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The newly launched Spector Craft Prize has announced its inaugural winner: Sharif Bey, an artist and educator based in Syracuse, New York. The Spector Craft Prize was established last year by the Spector Family Foundation to “reinforce American craft as a vital and enduring art form while creating new pathways for artists at every stage of their careers,” according to a release. It is being awarded in collaboration with Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas. Curator and craft scholar Glenn Adamson served as an adviser on the prize. “It is encouraging that there is now a prestigious award dedicated to the impact of American craft, and I am honored to be [the] inaugural winner of the Spector Craft Prize,” Bey told ARTnews by email. “While contemporary craft is not always distinct from the evocative works we encounter in the world of contemporary art, innovative works grounded in material histories, as well as traditions of making and using objects, can ...

The group of eight preservation groups that currently have a lawsuit pending to prevent changes at the Kennedy Center without congressional approval have called for the institution’s leadership to step aside or for the court to take the drastic step of putting the cultural organization into receivership, citing the leadership’s fiduciary duty to steward the Center. The eight plaintiffs are the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, the DC Preservation League, the Docomomo US, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Cultural Landscape Foundation. (Their legal suit is separate from the one filed by Representative Joyce Beatty, who is a Kennedy Center trustee.) A press release announcing these plans characterized the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees as “fiduciaries, not owners.” In a joint statement, the plaintiffs...

Today, in honor of the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis of Assisi’s death, a new digital platform dedicated to the eponymous basilica was launched by Haltadefinizione, part of the Gruppo Panini Cultura, in collaboration with the General Custody of the Sacred Convent of Saint Francis. The platform, called Preserving Assisi , is free to access and digitally preserves the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi’s architecture, as well as its masterpieces by Giotto, Cimabue, Simone Martini, and Pietro Lorenzetti. It was created by a team of specialists who mapped the Basilica’s interior and exterior spaces and its major decorative schemes using ultra-high-resolution gigapixel photography and three-dimensional surveys. This allows users to virtually explore the Basilica, while also establishing a detailed record of its architecture, paintings, and state of conservation that will be used to support research, documentation, monitoring, and conservation over time a...

Above: The Petone Rec grandstand in its former glory. Credit: Petone Borough Council collection. By Touchline “Patrons of the Petone recreation ground are to be denied the use of the grandstand at the ground in future owing to the unsafe condition of the building,” declared the Dominion newspaper (forerunner of today’s “Post”), 89 years ago....

Lucy Bull, one of the most sought-after young painters, has joined Hauser & Wirth, a mega-gallery with 16 spaces spread across three continents. She will continue to be represented by the Los Angeles– and New York–based David Kordansky Gallery, which has shown her since 2021. Bull produces vibrantly colored abstractions that can at times resemble fantastical beings moving through voids. These paintings often involve frottage and automatic techniques—both of which are associated with Surrealist art of the early and mid-20th century—and they are typically produced by Bull over extended periods of time. Some of her paintings are monumentally scaled. One produced for the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, which mounted an exhibition of her work in 2024, featured a 39-foot-long painting that extended across multiple floors of the museum. In addition to her art, Bull manages an itinerant project called From the Desk of Lucy Bull that has staged exhi...

The Etruscan painted tombs of Tarquinia, Italy, dating from around the 7th to the 1st century BCE, have long been celebrated for their vivid iconography and remarkable state of preservation. Now, archaeologists have used AI to examine how sight and sound may have affected Etruscan mourners of the time. Focusing on two 5th-century BCE painted tombs at Tarquinia, the Tomba del Gallo and the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri (“Tomb of the Blue Demon”), as case studies, researchers used acoustic science and AI modeling to recreate each tomb’s distinct experiential strategy. Their findings suggest that these tombs were intended not simply to house the dead but to affect the living through an immersive environment. “Etruscan tomb architecture was structurally designed in a manner that produce[d] somatic and affective responses,” say archaeologists Maurizio Forte of Duke University and Jacqueline Ortoleva of the University of Oxford, who coauthored a study recently publi...