Phoenix Art Museum opens exhibit on world religion

by Sean McLachlan on

The Phoenix Art Museum is one of the city’s best art spaces. With more than 18,000 objects in its permanent collection, it brings everything from Picasso to medieval Japanese silk to central Arizona. Their Asian collection is especially good.

Now the museum has started the new year with a major new exhibition. Sacred Word and Image: Five World Religions covers the written word and painted image as expressed in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. By showing the art and writings of these different religions side by side, visitors can see how people each faith use them to express their beliefs.

The exhibit includes a wide variety of objects, including Christian icons, Muslim prayer mats, religious texts, sculptures, and much more. One interesting item is a 7th century Japanese printed prayer, one of the oldest printed texts in the world. When Japan converted to Buddhism in the 7th century, the emperor had one million small wooden pagodas built. Each included a printed prayer inside.

Sacred Word and Image: Five World Religions runs until March 25, 2012.

Photo courtesy Chanel Wheeler.

Sexy goddess bares all in Boston

by Sean McLachlan on


The ancient goddess of love, sex, and beauty is making an appearance at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Aphrodite and the Gods of Love is a new exhibition examining one of the most popular ancient goddesses and her place in the Classical world. More than 150 ancient works of art are on display, including famous pieces such as the Knidia, a life-size sculpture of Aphrodite made by the 4th-century BC Greek artist, Praxiteles. Another interesting piece is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, a reclining figure who from one side looks like a voluptuous woman, and from the other like a man.

The exhibition traces Aphrodite’s sexy origins in the Near East and the place of her cult in Greek and Roman society. Aphrodite was a Greek goddess who was adopted into the Roman pantheon as Venus. She was the symbol of romantic love and ideal beauty. She also oversaw marriage, an odd choice since many of the myths surrounding her involve her cheating on her husband, the blacksmith god Hephaistos (Vulcan). Men worshiped her because she aroused male virility.

Being in charge of such important aspects of life made Aphrodite extremely popular. She was the patron goddess of Pompeii. Interestingly, Ramsay MacMullen in his Paganism in the Roman Empire points out that altars in private homes in Pompeii were more often dedicated to Foruna, Vesta, and Bacchus than Aphrodite. Perhaps because love received so much public worship, people felt they needed to give good luck, the home, and drinking some attention. They can be related, after all!

McMullen’s book (which I highly recommend) also touches on various ways the Romans worshipped Venus, including picnicking in the orchards around her sanctuary in Cnidus, and wild processions where a woman playing Venus led a string of dancing children playing Cupid. She and the other deities were very much part of daily life.

The exhibition also looks at related figures of Classical mythology, such as Aphrodite’s sons Eros (Cupid), the well-endowed Priapus, and Hermaphrodite.

If you want to meet this lovely lady and her interesting offspring, you better hurry. Aphrodite and the Gods of Love is only on until February 20, 2012.

Top photo: Fresco of The Judgment of Paris, Roman, Imperial Period, 45–79 A.D. Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. © www.pedicinimages.com. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Get to know Belarus through the art of motion timelapse

by Jessica Festa on



This timelapse video, One Day in Life, was created by professional photographer and Minsk native, Artem Sergeevich. It shows the country of Belarus in a way that will put any negative eastern Europe stereotypes out of your head and have you booking a one-way plane ticket there. Vibrant colors wash over a mix of countrysides and cityscapes, making the factories look just as beautiful and exciting as the lakes and fountains. It isn’t easy to capture images like these, and Sergeevich used a range of different cameras, some of which included a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 60D, Tokina 11-16mm, and a Sigma 14mm, among others.
To see more videos by Artem Sergeevich, click here.

New Georgia border crossing provides a whimsical welcome

by Jessica Marati on
Customs checkpoints tend to be dreary, depressing places.

A rare exception is the new Georgia border crossing with Turkey, located right at the crossroads between Eastern Europe and Western Asia. There, German architect Jürgen Mayer H. recently unveiled a modern, state-of-the-art border crossing that rises from the shores of the Black Sea in a white, whimsical squiggle. How’s that for a friendly welcome? The building houses standard customs facilities, a terrace viewing platform, a cafeteria, staff rooms, and a conference room. According to J. Mayer H., the project represents “the progressive upsurge of the country.”

Georgia, a former Soviet state, has only recently started to attract tourists drawn by the charming capital city of Tblisi, the ancient religious sites of Mtskheta, and the fresh, delicious cuisine. Hopefully off-beat architecture and design like that of the new Georgia border crossing continues to develop along with the country’s infrastructure.

[via Fast Co.Design, image via Jürgen Mayer H.]

Your Paintings website puts UK’s art collections at your fingertips

by Sean McLachlan on


An online collection now boasts half of all the publicly owned oil paintings in the United Kingdom.

Your Paintings was started in June by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation and has already uploaded high-quality images of 104,000 oil paintings by 23,000 artists.

The goal is to put online all of the estimated 200,000 publicly owned paintings housed in some 3,000 institutions, making it a veritable Google Books of UK art. There are plenty of UK artists, as well as many other works from around the world and from all periods. While all are owned by the public, many are in buildings that aren’t generally open to the public, so this website helps make them available.

Right now the website is focusing on putting up all the oil paintings since that was the preferred medium of painters for several centuries, and a medium that British painters used quite well. Other media such as watercolor and tempera are represented, and more such paintings will probably go up in the future.

Users can tag paintings to help with the ongoing organization of the collection. There are also links to BBC’s online sound and video archives and various guided tours by different people in the art world.

The website also hosts regular online exhibitions. Currently there’s one on the arctic.

Detail from John Constable’s “The Hay Wain” courtesy Wikimedia Commons.