academy of Art in Italy for years. It’s a small, prestigious art school that revived the kind of education Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and George de Forest Brush had, as well as hundreds of other Americans who studied in Paris in the late nineteenth century. It’s an atelier and draws on teaching principles once used in the best French art schools but also by the Old Masters. I visited in September. There are 130 students from thirty-five countries occupying what was once an old customs house a short walk from the Arno River and the historical center of Florence. This year is its thirtieth anniversary.
Finding Your Soulmate, the Ancient Greek Way
February 14, 2021
“Psyche revived by the kiss of Love,” by Antonio Canova, 1787-1793. Credit: Jean-Pol Grandmont/ CC BY-SA 4.0
By Firmin DeBrabander, Professor of Philosophy, Maryland Institute College of Art
In the beginning, humans were androgynous. So says Aristophanes in his fantastical account of the origins of love in Plato’s Symposium.
Not only did early humans have both sets of sexual organs, Aristophanes reports, but they were outfitted with two faces, four hands, and four legs. These monstrosities were very fast – moving by way of cartwheels – and they were also quite powerful. So powerful, in fact, that the gods were nervous for their dominion.
Is privacy really worth saving?
Firmin Debrabander
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Is privacy overrated?
The question might seem daft, given how gravely privacy is endangered in our digital age. Spies in government and the private sector routinely devour data for insights into our behavior, insights that may be used to manipulate our behavior. And privacy’s advocates contend that freedom and democracy are unthinkable without it. As philosopher Michael Lynch puts it, privacy affords us control over our thoughts and feelings, which is a “necessary condition for being in a position to make autonomous decisions, for our ability to determine who and what we are as persons.”