Artists

Installation view of “The Anansean World of Robert Colescott,” curated by Umar Rashid, 2025, at Blum Los Angeles. Photo Josh Schaedel; ©The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy The Trust and BLUM Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York Robert Colescott’s most famous painting might just be George Washington …

Artist Umar Rashid on Curating a Robert Colescott Show for Blum LA Read More »

The world loves few things better than a controversy involving an artist. Such brouhahas are nothing new; Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (c. 1605–06), for instance, was rejected by the Church fathers who commissioned it for the chapel of Santa Maria Della Scala in Rome because of its brutally realistic depiction of Mary—for whom a …

The Most Controversial Artworks of the 21st Century So Far Read More »

Warburg Institute, London. From Renaissance Milanese court painter Bonifacio Bembo to the Surrealists and even contemporary artist Claire Tabouret (who painted her home’s ceiling with images from an early-20th-century tarot deck), tarot—a centuries-old set of 78 cards—wafts in and out of art history. Between 1979 and 1998, French avant-garde artist Niki de Saint Phalle built …

It’s in the Cards: An Exhibition at London’s Warburg Institute Offers a History of Tarot Read More »

Karyn Olivier in front of her work, Revelation, at Brochstein Pavilion, commissioned by the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. Photo Frank Hernandez Karyn Olivier’s work can often read as elusive. An expansive artist whose practice floats across various mediums, her works take many forms: a white column that rests on a historical …

Karyn Olivier’s Elusive Art Bears Witness to Hidden Histories Read More »

Britta Marakatt-Labba with her 2003–07 work Historjá. Photo Ina Wesenberg/©Britta Marakatt-Labba/BONO In most textbooks, history typically only moves forward, from past to present. But in Britta Marakatt-Labba’s 75-foot-long embroidery Historjá (2003–07), a piece that aspires to sum up the entirety of the Sámi experience, history is a continuum that starts and finishes in the same …

Britta Marakatt-Labba Is Bringing Sámi Culture to the Rest of the World Read More »

Photocollage by Daniela Hritcu. Native American artists, especially women, have only recently gained a spotlight within the mainstream art world. For centuries, Native art was siloed on reservations, at trading posts, and in Indian markets, with no dedicated Indigenous commercial galleries either in urban Indian centers like New York City, San Francisco, Tulsa, or Phoenix …

15 Native American Women Artists to Know Read More »

Citra Sasmita. Photo Gus Agung, Niskala Studio/Courtesy the artist In Citra Sasmita’s universe, naked women with long, flowing black hair are often engulfed in flames. Some sprout trees from their heads, their necks, or even their pelvises. Others metamorphose into snakes or birds. Still others wield swords and severed heads. Channeling creative and destructive energies, …

Citra Sasmita Rewrites Balinese Mythology Through a Feminist Lens Read More »

Walter Sickert, Ethel Sands Descending the Stairs at Newington , c. 1920 Collection of the Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK. Photo copyright © The Hepworth Wakefield/Bridgeman Images. The room comes into focus slowly. It’s an intimate space, with clothing strewn across a chair and a glimpse of a bed frame on the left side of …

Who Was Ethel Sands? Read More »

Photocollage by Daniela Hritcu When Salvator Mundi, a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, fetched $450 million at Christie’s in 2017, it became the most expensive artwork ever sold. While male artists, dead or alive, keep breaking records at auctions (Jeff Koons’s $58.4 million Balloon Dog sculpture in 2013, Claude Monet’s $65.5 million Nymphéas painting …

13 Women Artists Whose Works Have Broken the $1M Mark at Auction Read More »

Photocollage by Daniela Hritcu. From the first wave of feminism in the 1840s to second-wave feminism and the Feminist art movement of the 1960s and ’70s through the intersectional feminism of today, these 15 artworks by American women stand out for the lasting impact they’ve had on art history. Read more of our Women’s History …

15 Iconic Feminist Works by American Women Artists Read More »