The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State announced the gift of a stunning landscape painting by William Louis Sonntag (1822-1900) from Hilary Peery Vesell. Hilary donated Autumn Landscape, 1864, in honor of her late father Dr. Elliot Vesell, who served for thirty-two years as the founding chair of Pharmacology at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and twenty-two years as assistant dean of graduate studies at the Penn State College of Medicine. He was recognized as an Evan Pugh Professor, the University’s highest honor, and later a professor emeritus. Dr. Vesell published more than 350 articles on pharmacogenomics and received many awards and honorary degrees including an honorary degree from Penn State University. Dr. Vesell also edited several books and was a scholar of American art. His first publication on American art was written the summer between graduating from Harvard College and starting Harvard Medical Sc

The Bruce Museum’s newest exhibition, From Butterflies to Battleships, displays the work of four singular American photographers: Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans, Patrick Nagatani, and Brett Weston. From Butterflies to Battleships showcases the tremendous diversity of directions taken by photographers in the twentieth century, whether employing the camera in a documentary mode to record insect development and to chronicle historic events, or experimenting with the technology to create abstract or composite images. Organized by Stephanie Guyet, Zvi Grunberg Resident Fellow 2018-2019, the exhibition consists entirely of photographs from the Bruce Museum’s permanent collection. “Given that the Bruce is a place for both aesthetic and scientific inquiry, I wanted to create an exhibition that tapped into that dual mission. Since photography is a practice that lies at the intersection of art and science, and

Lying on a workshop counter that is closed to the public at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum’s annex near Washington Dulles airport, Neil Armstrong’s gloves look almost as good as new. You can hardly tell they made a trip to the Moon and back 50 years ago. To their side is the slightly yellowed “Snoopy Cap” (formally known as a “communications carrier”) worn by crewmate Buzz Aldrin. The space suit worn by Michael Collins, Apollo 11’s third astronaut, is in near mint condition. But the blue silicon fingertips of Armstrong’s gloves have begun to degrade — a process that for now remains invisible to the naked eye — as has Collins’ suit. “After 50 years, we do know that the rubber i

In the exhibition “The Mysteries of Material: Kirchner, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff”, the Städel Museum explores the reciprocal relationships between woodcut and wooden sculpture in the oeuvres of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Erich Heckel (1883– 1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976). What the two very different artistic mediums have in common is wood, the material intimately linked with the art of German Expressionism. The three co-founders of the “Brücke” artists’ group became involved with this material by way of the woodcut – a printmaking method in which a relief is cut into a wooden board or block. What appealed to Kirchner, Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff was the great experimental potential of this printing technique, as well as the work with the material. Engagement with the characteristics of various wood types as