Pablo Casals’s Obelisk, a towering accumulation of welded bronze cellos, dominates the waters of a lagoon in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden. Standing over twenty feet tall, the Obelisk is an imposing example of monumental sculpture by Arman. Read More
In Leonard Baskin’s bronze sculpture Ruth and Naomi, the biblical women are bound together by shared sadness and mutual support. The work is sited in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden. Read More
The hallmark characteristic of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes is a closely observed illusionism wedded to moralistic content. An excellent example is provided by Cornelis de Heem’s Still Life with Fruit on a Ledge. Read More
More than 500 years ago, Japanese artists developed a technique that celebrates breakage as a part of life’s journey. This ceramic-repair methodology, known as kintsugi, highlights cracks as part of the beauty and the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Read More
Lotte Stam-Beese’s portrait of fellow Bauhaus student Albert Braun reflects the innovative creative process nurtured by the Bauhaus School of Design in Weimar-era Germany. Read More
In a new body of large-scale sculptures, painting, installations, and performances, which includes The Mete of the Muse, Fred Wilson focuses on histories of the African diaspora, and the lingering legacy of colonialism and slavery in the United States and around the world. Read More
Commissioned in honor of NOMA’s centennial, Forever is a large-scale wall painting by the Philadelphia-based, Nigerian-born artist Odili Donald Odita. Extending 150 feet, the mural contains 87 colors, calibrated to respond to the physical space and changing light of the McDermott Lobby. The title conveys the impressions of dynamism, musicality, and continuity Odita gathered from… Read More
Taken on its own as a visual object, this punch service in NOMA’s decorative arts collection is striking. A large aluminum sphere punch bowl centers a galaxy of spherical cups riding on a ring like Saturn’s, the repeated shapes emphasized and softened by spherical birchwood handles. Read More
Will Ryman’s large-scale sculpture America is a reflection on the industries and economies that built the United States over the past few centuries. America is made of many materials, each of which have been carefully selected and arranged by Ryman to reflect the legacy of capitalism in this nation. Read More
In 1940, Josef Sudek began his best-known series of photographs, a body of images of or through his studio window in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Read More
Photographs of and through windows have remained popular throughout the history of photography. In the early years, the presence of windows was driven by necessity: photography in its infancy required great amounts of light, and windows obliged. Read More
Photography has often been employed in the service of recording exceptional spaces, but a photograph always more or less distorts the space it is supposed to record. The distortion may enhance the true nature of the interior or it may severely misrepresent it. Read More
None of the following photographs were taken by photographers in their own homes. Rather, to make each of the images discussed here, a photographer had to gain permission to cross the threshold into someone else’s home. If that transaction calls to mind mythic negotiations that, supposedly, allow a vampire to enter one’s home (May I… Read More
Pottery has a long history as a tool for self-expression and a method of self-care. Whether your relationship to ceramics is placing your muddy hands around a spinning mound of clay, or your clean hands around a mug of tea, you’ve experienced the therapeutic qualities of pottery. Read More
Dorothea Tanning painted Guardian Angels the same year she left Manhattan to live in solitude with her partner Max Ernst in a small desert town in the American Southwest. Fleeing the chaos of big cities like New York and Paris, Tanning found incredible creative freedom in her self-imposed isolation. Often focusing on the confines of… Read More
Since its opening in 2003, the Besthoff Sculpture Garden has been a place of reflection for visitors—and in the case of works with mirrored surfaces by Lin Emery, Anish Kapoor, and Jeppe Hein that quality is quite literal. Read More
“I never violate my inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything… I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regards for the inner voice.” –Lee Krasner Krasner’s paintings explore the role of the body in art, treating painting as a form of self- exploration. In Breath,… Read More
Many of us can name a work of art, music, or literature that provokes an emotional or even a physical reaction. This photograph by Guy Mendes has that quality, and can inspire an incredible sense of lightness and peace. The photograph is beautiful in its simplicity. The soft bend in the wrinkled sail allows us… Read More