tran hoang calvin

Time travel might be impossible, but Marina Amaral gets pretty close with Photoshop. The Brazilian artist digitally colorizes black-and-white photographs from the past with obsessive accuracy and stunning near-perfect hues. Poker-faced historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Lewis Payne suddenly look less stodgy, becoming the kind of warm-blooded people you could imagine laughing or eating or yawning. All because of a little ROYGBIV.

MoMA | Tag: Black Lives Matter

Thanks to all of you who read and shared associate curator Thomas Lax’s recent blog post “How Do Black Lives Matter in MoMA’s Collection?” Read two new blog posts from associate director Kathy Halbreich and chief of archives Michelle Elligott in response to Thomas’s post. 

[Faith Ringgold. American People Series #20: Die. 1967. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

For much of human history, people made art by trying to represent the world as it appeared around them. Until about 100 years ago, when a bunch of artists stopped trying to do that. It was shocking then and it still upsets and confounds today.

How are we supposed to deal with art completely removed from recognizable objects? And why should we? This is the case for Abstraction.

Many objects within the Brooklyn Museum collection were found on excavations including this beautiful Ancient Egyptian cartonnage dating to the 1st century B.C.E. The object arrived in the conservation lab for treatment for an upcoming exhibition in our Ancient Egyptian galleries. After close visual examination, something unusual was discovered in one area of the red pigment: a perfectly printed letter ‘m’ under some white fibers stuck to the top of the pigment.  As this was clearly not original to the object, the fibers and printed ‘m’ offer evidence of what happened to this object after it was excavated.  

The red pigment, unlike the other colors, is shiny and unstable suggesting it was previously treated with an adhesive that is causing further damage.  The attached fibers and printed ‘m’ would only transfer to the surface of the red pigment if it were wet or sticky suggesting the source of the letter ‘m’ was placed on top of the object while the adhesive was still wet. 

Close visual examination as well as knowledge of the materials in which objects were packed on excavation suggested the fibers were from paper. After consultation with the paper conservators, the white fibers were tested for lignin, an organic polymer that helps form the structure of cell walls in wood and barks. This polymer reduces the strength of paper and is removed from high quality papers, but only minimally from low value paper items such as newspaper. The fibers tested positive indicating the object was likely consolidated with an adhesive and packed to be shipped from Egypt in contact with newsprint while the consolidant was still wet thereby allowing the transfer of the black printed ‘m’ and white fibers to the approximately 2,000 year old red pigment.

As the museum has no record of any previous restoration, the white fibers and letter ‘m’ are some of the only remaining evidence we have of this object’s more recent history. The object has been treated and will be on display in the fall.

That’s according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, which found that for the first time since at least 1992, majorities in both parties hold not just unfavorable views of the other party, but “very unfavorable views.”

According to Pew, 91 percent of Republicans view the Democratic Party unfavorably, with 58 percent holding a “very unfavorable” view of the other party. Among Democrats, 86 percent felt unfavorably toward the GOP, with 55 percent expressing a very unfavorable view.

But voters aren’t just frustrated with members of the opposing side. They’re also fearful of them.