A swim is the perfect summer pastime – here are some of the best pools

Featuring a new Game of Thrones saga and an 'unfilmable' fantasy

Perhaps we’re biased, but there’s a unique beauty to drawing pencils that isn’t matched by your everyday writing pencil. Usually painted in a pleasing color and embossed with their name and grade, they cut a striking figure in one’s art box. Of course, you can’t judge a drawing pencil (solely) by its beauty. They come in a variety of grades: B pencils have more graphite in them, so they make dark and soft marks, while H pencils have more clay in them, which provides harder and more precise lines. A good drawing set will include a range of grades that transition smoothly from one into the next. Ahead, find top-notch options to get your sketching and drafting off to a good start.

With a plastic or aluminum head and a sharp metal point, pushpins are essential to any studio, classroom, or office. The humble pushpin, precursor of the thumbtack, was invented and patented in 1900 by Edwin Moore of Newark, New Jersey. Moore’s original pins were made of glass and steel, and he referred to his creation as a “pin with a handle.” After making and selling his invention for several years, Moore founded the Moore Push-Pin company in 1904. Today’s pushpins are useful for affixing studies, bits of inspiration, or memos to a corkboard or wall. But they can be great assistants for specialized projects, too. You can use them to stretch canvases, elevate canvases for drip paintings, or use them as mini grips to hold while tilting a wet canvas. They’re helpful for stained glass projects as well, holding pieces in position prior to soldering. Or use them to secure paper stencils over clay for neat transfers. The perfect pushpins await you in our list of favorites below.

June 29 – July 29, 2022

June 8 – July 29, 2022

The Guggenheim Bilbao’s long-gestating plans to expand to a Spanish natural reserve may finally come to fruition.

Earlier this week, officials with the government of the Biscay province, whose capital is Bilbao, revealed that they were planning to put €40 million toward an expansion in Urdaibai, an estuary to the east of Bilbao that has hundreds of plant species and thousands of human residents.

Deia, a Spanish-language outlet based in Biscay, reported this week that the provincial council had pegged the total cost of the new museum at €127 million ($129 million). A connector that El Correo described as a “tunnel” would reportedly link the Guggenheim Bilbao with its expansion.

Unia Rementeria, the deputy general of Biscay, reportedly described the potential project as an “important” one that could “generate a lot of well-being in Biscay society.”

Representatives for the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Guggenheim Museum in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Creating your own paint is a great way to cut costs while exerting greater control over the shades and effects you desire. Dry pigment powder can be combined with binders to create a variety of painting media, from oils to acrylics, and you usually need just a small amount of pigment. (Keep in mind that the amount of binder will vary depending on the pigment used.) Like paint, however, the quality of powders is wide ranging in order to suit projects from crafts to fine art. No matter what powder you favor, you should always handle these particles carefully and protect yourself from inadvertent inhalation. Review our picks of the best powdered pigments to find the one that suits your needs.

Archaeologists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona discovered ancient engravings that are around 14,000 years old, the researchers announced in a statement.

The Upper Paleolithic–era engraving was found near the city of Lleida, which is about an hour away from Barcelona. The archaeologists had been working on the site for some time, having previously discovered the partial skeleton of a woman the researchers have dubbed Linya, her name a reference to the cave she was found in, Cova Gran de Santa Linya.

The engravings, though found at the same site, predate Linya by a few of centuries, according to the carbon dating research. According to the archaeologists, the fragment helps put together a larger tapestry of the lives of the first settlers of Spain’s northeastern region.

Jorge Martínez-Moreno, a researcher who helped found the engraving, said in a statement, “There are elements and visual resources with which to narrate stories or specify spaces that denote that the person or persons who executed them were intelligent and technically skilled, and that combining few lines were capable of generating visualizations with a high empathic content that we have been able to decode thousands of years later.”

While the naked eye can’t quite make out the engraving, a 3D scan helped reveal the figure that was a Pyrenean ibex colloquially known as a bucardo.

French curator and archaeologist Jean-François Charnier has been indicted amid an investigation into the the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions of allegedly looted Egyptian antiquities.

Charnier is an adviser for the French Agency for AlUla Development, an agency that develops cultural projects in Saudi Arabia. He was brought into police custody earlier this week for questioning and was officially indicted on Thursday on charges of  “laundering by facilitating the false justification of the origin of the property of the author of a crime or an offense,” the French outlet Le Monde first reported.

Charnier is currently under judicial supervision, according to the report. Noémi Daucé, a curator at the Louvre and cultural heritage expert, was also detained by authorities on Monday for questioning. She was released on Wednesday without being charged.

The two scholars were involved with the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s acquisitions of ancient artifacts while working at Agence France-Muséums (AFM), a private consultancy firm contracted to review the provenance records of artifacts being considered for the Emirati museum’s collection ahead of its opening in 2017.

Both experts worked with Jean-Luc Martinez, the Louvre’s former director, while he served as president of the agency’s scientific committee between 2013 to 2021, running concurrently with his tenure at the Paris museum. Martinez co-chaired the committee that approved acquisitions for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. He stepped down from his position at the museum in 2021.

