Daniel Huntington towered over the New York art world in the nineteenth century, serving as president of the National Academy of Design and the Century Association.  He began as a landscape painter working in the style of the Hudson River School, but soon expanded his repertoire to include history painting, portraiture, and literary subjects.  Cooper...

The identity of the sitter for this composition remains unknown. However, subtle details of the subject’s facial expression accentuate a sense of introspection and melancholy. Distinct contours of the jaw and cheek bones, lips, nose, and eyes were first drawn in graphite. Soft tones of cream and white paint (of varying consistencies and amounts) developed...

For more than a decade, Dutch designer Joris Laarman and his team at Joris Laarman Lab have been looking to nature for information and inspiration. As he writes in the newly published book Joris Laarman Lab, “our digital age makes it possible to not just use nature as a stylistic reference, but to actually use the...

Elegant contrast is the defining characterstic of Korean sculptor, artist, and furniture designer Byung Hoon Choi’s body of work. This delicate black ink and gray wash drawing is no exception. The opposing forms, textures, and colors of the two geometries in this preparatory sketch for a bench produce a meditative composition echoed in Choi’s final...

“It is, indeed, a tribute to the appeal of the sheer granite walls of Katahdin that Church should have made so many studies of this region alone.”[1] -Myron Avery, writer and Maine adventurer American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900) began visiting the region around Mt. Katahdin, Maine in 1852.  While Church is renowned for...

Though it is frequently lauded as the tallest skyscraper designed by a woman in the world, Chicago’s Aqua Tower is worthy of praise beyond the gender of its architect, Jeanne Gang, a MacArthur fellow and winner of the 2013 National Design Award in Architecture. The key aspects of Gang’s LEED certified design, which explores the...