February 18 – May 1, 2022

As the new Doctor Strange film comes out, the truth about its parallel realities

Our review of We Own This City, the new TV series from The Wire's David Simon

9 min read

The origins of the folk traditions of May Day

Ancient origins

May Day, like most folklore customs, has its roots in the Dark Ages. The ancient Celts divided the year into four major festivals – Samhain (October 31st – November 1st), Imbolic (February 1st), Beltane (May 1st) and Lughnasadh (August 1st). Beltane, a Celtic word meaning ‘the fire (or fires) of Bel’ marked the beginning of summer for the Celts. The festival celebrated the coming of longer, lighter days, the rebirth and renewal of spring, and the hope for a plentiful harvest in the year ahead. Beltane is still celebrated throughout the UK today, though it is now better known as May 1st or May Day.

‘Heathenish vanity’ and pagan superstitions

The most well-known of Oxford’s May Day traditions is of course, Magdalen College’s choir singing Hymnus Eucharisticus from the top of Magdalen Tower at 6am to waiting crowds below. This tradition, however, has only been documented from about 1674 and marking May Day in Oxford goes back much further than that. More detail on Magdalen College’s role in the celebrations can be found on the Museum of Oxford blog here.

Pre-Christian traditions and pagan superstitions particularly relating to nature, still had a strong influence in the Middle Ages. The earliest accounts of Maytime celebrations mainly refer to ‘bringing in the May’ which is when people would go out into the fields and countryside to gather flowers and greenery to decorate their homes and other buildings. Green has long been associated with life and rebirth, which is embodied by The Green Man, an ancient pagan figure representing fertility and growth. A central figure in May Day celebrations throughout Northern and Central Europe, he is the male counterpart of the May Queen, and is often portrayed with acorns and hawthorn leaves, medieval symbols of fertility associated with spring.

If you look closely, the Green Man pops up all over Oxford and Oxfordshire, in churches, on college buildings and in street architecture. The Green Man features in churches as symbol of rebirth and resurrection, key ideas in Christianity, and serves as an example of how images from the ‘old religion’ were brought into medieval churches to tie them to the Christian faith.

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Piles of art supplies and material can not only be unsightly but also frustrating. To hold your stuff, you’ll need a reliable storage container. Not only will these neaten up your studio, they’ll also help you organize your possessions. A good bin should store your stuff securely and be light enough for you to comfortably handle or move around. Whether you’re looking for long-term storage for overflow or receptacles you need to access frequently, our picks below will guide your search.

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If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

A light box is one of the most useful tools you can have in your studio. Resembling a stripped-down tablet, these slim devices illuminate flat surfaces from behind so you can place material on top for tracing or close observation. Use a light box, for instance, to weed vinyl, trace designs on watercolor paper, transfer tattoo illustrations, illuminate diamond painting, and view photo negatives. While you can find full, table-size light boxes, the market for portable ones is growing. These are typically engineered with LEDs to reduce eye fatigue, offer different brightness settings, and require connection to a power source to operate. Below, a roundup of our favorites.

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If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

Making socks is one of the most popular knitting projects out there. To make the perfect pair, you’ll want to choose a skein of yarn specially spun for the task. Sock-making works best with a yarn that offers some stretch, and generally knitters prefer wool-nylon blends with at least 20 percent nylon for guaranteed elasticity. If you prefer thin socks, choose a fingering weight skein, and if you prefer thicker socks, choose a bulkier ball. Beyond that, you should choose the yarn that best suits your taste. Available in a plethora of material compositions, colors, and gradients, there’s plenty of sock yarn to choose from. Browse our roundup below of the best options on the market. 

March 2 – April 14, 2022

February 16 – April 16, 2022

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Getting tired of your same old paints? Make like the Ancient Greeks and Romans and give encaustic paints a try. In this method, which dates back more than 2,000 years, a pigmented mixture of beeswax and damar resin is heated until it’s supple enough to apply with a brush. Encaustics dry with a subtle, glossy sheen and are ideal for layered work, making them a great alternative to textured mediums like oils and acrylics. Also, most companies making encaustics today avoid using chemical solvents and synthetic adulterants, meaning they’re an environmentally friendly option. Below are five encaustic paints that we think deserve more buzz.

Jack Dorsey’s debut NFT was an image of the first-ever tweet posted on Twitter, which he founded in 2006. In March 2021, during the early days of the NFT boom, Dorsey’s tweet sold for $2.9 million after a competitive bidding battle in which Tron founder Justin Sun was a major player. Sun lost out to Sina Estavi, an entrepreneur who has since faced economic turmoil as his crypto-enterprises collapsed following his arrest last May.

Then, this month, Estavi listed the NFT for $48 million and tweeted that he would given 50 percent of the proceeds to GiveDirectly, a charity whose mission is to help impoverished people in certain parts of Africa. “Why not 99% of it?” Dorsey subsequently quipped.

But after Dorsey’s NFT went up for auction again this past week, no one bid higher than $280, effectively dropping the value of it by 99 percent. The highest offer now on OpenSea, where anyone can list an NFT, even if a bidding period isn’t open, is about $12,000, which is still a paltry amount. Is this a harbinger of the NFT market’s collapse?

For Jonathan Perkins, cofounder of the NFT platform SuperRare, the bungled sale is a symptom of the NFT market going through growing pains.

“There has been a lot of experimentation in the space, and I think we’re running up against the boundaries of speculation,” Perkins said, referencing the tokenization of tweets and the interest in PFP NFTs. He characterized the NFT market of 2021, especially of last summer, as one built on risk-taking behavior.

