Where are the women on Wikipedia?; a riveting image of stillness in a time of war; a campaign for one million men to rise up against violence against women; Picasso’s never-before-exhibited “Portrait of A Lady”; and Dame Maggie Smith talks aging.

By Pamela Forsythe

The mosaic’s center is populated by lions, an elephant, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, a bull, and a mythical sea creature, the Ketos. The bottom end depicts the sea, with inhabitants familiar to the people of Lod: fish, dolphins, and a fearsome whale, mouth agape, poised to swallow one of two ships.

Fashion in the Impressionist era shunned the old adage that less is more. Instead, it was a period of exaggerated silhouettes, volume, exuberance, vibrancy, and, yes, lots of excess. For those of you who relish a 19th-century French feast full of pleats, petticoats, corsets, muslins, gloves, laces, ruches, ball gowns, and oh yes, parasols.

In a show that purports to show how Tokyo was transformed into an international center for avant-garde art, my father didn’t get the full story that the curators had set out to tell. I will even venture to write that he “misread” some of the artwork. But my father saw and felt the tragedy of Japan’s past through the artwork in his own way.

“I go into my studio every day and play with my muse. I draw the way I drew at Rhode Island School of Design, every morning, like a meditation. The phone rings, I paint, the phone rings again—it’s the fabricator. I daydream, I’m hungry, a visitor stops by with marble remains of a church, I’m hungry, I cast. I pace around thinking I’m not working, but I’m really processing fairy dust.”

Feminism is a vitally important aspect of the current exhibition of 75 works by women artists at the Seattle Art Museum. The Guerrilla Girls’ poster puts the problem succinctly: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”

Janet Goldner shared with us, in “Finding Home: West Africa,” that the year she spent in West Africa was pivotal—one of the more life-changing periods of her life. It was 1973 and she was 20 years old. In this installation of “Finding Home,” she reflects on her adventurous 21st birthday, spent in Togo.

My first journey in West Africa remains a pivotal experience of my life and is still a source of inspiration and resonance for me. In Africa I was relieved to find, as I had suspected, that there are many ways to organize life.

Ceramic artist Julia Kunin talks about a series of vases she has produced using metallic eosin glazes—and about a show of Hungarian ceramics she is bringing to New York.

Julia Kunin’s sculptures are made of castings from the natural world and special metallic glazes from Hungary, evoking themes of beauty and decay, sensuality and nature. These ceramic structures are glazed with special metallic glazes from Hungary that create luminescent, often iridescent, effects. WVFC recently met with the artist to discover how she achieves these unusual glazes.

Until next month, everyone who walks along the High Line over West 21st Street, literally, passes through Sze’s engaging artwork. You might want to make sure you do, too.

By Diane Vacca

This week, we spotlight more fantasies from the Fashion Institute of Technology exhibit—all of them dramatic, some of them delightfully wild.

If you are interested in history, enjoy vintage black-and-white photographs, or just like a good New York story, make sure to see “The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-51,” at the Jewish Museum in New York City through March 25.

By Julia Kay

When we learned that our former artist-in-residence was presenting at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, we realized that an update was seriously overdue.

    Back in December when it opened, I went to see Sarah Sze’s show at Asia Society, Infinite Line. The first time I saw the show was on a sunny afternoon with my husband. I eagerly noticed the details of the artwork and mentally made what I would call a visual overview of the [...]