Arts

Arts

The holiday season is here, and Oregon's literary scene is flourishing with author readings, holiday fairs, and cookie decorating events for the whole family. Enjoy December's front-heavy schedule with events from Powell's Books, Mother Foucault's Bookshop, Up Up Books, and others, then take some time to unwind and enjoy the peaceful beauty of the holidays as December winds down and the year comes to an end.

In early November, we stayed at the 200-year-old Stone Ridge Farm Inn in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for a family wedding weekend. It was rustic, charming, and quiet-even with a six month old baby.

Her mother had a habit, in Siesbye's childhood, of giving away her daughter's toys to other children; as an adult, Siesbye started to treat herself to gifts. On that trip, she came home one afternoon to find that the leopard was gone: her mother had gifted it to the young daughter of family friends. Later, visiting these friends, Siesbye told the little girl that she would like the toy back when the child was done playing with it.

But in Robert Icke's contemporary adaptation of the 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy, the real surprise is how long it takes to get there. Now at Studio 54, Oedipus arrives as the fall season's prestige import from abroad, bringing with it an imposing cast led by Mark Strong and Lesley Manville. It's sharply acted and conceptually ambitious. But the extended pacing dilutes the speed and compression that define Sophocles' original.

John Nixon, the late Australian avant-garde artist, would sometimes save the shells from his boiled eggs and sprinkle them across blank paint, creating his own starry night. Other times he'd set himself rules, such as painting only in orange for five years. It was 1996 and he was becoming a father, so he wanted a streamlined practice plus, what other artist was associated with orange?

In the burn scar left by the 2022 wildfire in Sabinares del Arlanza - La Yecla Natural Park, Spain, Nomad Studio places Socarrado, a circular structure built entirely from charred juniper trunks recovered after the blaze. First conceived for the Uncommissioned Exhibition by Novo Collective, the work becomes a point of collective reflection for the communities of Santo Domingo de Silos, transforming damaged terrain into a site of memory, refuge, and healing.

You'll find most professional dancers in the studio teaching, not onstage performing - because paid performing work has always been scarce, and keeps getting scarcer. And with President Trump's policies gutting arts funding and devaluing cultural work at every turn, the squeeze on dance artists is getting even tighter. So these highly skilled artists do what actually pays: They pour everything they know (and it's a lot; 15-50 years and more of intensive dance and fitness training) into the next generation in studios across America.

These firearms are typically valued not only for their mechanical performance, but for their specific history, including who owned them, the battles they were used in, or their connection to iconic gunsmiths. Antique rifles from the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly those with elaborate engravings, custom stocks, and hand-forged barrels, are among the most highly valued. These guns bring in hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at auction.

A large installation by the Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, consisting of 22 submerged marine-grade concrete cars on the ocean floor that seem to drift towards nowhere as the current flows through them, marks the first phase of the Reefline project just off the shores of Miami Beach. This underwater sculpture park, located 21ft below the waves and 600ft from the beach, is designed to resemble a hybrid reef that will support coral regeneration and marine biodiversity.

"There are people who do not know how to destroy fragments of their lives, even though they hinder their development," the Israeli artist Dov Or-Ner wrote in typewritten instructions for a conceptual art experiment in 1972, referencing a general desire to release things from the past that no longer serve us. "What is suggested here is to become free of whatever one chooses." As part of a landmark Israeli conceptual art project called Metzer-Meiser situated along the seamline of Kibbutz Metzer and the Arab village Meiser between June and October 1972, Or-Ner asked residents of both communities for personal items they were ready to shed, and buried them together as specimens to be unearthed at some future point.

Vladimir Putin's government had begun cracking down on independent journalists covering the protests, branding them as "foreign agents" a designation that effectively stigmatized them and forced them to include disclaimers with their work. Loktev began filming several of these journalists who courageously kept reporting on the abuses of the regime, including her friend Anna Nemzer, a talk-show host for the independent channel TV Rain.

"Rembrandt's etchings were an enduring passion for the late Sam Josefowitz, whose collection of the Dutch master's graphic works remains unparalleled by any other 20th-century collector," the house said in a statement.

Today is Black Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season! Many US retailers have marked down selected wares, including art and craft supplies. To help you parse the offerings, we'll be tracking some of the best deals on artists' tools, from pastels to tablets, to give as gifts or to keep for yourself. We will be updating this page, so check in with us often. A word of advice: Move fast, as many of these products will sell out quickly.

When Mernet Larsen was in her 70s, theproject she had been working on her entire life met a moment. It was the 2010s, and painters everywhere were grappling with how the digital realm affected what we see. People seeing Larsen's paintings for the first time often assumed that they were made using a computer, reading her signature blocky figures as robotic or pixelated-something a machine would create. But they are not computational at all.

Henry Moore believed tactility to be paramount, "as an aesthetic dimension", to both the making and the experiencing of sculpture. He really wanted us to be able to touch his work. However, its value and importance now means that doing so in most museums would be considered a big no-no-and for anyone for whom touch provides sight, this is massively restricting.

