Burkina Faso’s Diebedo Francis Kere will be the first African architect to design a temporary pavilion in London’s Hyde Park, a prestigious assignment given to a world-famous architect every year.Kere’s design is inspired by a tree in his hometown of Gando that serves as “a central meeting point for life,” the Serpentine Galleries said in a statement.“An expansive roof, supported by a central steel framework, mimics a tree’s canopy, allowing air to circulate freely while offering shelter against

A new blockbuster Vermeer exhibition which opens Wednesday aims to smash the myth that the Dutch master was a solitary genius who worked alone at home cut off from the world.The Louvre in Paris has gathered a third of the 17th century painter’s canvasses for the show -- the most ever shown in one place since his death -- where they will hang alongside nearly 60 painting by his friends, rivals and contemporaries.“We wanted to do away with the stereotype of Vermeer as ‘the Sphinx of Delft,’” said

“This offers you amazing moments,” said participant Oliver Ryan, who runs a New York corporate wellness company. “We did our first stretch, and there in the vast gallery was Perseus holding the head of Medusa. What hit me was this was the TV of ancient times, a frozen moment from a story everyone knew.”The Met commissioned the innovative Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company for the project. It was choreographed by the two women leading the workout -- Monica Bill Barnes herself and her dance partner,

The whimsical designs of the graffiti artist with the signature Yulier P. began to appear randomly on walls around Havana three years ago. The first ones were large abstract renderings of rabbits, their floppy ears outlined in black against chipped concrete.Now, there is hardly a neighborhood in the Cuban capital where you can’t find one of the sprawling works of Yulier P. They include enormous gaping mouths 2 yards (meters) high, or flowers mixed either with the image of a woman or in the hands

Fake news, Brexit and genitals: a Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition opening at the Tate Modern on Wednesday is an eclectic show that the edgy German artist says is as much about poetry and art as politics.“I want you to feel encouraged by the curiosity that I have for the world, to also not be afraid of the world and to not let fear be implanted in your brain,” the photographer said at a press preview.“The exhibition is not about politics. It is just as much about poetry, about art, about installatio

For 40 years, Joseph Young festooned public buildings, open spaces and private places across his adopted city of Los Angeles with dozens of brilliant, colorful mosaics, larger-than-life murals and towering sculptures.But the work the artist hoped he would be best remembered for was the Triforium. And he was, but for all the wrong reasons. From left: Tanner Blackman, Claire Evans, Jona Bechtolt and Tom Carroll, members of the Triforium project, pose with Joseph L. Young’s Triforium, a “polyphonop

NEW YORK (AP) - Some 80 years ago, the Nazis forced prominent German Jewish art gallery owner Max Stern to sell his family’s roughly 400-piece collection before he was exiled from his country.FBI agents on Wednesday returned one of those works, a 17th century oil painting by a Dutch master, to representatives of the Dr. and Mrs. Max Stern Foundation during a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.The recovery of Jan Frans Verzijl’s “Young Man As Bacchus’’ marks the 16th piece of S

English-language version of psychological thriller will be performed by US cast

NAPLES, Italy (AFP) -- Two Van Gogh masterpieces stolen in Amsterdam in 2002 and recovered last year in Italy will be on show in Naples from Tuesday until Feb. 26.The brief exhibition at the Capodimonte museum has been organized as a thank you to the southern city for the local police‘s role in tracking down the two small but hugely valuable and historically significant oil paintings.The works had gone unheard of from the time they were stolen in a daring raid on the Van Gogh Museum until they t

LONDON (AP) - It’s not often an artist finds himself occupying 12 rooms of London’s leading museum of British art and the front page of populist tabloid The Sun. But David Hockney is unique. For curators of a major retrospective opening this week at Tate Britain, Hockney is an innovator whose 60-year career has taken in sketching, painting, printmaking, photography and digital iPad experiments. His depictions of sun-dappled Los Angeles swimming pools and wooded Yorkshire hills are among the best