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Arts & Culture / Art & Artists

Resurrection Bay, Alaska (1939), by Rockwell Kent

Art Meets Science

Art Chronicles Glaciers As They Disappear

The Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington, is exhibiting 75 works of art pulled from the past two centuries—all themed around ice

The Peacock Room Comes to America: Exhibiting Freer’s Bibles

The Man Who Viewed the Bible as Art

The Washington Codex, now on display at the Freer gallery, became one of the earliest chapters in Charles Freer’s appreciation of beauty and aesthetics

Fishing net at Alaska’s Gore Point

Art Meets Science

Artists Join Scientists on an Expedition to Collect Marine Debris

Now, they are creating beautiful works from the trash they gathered on the 450-nautical-mile journey in the Gulf of Alaska

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill by Yousuf Karsh, 1941

The Day Winston Churchill Lost His Cigar

Thanks to a gift of over 100 photographs, the National Portrait Gallery celebrates Yousuf Karsh’s iconic photography with an installation of 27 portraits

Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher captures tears of grief, joy, laughter and irritation in extreme detail. Above: Tears of timeless reunion

Art Meets Science

The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears

Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher captures tears of grief, joy, laughter and irritation in extreme detail

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From Colonel Sanders to Grace Kelly: Iconic American Portraits by Yousuf Karsh

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition on Yousuf Karsh will display a rotating selection of Karsh portraits until November 4, 2014

Art Meets Science

Do Our Brains Find Certain Shapes More Attractive Than Others?

A new exhibition in Washington, D.C., claims that humans have an affinity for curves—and there is scientific data to prove it

Mood: experimental. Desired quality: active.

These Abstract Portraits Were Painted By An Artificial Intelligence Program

The Painting Fool, a computer program, can create portraits based on its mood, assess its work and learn from its mistakes

These Spectacular Cutaways Give You An Insider’s View of Your Food

Nathan Myhrvold and a team of photographers have sliced meats, vegetables, pots, pans and ovens in half to produce stunning cross-sections of cooking

Horseshoe crab

Animal Specimens, From Fish to Birds to Mammals, Get Inked

Inspired by Japanese fish rubbings, two University of Texas biologists make spectacular prints of a variety of species at different stages of decay

Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher uses a powerful scanning electron microscope to capture all of a bee’s microscopic structures in stunning detail. Above: a bee’s antennae sockets, magnified 43 times.

What Does A Bee Look Like When It’s Magnified 3000 Times?

Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher uses a powerful microscope to capture all of a bee’s microscopic structures and textures in stunning detail

Todd Oldham (left) is a designer and president of L-7 Designs who announced the award, David Fischer (right) is the CEO of Grief Inc who accepted the award for PAck h2O.

Cooper-Hewitt Announces Design Award Winners

As part of National Design Week, National Design award winners celebrated their achievements with a gala held October 17

You might be curious, is this something macroscopic or microscopic? It’s actually the wing of a green darner dragonfly, as seen through a scanning electron microscope.

Macro or Micro? Test Your Sense of Scale

A geographer and a biologist at Salem State University team up to curate a new exhibition, featuring confounding views from both satellites and microscopes

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Why We Gave Susan Seubert the Keys to our Instagram Account

Who wouldn’t want to transport themselves to Hawaii via their smartphone?

“Alexis”

This Photographer Shoots Portraits With a Thermal Camera

Artist Linda Alterwitz uses a camera that detects radiant heat, instead of light, uncovering hidden thermal signatures in everyday scenes

Defrosting the Crests of Inca City, LAT: -81.5° LONG: 296.3° “The nature of this polygonal network, unique on Mars, remains poorly understood, but seems to be linked to volcanic dykes covered by eolian sand. These terrains are close to the South pole and undergo springtime defrosting in dark patches that become progressively larger as temperatures climb,” writes geophysicist Nicolas Mangold in This is Mars.

This Is Mars in Extremely High Resolution

French designer Xavier Barral pored over 30,000 images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, selecting the most appealing for his book

Artist Nickolay Lamm’s depiction of a polar-grizzly hybrid

What Would a Cross Between a Polar Bear and a Grizzly Really Look Like?

As climate changes and Arctic sea ice melts, species shift habitats and may interbreed. Lamm digitally manipulates photographs to imagine these hybrids

A calcified flamingo, preserved by the highly basic waters of Tanzania’s Lake Natron and photographed by Nick Brandt

This Alkaline African Lake Turns Animals into Stone

Photographer Nick Brandt captures haunting images of calcified animals, preserved by the extreme waters of Tanzania’s Lake Natron

Oto Gillen, “untitled, (Vanitas),” 2007, traditional chromogenic print, mat board, UV glass, mahogany, screws

Snack on This: One Curator Has Devoted a Whole Show to Pizza Art

What is it about that slice of cheesy goodness that makes it such an appealing subject for these artists?

The Crab Pulsar, located in the Crab Nebula, is one of the celestial bodies Mickey Hart has translated into music.

Former Grateful Dead Drummer Mickey Hart Composes Music from the Sounds of the Universe

Hart teams up with a Nobel Prize-winning cosmologist to translate light and electromagnetic waves into octaves humans can hear

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