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Category / Art & Design Awesomeness

Sleeping in the Archives: The Met’s Forgotten Fashion Brands

I’ve been digging through the archives of the Met Museum again. You’d be surprised how many fascinating stories of dormant fashion brands are buried in there. They ceased to exist for a variety of reasons, but many of the individual designs kept in the collection reveal a direct path of inspiration for well-known designers today.…

Artist of the Week: A Janitor’s Mysterious Masterpiece

James Hampton’s magnum opus was discovered posthumously in a rented garage he had converted into his studio. The installation features over 180 individual found objects, mostly collected from dumpsters on his way home in the early hours after midnight, when he would clock out from his janitor duties at the GSA in Washington DC. The…

Artist of the Week: Harlem’s Horace Pippin

Horace Pippin was an artist who was gifted with the ability to express his work with an unrefined social realism and dreamlike playfulness of touch that in reality, would mask a darker narrative. The grandson of African American slaves and a decorated World War One veteran who was registered as disabled after being wounded in…

Time Machine Art Show: Surrealist Exhibition of Paris, 1938

The 30’s was a booming, sensational time for the bizarre and avant garde – a high time for the flashing waves of surrealism before the dawn of the Second World War. Dali and Miro were still painting, Duchamp was on the scene, and Man Ray was producing photographs like the world had never seen before.…

Let’s Entertain the Theory of the Tartarian Empire for a Moment

What do you mean you’ve never heard of the lost civilization of Great Tartaria? It’s only one of the weirdest architectural conspiracy theories going. It seems there has been a monumental cover-up to hide the truth from us all about an ancient empire that’s hiding in plain sight all around us – or so a…

Not Old World Europe, this is India’s Ghostly Town of Sidhpur

With their exquisite facades in pastel shades, replete with balconies, pointed gables and elaborate monograms, the Vohrawad mansions are a wonder to behold. One could easily be forgiven for assuming these grand dames stand somewhere in Europe, but today, we’re taking you to Sidhpur, in the Indian state of Gujarat. Almost deserted today, their decadent…

Meet Mrs. Madge Gill: The Outsider Artist Who Painted through the Spirit World

“Mediumistic Art.” It’s something we’d never heard of, until we uncovered the mysterious world of Mrs. Madge Gill. One of history’s most important outsider artists, Madge tended to her garden, her husband, and her children in what appeared to be the quiet life of a London housewife. But one day, she felt a stirring to…

Digging for Treasure (and Love) in New York City

Their’s is a love of strange and beautiful proportion. The kind measured in porcelain, peanut-sized dolls, and antiqued oysters as big as your face. “It’s hard to imagine a time when we’d stop digging,” says Belle, back-lit by a wall of technicolour glass bottles, “I mean it’s addictive. And when you have someone who gets…

A Forgotten Ode to the Little Paris Shopfront

I was walking along the Seine this weekend, slowing my pace for the lonely bouquinistes (the open-air booksellers that have squatted the quays of the river since the 18th century), when a dog-eared paperback caught my eye. Inside, it was filled with the most delightful illustrations of French boutiques from the 1920s; each storefront’s name inspired…

Moonlight Etchings of the Forgotten Artist who Taught Edward Hopper

Martin Lewis died in obscurity in 1962; a retired art teacher who had found some success in his early career, but was largely forgotten after the Great Depression took away the demand for his craft, leaving Lewis to spend his last three decades teaching other people how to etch. History chose Edward Hopper, but Martin…

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