Winter Solstice Marks New Dawn for Ancient Monument: Stonehenge Visitor Center is Now Open

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By TAHLIB

Overhaul of 4,000-year-old monument cost $44 million. Photo courtesy of CNN.

We are headed to a Winter Solstice party this Saturday, December 21st. Our party however will be nothing compared to the celebration taking place at Stonehenge in England, where they've just opened a new $44 million Visitor's Center. The winter solstice is the high holyday of Stonehenge--the time at which the sun appears at noon at its lowest altitude above the horizon. The winter solstice lasts only a moment in time, and other terms are often used for the day on which it occurs, such as "midwinter", "the longest night" or "the shortest day". But what do you take to a Winter Solstice party? "Ornaments in the shape of the sun, stars, and other pagan symbols..." recommends legal expert Dusty Sparks, because it is based on the four elements of earth, wind, water, and fire.

People walk towards the new Stonehenge visitor center, Dec. 11, 2013.

On the huge wall of the main area the landscape digitally transforms over millennia. 

New exhibition includes a forensic reconstruction of an early Neolithic man's face

Read More

Foundation's Secret Bids Guide Hopi Indians’ Spirits Home

THE NEW YORKBy Tom Mashberg

Alain Leroy, owner of an auction company in Paris, surrounded by sacred Hopi spirit masks.

CALIFORNIA---The foundation had never done something like this before — a repatriation effort — and the logistics were tricky, to say the least. More than 100 American Indian artifacts were about to go on sale at the Drouot auction house, including 24 pieces, resembling masks, that are held sacred by the Hopi of Arizona. Now the Annenberg Foundation decided to get involved from its offices in Los Angeles. It hoped to buy all of the Hopi artifacts, plus three more sought by the San Carlos Apaches, at the Dec. 9 sale and return them to the tribes. To prevent prices from rising, the foundation kept its plan a secret, even from the Hopis, in part to protect the tribe from potential disappointment. [link]

Read More

Gallery Owner: Every Piece of Judaica Has a Story

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
By Donald Liebenson

Judaica from the Arthur M. Feldman Gallery

ILLINOIS---Part art gallery, part museum and part salon, the Arthur M. Feldman Gallery is back in business in Highland Park. The storefront location at 465 Roger Williams Ave. opened last month after Feldman previously operated a gallery of antiques, fine art and Judaica in downtown, first on St. Johns Avenue and then on Central Avenue. Feldman, a second-generation antiques dealer with degrees in art history and archaeology, served as director of the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. To continue educating the public, Feldman will present exhibitions under his banner Jewish Museum of Chicago. The first, a showing of commissioned Purim masks created by professional Chicago artists, is scheduled for March 2014. [link]

Read More

Nevet Yitzhak Exhibit Peels Off the Prevailing View of 'Islamic Art’ as 'Monolithic and Mysterious'.

HAARETZ
By Galia Yahav

From 'Orient Express': Shows experts as genies returned to their bottle.

ISRAEL---One of the most wonderful aspects of “Orient Express,” the brilliant exhibition of works by Nevet Yitzhak at Jerusalem’s L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art, is the resounding answer she gives to the superficial, cliché-filled discourse on Islamic art. It is a discussion that defines Islamic art as a “rich, ancient, much respected culture” in a generalized manner that, as it declares the wealth of ancient Islam, presents Islamic art as homogeneous, monolithic and bereft of any nuances. [link]

Read More

54 Days In The Eternal City: A Christian 'Pilgrimage' For Lent

NPR

Each year, millions of people from different faiths make religious journeys. They travel far, to Mecca, Jerusalem, the Ganges River or Lourdes, France, to walk the paths of prophets, saints and martyrs. “Pilgrimage is something built into the human condition,” says George Weigel, author of Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches. “There seems to be something hardwired into us, spiritually, that the idea of a journey from A to B becomes part of the rhythm of the spiritual life.” In Roman Pilgrimage, Weigel, with his photographer son Steven Weigel and art historian Elizabeth Lev, tells the story of a spiritual trek that takes place in the Eternal City each Lent and Easter.[link]

Read More

Objects of beauty from ‘Mother Russia’ in North Carolina

THE HERALD SUN
By Blue Greenberg

The Durnovo Casket, silver gilt, enamel and sheets of lapis lazuli,
Firm of Ovchinnikov, Russia, 1889, now on view at the N.C. Museum of History.

NORTH CAROLINA---“Mother Russia” conjures up images of great writers; vast expanses of unbelievable cold; royal courts with tsars and tsarinas, the peasants or serfs, who were little more than slaves; the psychic Rasputin; the assassinations of the last tsar and his family; and the people’s devotion to the Eastern Orthodox Church. All this is part of the mystique surrounding this exhibition of more than 200 decorative and religious objects, which date from the first Romanov, Peter the Great (1672-1725), to Nicholas II (1868-1918), the last. [link]

North Carolina Museum of History: “The Tsar’s Cabinet: Two Hundred Years of Russian Decorative Arts under the Romanovs" and "Windows into Heaven: Russian Icons from the Lilly and Francis Robicsek Collection of Religious Art” (Ends March 5);  5 E. Edenton Street, Raleigh, North Carolina; 919-807-7900; ncdcr.gov/ncmoh

Read More

Eastern Michigan University Students AMP Up the Arts

AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS

MICHIGAN---Students enrolled in Eastern Michigan University’s (EMU) Arts Management Programs (Undergraduate & Graduate) produce two-day music festivals, art competitions, face and body paint tailgating activities, art crawl events, and reality TV shows as part of an academic service learning project and student organizational activity designed to give members their first experiences as arts administrators. The Arts Management Project (AMP) is a yearly project undertaken by students of the Arts Management program at EMU. The project, which doubles as a student organization, produces arts-based events and creates opportunities for EMU’s student artists to present their talents to the campus community. [link]

Read More