Early on in Shih-Ching Tsou's Left-Handed Girl, one of its protagonists, an adorable Taiwanese girl named I-Jing (Nina Ye), is told by her grandpa that her left-handedness is a curse. "Don't use left-hand in my house," he says to her, yanking a crayon from her left hand into her right and sending a bolt of fear through the impressionable 5-year-old. "Left hand is evil," he scolds. "It belongs to the devil."

Gazing at Matthew Stone's new works at The Hole NYC, the question feels impossible to ignore. The exhibition, titled Staggered Paintings, describes the way in which his paintings are constructed: layer upon layer, moving back and forth between mediums of oil paint and AI technology. 'Staggered' implies something disrupted, jolted, or momentarily thrown off balance, and perhaps this is where painting sits today, leaning towards a change as it confronts the unprecedented capacities of digital production, CGI modelling and AI-driven image-making.

Last year, character comedians Adam Riches and John Kearns joined forces for an archly silly tribute to crooners Michael Ball and Alfie Boe. Now Riches is back with another leftfield celebrity riff as he gives his Game of Thrones-era Sean Bean impression (as seen on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and his Edinburgh show Dungeons'n'Bastards) a yuletide twist.

The use of crochet as fine art with this level detail and on this scale can boggle the mind for anyone who practices the craft. Crochet and portraiture are not usually synonymous. Crochet is a textile art and uses a hook to tie yarn into knots. It is most often used to create household goods such as blankets, stocking caps and clothes. It falls somewhere between knitting and tatting in its use. It is an artistic and creative craft that often ventures into functional art.

On November 18, Sotheby's rolled out the blue carpet, hung the velvet ropes, and poured Champagne for attendees on the inaugural night of auctions at the Breuer Building, its new headquarters on Madison Avenue. The collection of the late cosmetics billionaire Leonard A. Lauder was on the block, and the house desperately needed a strong showing. The global art market has endured a grim two years of sliding sales and gallery closures, but Sotheby's has been in a more precarious position than most.

Shakespeare's beloved comedy takes on the eternal themes: love, jealousy, and unreality. The action turns around the romantic infatuations of a love quadrangle, an approaching wedding, and a clumsy acting troop. It foregrounds the changeability of passion, the agony of unrequited feelings, and the delights of lust. Experiencing the play might feel like drifting through dreams in the small hours of the morning, the real and the fantastical weaving inextricably together. It's both hallucinogenic and sharply lucid theatre.

Hear how Christmas was observed in Shakespeare's time and the folk traditions that people practised to welcome in winter. From wassailing to the winter solstice, 'kissing boughs' to proper mince pyes, this family-friendly guided tour will enchant, fascinate and warm even in the frostiest of weather. But do still wrap up well - don't forget our wooden 'O' is outdoor!

While Robert Musil's century-old adage that "there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument" still rings true in some ways, many monuments today feel more visible than ever. Statues of Cecil Rhodes and Robert E. Lee have collapsed under the pressures of public protest, exposing monuments for what they really are: flashpoints where histories are negotiated and mythologies are formed.

For Lankton, dolls were more than just kitschy objects - they were powerful, emotional extensions of herself. "(My dolls) are all freaks. Outsiders. Untouchables," she once said. "They're like biographies - the kind of people you'd like to know about. Really interesting and fucked up." Lankton's dolls were born as much from necessity as from imagination. "She wasn't allowed to have a doll as a kid," Monroe tells Dazed. "So, she made them - first with flowers, then with socks.

Polish film posters, old matchboxes, pulpy book designs, escort calling cards from the 90s and Julia Fox - these are just a few of the visual inspirations behind Scary Boots, an arts and literature zine published "roughly quarterly" with each one themed and Risograph printed in limited runs. The harness of all of these influences is Elias Myer, a zine-maker in East London who is moved by homemade, self-published magazines

Through large-scale tapestries of fringed strips of fabric, Abdoulaye Konaté explores the contemporary relevance of ancient signs and symbols. The Malian artist began working with textiles in the 1990s, when it became clear to him how prevalent they are in our everyday lives, from clothing and home goods to tools and more. This early interest began what's become a research-driven artistic practice, and today, he layers long, stitched pieces of Bazin and Kente fabrics into dynamic, largely abstract works.

Inverse Ruin by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh stands within the Archaeological Park of Herakleia in Policoro, Italy a quiet expanse where traces of the Archaic Temple meet the open landscape of the Ionian plain. Developed as part of the broader project Siris, curated by STUDIO STUDIO STUDIO with artistic direction by Antonio Oriente, the installation forms one of several interventions intended to bring clarity to a site shaped by layered histories.

In 2010, Kolinda and I met at a clown convention, where we were introduced to each other while wearing full clown makeup. I had been a clown since 1988, when I enrolled at clown college. Upon graduation, I was hired to perform with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and then went on to perform at Circus Circus in Las Vegas and as the clown for McDonald's corporation in North Carolina.