A 14th-century Hebrew manuscript is the subject of a lawsuit filed this week against the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The institution has denied claims by heirs of a German-Jewish lawmaker that the museum has “illegal possession” of the religious book, which has been in its collection for nearly seventy years.

This is the first lawsuit against a museum in Israel to recover property lost in the Holocaust.

Four heirs of Ludwig Marum, a Jewish-German politician and public opponent of the Third Reich, brought forth the claim in a New York state court. In court documents reviewed by ARTnews, the attorney representing the heirs said the suit was filed in New York because the museum conducts business through the Manhattan nonprofit American Friends of the Israel Museum.

The medieval manuscript dubbed Bird’s Head Haggadah is believed to have been produced in southern Germany around the year 1300. It is known as the oldest surviving Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah, a volume containing ritual text that is used for religious observation. The lawsuit claims the book is worth an estimated $10 million.

Marum was killed in 1934 under official Nazi orders. Marum originally received the script as a wedding present, the suit says.

Famed artist Laurie Simmons and influential art market figure Amy Cappellazzo think that artists need to “pay attention to NFTs” and blockchain, and that the new phenomenon cannot be “brushed aside.”

Speaking at the spring luncheon for the American Friends of the Israel Museum at the Rainbow Room on Tuesday, Simmons and Cappellazzo engaged in a wide-ranging discussion that was mostly in a format Cappellazzo likened to Vogue’s ever-popular “73 Questions” interviews with celebrities.

After Simmons answered a series of rapid fire questions—What was your first thought today? Kittens or puppies?—Cappellazzo opened up to questions from the audience. The first was the one on every casual art watcher’s mind: “What do you think of NFTs?”

While Simmons and Cappellazzo were cagey at first, more or less saying they’re watching with interest but not ready to jump in the pool themselves, they both eventually signed on to the liberating potential of the blockchain, if not quite NFTs themselves.

“I’m more interested in NFTs as vehicles or mechanisms than actual end-art forms,” Cappellazzo said. “But I do think every artist these days needs to pay attention to NFTs because it’s the only way to track the work—on the blockchain—as it goes through the world. They’ll be able to get royalties, if they design it with that mechanism. It’s of incredible importance to artists.”

A sarcophagus made of lead discovered in the depths of the Notre-Dame Cathedral among an ancient graveyard will soon be opened, French archaeologists said Thursday.

The sarcophagus was found laying amid several tombs “of remarkable scientific quality” 65 feet below the central spot where the transept crosses the 12th century Gothic church’s nave, France’s Culture Minister, said last month.

The discoveries were made during excavation work in anticipation of the reconstruction of the church’s iconic spire, which collapsed in a shocking 2019 fire. The team of archaeologists were present in the church to ensure the fragile floor of the Paris landmark was not damaged during the survey.

The graveyard was found below a layer of the church floor dating to the 18th century, but researchers believe it is much older, likely dating to the 14th century. Researchers inserted an endoscopic camera inside the sarcophagus for a peek of its contents, revealing parts of skull, a pillow of leaves, fragments of textiles, and several objects.

Christophe Besnier, an expert from France’s National Archaeological Institute, told Reuters that laying plants beneath the skeleton was a “well-known phenomenon when religious leaders were buried,” adding that “the fact that these plants are still there indicates that the contents have been very well preserved.”

An ancient site in Guatemala has turned up a fascinating find: the oldest known Mayan calendar.

The calendar was discovered in a complex of pyramids painted with murals that is known as San Bartolo. It was on a pyramid known as Las Pinturas that archaeologists spotted what they believe is notation for a Mayan calendar. The find was announced in a new study in Science Advances by David Stuart, Heather Hurst, and their colleagues.

The wall paintings at Las Pinturas are from the Late Preclassic period (400 BCE to 200 CE), when the Maya’s first societies were on the brink of collapse. Those societies went on to bounce back during the Classical period. It was during the Preclassic era that Mayan script systems were being developed.

Amid the hieroglyphic texts adorning the murals of Las Pinturas comes a single date: 7 Deer. This hieroglyphic is the earliest known evidence of the Mayan calendar. Much of the remaining mural was destroyed, so it is not known what the date referred to or if it was accompanied by other dates.

The Mayan calendar has 260 days, and each day is demarcated with two elements, the paper explains. The first element is a number from 1 to 13 paired with 1 of 20 days, each of which carries a name that refers to animals, the elements, and other aspects of nature.

Among the most acclaimed artists of her generation, Carrie Mae Weems first rose to fame with her groundbreaking “Kitchen Table” series (1990). For these rich black-and-white photographs, Weems created various tableaux of Black women, and sometimes men, sitting at a kitchen table.

In one image, a woman runs a hair pick through Weems’s hair, two glasses of red wine in front of them. In another, a husband and wife eat dinner, and in a third, a mother applies makeup in front of a round beauty mirror while her daughter mirrors her to the right. Though these images are staged and not strictly documentarian, they showed the ways in which a kitchen table was, is, and continues to be an important space within Black American homes.

In the years since, Weems has continued to ponder what it means to be a Black woman living in this world today, whether by standing in front of major museums, which have historically been repositories of colonial plunder, or by grieving the young Black men and women who have been murdered by the state.

Her genre-defying work moves between installation, performance, and film and video. More recently, Weems has also begun to organize what she calls “convenings,” multiday symposia that gather top intellectuals, writers, poets, and artists.

Weems was last the subject of a career retrospective, “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” when it opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville in 2012. The exhibition traveled to four other venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014; she made history then as the first African American artist to have ever mounted a retrospective at the Guggenheim since its founding in 1939.