February 17 – March 25, 2023

February 4 – April 8, 2023

February 3 – March 25, 2023

February 24 – March 25, 2023

January 26 – March 25, 2023

February 9 – March 25, 2023

February 7 – March 25, 2023

February 3 – March 25, 2023

From tiny terrariums to tiger-print statements, how plants enhance any interior

How the plucky Nintendo character Mario has gone from arcade games to Hollywood

The controversial style of 'method acting' that divides the industry

A thrilling end to a genius TV series

How a major new show is refusing to look at what's inside the Egyptian artefacts

Meet the Gen-Z and young Millennial image-makers now in the global spotlight

Some of North America's most famous designs were the work of little-known names

The millennia-old legends that still shape how we think today

How film and TV are hung up on the 'dead wife' trope

How people around the world are revealing their hidden histories in fabric

A 1971 portrait of the artist Stanley Whitney painted by Barkley Hendricks is poised to break a record for the artists when it is offered at auction in May.

The painting, titled “Stanley,” picture its titular subject in street clothes standing against a gold background and smoking a cigarette. It will be offered during a single owner sale at Christie’s where it’s expected to fetch $5 million. If it reaches its low estimate, the painting’s sale will be a record price for a work by Hendricks, who died in 2017 at the age of 72.

The two Philadelphia-born artists met while studying at Yale University in the 1970s. Hendricks would eventually become known for his paintings of fashion forward subjects —predominantly depicting people of color in his inner circles. He’s credited for influencing the current generation of Black figurative painters working today.

The last time a major Hendricks work came to auction was in December 2020. The 1972 canvas Mr. Johnson (Sammy from Miami), 1972, depicting one of the artist’s signature nonchalantly-posed models sold for $4 million during a Sotheby’s contemporary sale in New York—setting a new auction record for the artist. The result surpassed the previous high of $3.7 million paid for Hendricks’s Yocks (1975) at Sotheby’s in 2019. 

Recognition surged for Hendricks following the Nasher Museum of Art’s lauded retrospective “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool,” in 2008 at Duke University. Whitney, who is 77, has seen his own milestones recently. His abstract works garnered attention during a collateral exhibition staged at the last edition of the Venice Biennale in 2022.

The arts and culture sectors represented more than $1 trillion of the US economy in 2021 and accounted for a record portion of country’s overall economic value, per new data from the government.

On Wednesday, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published their latest analysis of the economic health of 35 industries within the arts. Additional emphasis was placed on measuring whether each industry had returned to pre-pandemic levels of economic performance—or if they had failed to recover. 

According to the report, between 2020 and 2021, the total economic value contributed by arts and cultural industries increased by 13.7 percent, vastly surpassing the gains of the wider US economy, which grew by just 5.9 percent over the same period. By the end of 2021, the arts industries made up 4.4 percent of the nation’s overall gross domestic product (GDP).

Of the 35 industries studied, ten—including independent performers and artists and performing arts organizations—recorded significant growth within 2021, however none reached 2019-levels of economic output. The NEA also reported that just under 4.9 million people were employed in the arts industries in 2021, representing an increase from 2020, when the pandemic curtailed economic activity in the arts worldwide. That too was still below the 5.2 million employed in 2019.

Performing arts workers and performing art venues, two of the hardest hit areas in 2019, grew in 2021 by 14 percent to about 230,000 employees in total. Again, a gain that was still below the 323,000 workers employed by the industry before Covid-19.