March 22, 2023
Good morning. 🌸 Today, Cambodian-American choreographer and educator Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro writes about her experience of being removed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for performing a prayer to allegedly looted antiquities from her homeland. In the piece, you'll also see a video of the sacred dance, which didn't seem to bother anyone but the museum's security.
Also today, the story of the artist who makes commemorative sculptures from the ashes of loved ones, a dispute over an ancient Nepali necklace at the Art Institute of Chicago, a review of a book written by a museum guard about how art helped him cope with grief, and much more.
— Hakim Bishara, Senior Editor
The Sculptor Making Art With Loved Ones’ Ashes
Inspired by the three-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, Julian Stair’s exhibition honors the lives of eight people with cinerary jars. | Taylor Michael
SPONSORED
Nevada Museum of Art Presents Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity
For the first time in nearly 60 years, the innovative yet under-recognized artist is the subject of a retrospective exhibition. On view in Reno, Nevada. Learn more.
LATEST NEWS
From William Bache’s Silhouettes Album, black paper coated silhouettes mounted on paper (digitized by Mark Gulezian/National Portrait Gallery, courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Featuring nearly 2000 profiles, William Bache’s silhouette album has been entirely digitized and is available to peruse online.
The UK extends its export ban on the "Portrait of Omai,” giving London's National Portrait Gallery a few months to acquire the work.
A sacred 17th-century necklace remains on display at the Art Institute of Chicago despite Nepal’s calls for repatriation.
SPONSORED
The Public Theater in NYC Presents Plays for the Plague Year
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s theatrical concert chronicles the 2020 lockdown and the hope and perseverance that emerged from it. Learn more.
ART & PHOTOGRAPHY
Bobby Wilson Combats Indigenous Stereotypes Through Humor
The artist-performer's career undulates, ever so gracefully, across multiple mediums and registers of generational pain, healing laughter, and Indigenous joy. | Erin Joyce
Artists Show What They Can Do With a Google Phone’s Camera
Works by 20 photographers are now on view in Manhattan for the seventh season and 100th project coming out of the Google Creator Labs. | Briana Ellis-Gibbs
SPONSORED
Miami’s Fountainhead Residency Presents The Yearbook: 2022
This annual catalogue documents the work, ideas, and approaches of the 36 resident visual artists in the 2022 cohort. Now available for presale. Learn more.
MORE ON HYPERALLERGIC
Met Museum Kicked Me Out for Praying to My Ancestral Gods
My danced prayer to looted Cambodian antiquities was too much for the New York museum. | Sophiline Cheap-Shapiro
A Museum Guard’s Ode to the Healing Power of Art
In All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley revisits the many ways that art meets life, and life art, and how death is often the bridge between them. | Bridget Quinn
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