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.

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 29 – July 29, 2022

June 8 – July 29, 2022

April 8 – July 31, 2022

June 8 – July 30, 2022

June 24 – July 29, 2022

May 14 – July 31, 2022

March 25 – July 24, 2022

May 14 – July 26, 2022

June 10 – July 23, 2022

May 22 – July 29, 2022

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