Sotheby’s to Hold an All-Female Sale – Sotheby’s will mount an online sale of work by female artists, including Rachel Whiteread and Dorothea Tanning, from May 20 through 27. The 26-lot sale is expected to generate £1 million. The house’s Marina Ruiz Colomer articulated the (somewhat contradictory) rationale for the event as follows: “Female artists should not be pigeon-holed nor segregated, which is precisely why we are holding a sale that appears to be doing exactly that in order to turn the tables and open up this debate.” (
COMINGS & GOINGS
U.S. Returns 500 Smuggled Artifacts to Mexico – The U.S. department of homeland security has returned 523 objects, including pre-Hispanic-era stone arrowheads and tools, to Mexico. The pieces were originally seized in 2016 and, following investigation, were found to have been illegally smuggled and offered for sale in the U.S. (
Apr 17, 2021
The more cautious traveler will always have time to kill at an airport. Maybe they’ll peruse a few shops, look for a cafe or just vacantly stare at the flight information board. There’s usually not much else to do. Imagine their astonishment if they were to stumble across a huge contemporary artwork, one so unusual, it begs to be approached.
Yuri Suzuki and Miyu Hosoi’s new “Crowd Cloud” sound sculpture at Haneda Airport offers that element of surprise. A conceptual but playful work, the copse of tall golden and black trumpet horns dominates a corner of the domestic departure floor, inviting visitors to wander around it, lean in and listen to a chorus of soft, relaxing sounds. Step farther away and the notes dissipate into the white noise of its location.
The documentary
Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts opens with a quotation from Vincent van Gogh, suggesting that people often live unaware of the artists among them. That could be said about Bill Traylor (around 1853-1949), who was born a slave and made pictures in his 80s on the sidewalks of Montgomery, Alabama. The film-maker Jeffrey Wolf explores Traylor’s personal and often playful iconography of animals, people and farm tools, in a blend of choreographed forms, earthy spirituality and satire.
A parallel visual line in the film moves through Traylor’s life and land, with archival photographs and film footage, from the last years of slavery in central Alabama, into the Civil War, and eventually into the segregated Jim Crow South. Two on-screen narrators join members of Traylor’s family to bridge gaps where the documentation falls short, which is almost everywhere. The hybrid style fits a story of assembled fragments.
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In the Middle Ages, a grim adage sometimes turned up in European folklore and childrenâs stories:
Woe to that child which when kissed on the forehead tastes salty. He is bewitched and soon must die. A salty-headed newborn was a frightful sign of a mysterious illness. The witchcraft diagnosis didnât hold, of course, but today researchers think that the salty taste warned of the genetic disease we now know as cystic fibrosis.
Cystic fibrosis affects over 30,000 people in the United States, and over 70,000 globally. Mutations in the CFTR gene garble cellsâ blueprints for making protein tunnels for chloride ions. Chlorideâs negative charge attracts water, so without much chloride meandering into cells, the bodyâs mucus gets thicker and stickier, making breathing a struggle and often trapping dangerous bacteria in the lungs. It also disrupts digestive enzymes from traveling out of the pancreas and into the gut, causing inflammation and malnutrition.