This might be the best opening paragraph to appear in the Home & Garden section of the New York Times this year:

"In the late ’80s, before he became famous as a member of the Compton, Calif., gangsta-rap group N.W.A., Ice Cube studied architectural drafting at trade school in Arizona."  Yes, the ongoing series of fantastic videos celebrating the Pacific Standard Time: 1945-1980 exhibition in LA continues to exceed itself with a new video of rapper Ice Cube celebrating the Eames brothers. Watch it, love it. (And read more about Ice Cube and LA architecture in the NYT)

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Francesca Rosenberg with a group of patients and caretakers at MoMA. Photo by Jason Brownrigg, via ARTnews.

Several studies in the past few years have explored how exposure to the visual arts can help patients with Alzheimer's manage their symptoms. Led by a groundbreaking program at MoMA, museums continue to embrace and expand educational programing and tours to visitors with Alzheimer's.

ARTnews has a great article about some of the new initiatives being undertaken at museums, and their remarkable results:

"Visual art is particularly well suited to helping Alzheimer’s patients, research has found. According to Anne Basting, director of the Center on Age and Community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, art can trigger the emotional memory that often remains strong in Alzheimer’s patients, and can give them access to other memories as well. And participants in art tours don’t feel that they must already know something or that they will be expected to remember dates, names, or information. “The beautiful part of the program is that nobody mentions the word dementia. It’s all about the art, and they can all connect to that. Nobody’s sick, nobody’s different,” is how Kara Berringer, an art therapist at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum, explains the benefits of the program."

read the rest of the article here.

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We stumbled upon this work of Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen recently via the excellent blog This is Colossal and could help but share it. In Teeuwen's work she tears down the walls of abandoned buildings and rebuilds the interiors using fragments of the original walls and doors. With blind windows opening onto equally crammed spaces, Teeuwen's work is both expansive and claustrophobic, evoking themes of randomness, repetition and the reuse of objects (not to mention Gordon Matta-Clark). Teeuwen also fill spaces with like-colored objects to create an architecture of accumulation. To say we're intrigued is an understatement.

Everyone knows that TED talks are awesome. But even more fantastic are the under 6-minute talks featuring distilled thoughts from every corner of the universe. This talk by Sunni Brown is about the merits of doodling. Did you know that doodlers retain 29% more information while listening to verbal information? Take that, fifth grade math teacher!
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Intimidated by conceptual art? You wont be after this incredible video featuring John Baldessari reading "Sentences on Conceptual Art" by Sol LeWitt! Modern art has never had such a deep and resonant voice...

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Detail of Leonardo's Salvator Mundi

We're absolutely fascinated by the rediscovery of a new painting by Leonardo da Vinci, the first painting to be positively attributed to the artist since the early part of the century.

Preeminent Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp gives a fascinating interview on the Salvator Mundi to ArtInfo, discussing, among other things, his analysis of the bubbles in the glass orb held in the painting in Oxford's geology labs, and his intuitive sense that the new painting was indeed by the great Renaissance master:

"He has an extraordinary communicative power that is both very overt but also very withdrawn and subtle, so each generation in a sense can find what they want. I think great art is essentially generous, that it invites you to have a role. Lesser art sort of tells you what to look at..."

And catch the National Gallery London's current show, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan.

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Twice a year the setting sun lines up with the Manhattan street grid for "Manhattanhenge." A sublime reminder of the magic of the city.

Read more about this shot which was taken from the Museum of Natural History, on National Geographic.

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Brian Barr, Crusoe

An excerpt from a review of Harbinger, curated by the wonderful Sarah Ayres:

"Bearing the bold title “Harbinger: Shifting Culture and New Art from Detroit,” the newest show to be held at Studio Couture Detroit provides a refreshing look into the status of Detroit’s art scene. Curated by Sarah Ayers, the show features six promising young artists hoping “to shed light on Detroit’s burgeoning creative movement.” Although Ayers projects some large ambitions onto the show itself to “attract more artists, galleries and collectors to Detroit’s verging art scene,” I thought some of the most moving aspects were the pieces themselves, the location of Studio Couture and the innovative use of a web-based exhibition.

Currently, the Detroit art scene is oversaturated with art concerning Detroit. For good reason, this is an inspiring place to live, in a moment of great transition with many needs to which local and international artists are experiencing and reacting to. My favorite part of this show is actually that the featured work does not outwardly concern Detroit. It is billed that the six artists live and create within city limits, but it is interesting to see that they are focused more upon abstract ideas. Many of the works in this show are aesthetically beautiful, from Lauren Rices’ assemblage “The Tree” to William Irving Singers’ haunting figures. Other pieces, like Hobart Frolley’s sketchy characters, don’t take themselves too seriously. However, they ask viewers to consider their purpose. This show is comprised of a diverse mix of mediums and presentations, for example Peter Beaugard’s formed neon next to Brian Barr’s graphite on paper."

- from "Harbinger" Provides a Refreshing Vantage Point by V. Miller, in Knight Arts. Published November 8, 2011.

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"I'm not very good at speaking and I couldn't be a politician [...] Painting is very different, you feel very free when you paint"
Gerhard Richter in conversation with Nicholas Serota, in advance of his retrospective at the Tate Modern.

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Abandoned Lounge, Maya Fardoun

We are very excited to be launching our latest online exhibition this week entitled Harbinger: New Art and Culture from Detroit curated by Sarah Ayres. The show brings together 5 exceptional artists from Detroit who are part of the economic and artistic revival of the city and ArtStar is proud to host the online component of the exhibition featuring new work by Maya Fardoun, Mike Han, Lauren Rice, William Singer and Brian Barr. A former shining light of American industrialism and manufacturing, Detroit suffered terribly during the global recession but it now undergoing an artistic renaissance as artists, designers and innovators return to the city centre. This exhibition is intended to spotlight those artists who are committed to living and working in Detroit while demonstrating the range of media, subject matter and aesthetic emerging from the city's environs.

Concurrent with ArtStar's online exhibition, Harbinger is also talking place as a physical exhibition in Detroit at Ayres Gallery and we're thrilled to share some installation photos below of the artists' original pieces. The opening of Friday was a great success and ArtStar is pleased to help turn the spotlight on Detroit and it's phoenix-like artists rebirth. And if you're passing through Detroit, be sure to check it out!

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