Keep those fingers clean: Pick up a tortillon or a blending stump to blend, soften, and smudge your creative marks. Made of paper that is compacted and shaped into a pencil-like design, these handheld implements look similar but are used for different effects, most commonly with dry media such as charcoal, graphite, and pastel. A tortillon is hollow, features one pointed end, and is shorter, lighter, and less smooth than a blending stump; it is ideal for applications requiring precision, and it can create interesting textures. A blending stump is a solid tool that’s pointed at both ends and ideal for smooth blending; it can be cleaned and sharpened with sandpaper. Blending stumps usually have a number on them indicating their thickness, with #1 being the slimmest and #8 the chunkiest. Explore the characteristics of both with our favorite products, below.

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The Headlines

THE WAR IN UKRAINE. The founder of Manifesta, Europe’s roving art biennial, Hedwig Fijen, has proposed holding its 2028 edition in Ukraine, with the aim of helping to “rebuild and re-strengthen the cultural ecosystem and infrastructure” in the country, Artnet News reports. (Its current iteration just opened in Prishtina, Kosovo.) Meanwhile, an Annie Leibovitz photoshoot of Volodymyr and Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s president and first lady, for Vogue, has sparked controversy, with some commentators, and some Republican politicians, slamming it, Artforum reports. And critic Jason Farago has a lucid dispatch from Ukraine, reflecting on the power of culture amid a military conflict. “Through art we establish similarities between past and future, near and far, abstract and concrete, that cast received certainties into doubt,” he writes. “We look and listen in a way that lets thinking and feeling run parallel to each other.”

RECENT ACQUISITIONS. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, has acquired a showstopper of a painting by the 19th-century Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Fort Worth Business reports. Titled Dog Guarding a Basket of Grapes (1836), it features grapes that look juicy enough to pluck off the canvas and a dog that, frankly, you could probably brush aside. The work has not been exhibited publicly in more than 50 years, and is the first piece of Austrian authorship to enter the Kimbell’s collection. Meanwhile, after sending three works from its collection—by Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir—to auction, raising some $51.2 million to diversify its holdings, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio has revealed some of its recent acquisitions, KTNV 13 Action News reports. They include an a lively Grace Hartigan, titled Harvester, from 1966.

The Digest

In the four months leading up to July 9 toppling of Sri Lanka’s former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a protest village formed in Colombo, occupying the capital city’s oceanside park Galle Face Green. Called Gota Go Gama (GGG), a mashup of Sinhala and English words meaning “Gotabaya Go Village,” it became the main gathering site for aragalaya, or the struggle. A space of national imagining, GGG has been shaped by the contributions of artists expressing their frustrations and aspirations as part of a peaceful movement of citizens voicing their dissent. But in the middle of the night on July 21, less than 24 hours after Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the country’s new president, he ordered a military crackdown on GGG.

Sri Lankans have endured a crippling economic crisis, with fuel and food prices skyrocketing. The country’s lucrative tourism industry has taken a major hit since the onset of the pandemic, but it was the mismanagement of resources by the Rajapaksa administration that ultimately fueled this backlash that led to his ouster.

Almost as soon as GGG took root it began to feature the works of visual artists. An art gallery formed and the feminist public art project Fearless Collective erected a mural on a standing wooden flat. Tehani Ariyaratne, the chief operating officer of Fearless, wrote in a recent email that “the sense we got, painting in the art space at GGG, was that art was being used as a powerful medium of resistance and to express the feelings of the protestors at the site.”

While protestors’ anger was reflected in much of the art on view at GGG, the Fearless mural, which was collaboratively painted by local artists, set out to visualize the possibilities of a new country emerging from aragalaya. The mural depicts four figures that embody the qualities the painters want in their leaders, with each displaying a symbol of an attribute: a flower in the hair for compassion, a scale for justice, rice plants for abundance, and a clay oil lamp for mobility. The Fearless artists created a place of hope and joy around the work, which Ariyaratne recalls was intentionally filled with music and laughter.

Including a Welsh folk-horror and Brad Pitt on a bullet train

April 8 – July 31, 2022

June 8 – July 30, 2022

The Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico has returned to Mexico a collection of antiquities donated to the museum and kept in storage for more than a decade. The group of a dozen artifacts, which include sculptures and figurines with roots in Olmec and Zacatecas Indigenous communities, were donated to the museum in 2007.

Five months ago, the museum discovered the items in storage where they had been for the last fifteen years. An unidentified donor had donated the objects to the museum after originally purchasing them in the 1980s from an undisclosed dealer.

After uncovering the objects, the museum’s researchers located an appraisal from 2007 that labeled the artifacts as “pre-Columbian,’ a descriptor given to some ancient objects produced in Latin American territories before European conquests.

The move has come as advocates have called for cultural institutions to repatriate cultural artifacts with Indigenous roots to their originating countries. The government of Mexico has been making efforts to halt the sales of pre-Columbian artifacts at international auction houses and has made frequent requests for restitution.

More than 5,000 archaeological objects from Mexico have been recovered in the last several years, the Mexican government has estimated.

June 24 – July 29, 2022

May 14 – July 31, 2022

50 years on, how backwoods thriller Deliverance left a controversial legacy