Miamians flocked to the opening at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University for Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic, the unprecedented retrospective of the Cuban Master Rafael Soriano featuring more than ninety of his paintings and drawings (kicking off Miami’s Art Basel season, on view through Jan. 28). This national tour culminates in the artist’s hometown of Miami, where he created some of his most acclaimed works after seeking exile in the U.S. (featuring never-before-seen ephemera from the late artist’s studio that is still lovingly preserved in Miami after his recent passing in 2015). Art collectors, arts luminaries, community leaders and media were welcomed to the stellar opening reception by the museum’s Director, Dr. Jordana Pomeroy. “Soriano’s life and art fully blossomed here in Miami, the city where the artist and his family sought refuge in 1962. The ca

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of the most celebrated painters of the Spanish Golden Age, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682). A number of international exhibitions are planned to pay tribute to the artist’s achievements, the first of which is being presented this fall and winter at The Frick Collection. Murillo: The Self-Portraits is also the only such commemoration occurring in the United States. The exhibition opened in New York on November 1, 2017, and continues through February 4, 2018, after which it moves to London’s National Gallery from February 28 through May 21, 2018. Murillo’s career was a successful one, and he painted canvases for the most important patrons and churches in Seville. While the majority of his artistic production was for religious institutions, he also created allegorical and genre scenes. Murillo’s paintings of urchins in the streets of Seville are p

A passenger plane-sized “void” has been discovered in the middle of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, where it has lain secret and untouched for 4,500 years, scientists revealed on Thursday. The space is one of four cavities, along with the king and queen’s chambers and “Grand Gallery”, now known to exist inside the giant monument constructed under pharaoh Khufu of ancient Egypt. “It is big,” said co-discoverer Mehdi Tayoubi of the ScanPyramids project, which has been exploring Khufu’s pyramid since October 2015 with non-invasive technology using subatomic particle scans. “It’s the size of a 200-seater airplane, in the heart of the pyramid,” Tayoubi told AFP of the discovery, published in science journal Nature. Towering over the Giza complex on Cairo’s outskirts alongside smaller pyramids for kings Menkaure and Khafre and the Great Sphinx, the Khufu’s pyramid is the oldest and only surviving construction among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and one of the largest buildings ever ere