Lingerie sales in 2020 surged as pandemic lockdowns saw online shoppers seek to escape the mundanity of sweatpants and spice up their sex lives. Such sales will likely increase ahead of Valentine’s Day, but the gift of intimate apparel is not a modern phenomenon.
In 17th and 18th-century England and France, intimate objects were also gifted during courtship or amorous liaisons as tokens of romantic intention and sexual desire.
The “busk”, a long piece of wood, metal or whalebone, was placed into a stitched channel between layers of fabric in the front of corset bodices or stays.
And garters more of a novelty item today were strips of fabric or ribbons tied around a woman’s lower thigh to keep her stocking in place.
Victoria Miro announces representation of Ali Banisadr
Ali Banisadr, The Prophet, 2020. Oil on Linen, 168 x 224 cm, 66 x 88 in.
LONDON
.-Victoria Miro announced the representation of Ali Banisadr. The Brooklyn-based artist, acclaimed for his urgent, ravishing paintings that deftly combine elements of figuration and abstraction within a signature language, will present new work as part of the gallerys forthcoming online group exhibition themed around the colour blue (from 24 February). A solo exhibition will take place at the gallery in 2022. The first major monograph on the artist is published by Rizzoli in May 2021.
A painter of epic vistas and dazzling intricacies, Ali Banisadr creates complex, turbulent worlds whose syncopated rhythms corral a multitude of references from art history as well as allusions to our own turbulent times. In any single, expansive canvas one might sense the crystalline detail of the Persian miniature tradition, the muscular brushwork of Abstract E
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Closed Nearly a Year, Empty Museums in Los Angeles Struggle
While many museums around the country have resumed operations, those in Los Angeles remain an exception. They have been shut since March.
Los Angeles museum-goers have to make do with the great outdoors, with indoor installations closed since last March. “Levitated Mass” at Resnick North Lawn at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is by Michael Heizer.Credit.Philip Cheung for The New York Times
Feb. 10, 2021
LOS ANGELES Fulton Leroy Washington (known as Mr. Wash), who began to paint while serving time for a nonviolent drug offense, was looking forward to being part of the Hammer Museum’s biennial his first museum show before the pandemic forced the doors closed a few months before the exhibition was to open. “I started having excitement build up,” Washington said. “Then disappointment set in.”
"Black Art: In the Absence of Light," the new documentary film from acclaimed director Sam Pollard that began streaming Tuesday on HBO, opens with a clip from a notorious 1976