Tattoos can be a barrier for people getting out of prison. They can make it hard to find jobs, to feel safe in certain neighborhoods, to reconcile with family and to leave the past behind. Now there are programs to help inmates with tattoos wipe the slate clean. – NPR

On the third floor of Destination, a nightclub-turned-cultural center that’s one of the few such places in the country to expressly welcome queer people, is ART.Des, a (very rare) gallery that features Chinese art that addresses homosexuality. While there is censorship, says one artist, “perhaps it’s not as free as the West; but it’s not as closed as people think, either. We’re not North Korea.” – The New York Times

Reversing an earlier decision, the National Park Service has now denied an omnibus petition for 199 sites on public land near Moab, Utah to be listed in the National Register. The NPS agrees that the ancient petroglyphs are significant, but it now wants individual applications for each of the sites. – The Salt Lake Tribune

“A usually cheery online community of quilters has been ripped apart by a sewing challenge depicting a No. 2 pencil erasing the ‘in’ from the word injustice. Some members of the National Quilt Museum’s Block of the Month Club, which gives out quilting patterns from an array of artists, objected to the January block, claiming it introduced politics into the 13,400-person group. The design was created by the Social Justice Sewing Academy, a California nonprofit loosely tied to Black Lives Matter.” – The Washington Post

Doubts about the authenticity of the painting, which depicts the artist giving some serious side-eye, first arose in 1970. But research conducted jointly by the National Gallery of Norway (which owns the work) and the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has determined that the portrait is no forgery — and that it’s the only one van Gogh ever painted while hospitalized for psychosis. – Yahoo! (AFP)

Grain elevators were once an icon of Canada’s west: often painted a bright boxcar red, they stood in towns across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. As the tallest structures in the vast landscapes, they were visible from kilometers away and were known as “prairie castles” or “prairie cathedrals”. – The Guardian

By blurring out details from protest signs in an image of the 2017 Women’s March, including the name of President Trump and references to the female anatomy — a decision the Archives publicly apologized for on Saturday — it has damaged the faith many Americans, particularly women, may have had in its role as an impartial conservator of the nation’s records. – Washington Post

The Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa said that Saher Miahi’s identity did not fit with guidelines from its funders, the Hecht Foundation. The university rescheduled the talk for elsewhere. The artist said, “I was a student at this university and I’m still collaborating with it. Now, this museum is telling me that I don’t belong here.” The move was widely criticized by others on and off campus. – Hyperallergic

Newnan, Georgia, reacted to a neo-Nazi rally by putting up 17 large-scale banner portraits of people in the town – a diverse collection including African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Pakistani Americans. Not everyone dealt with that well, to put it mildly. – The New York Times

And the ultimate punishment to the art dealer, who may not actually go to jail as it’s his first offense: “The artwork is now property of the state and has been given to the Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid.” – BBC

The protestors are angry about the government’s proposed pension reforms, and they’ve shut down much of Paris on and off over the past six weeks. “‘Closing the Louvre to prevent tourists from visiting is very important because it’s the most visited museum in the world,’ said Christophe Benoit, 52, a protesting employee of France’s Culture Ministry, although he acknowledged that some visitors were’“very angry.'” – The New York Times

The whereabouts of “Portrait of a Lady” has been one of the art world’s biggest mysteries since the painting was stolen from the Ricci Oddi museum in 1997. – The New York Times

“A basketball-player-size wooden idol that allegedly escaped destruction by the Spanish conquistadors is real — but it may not be quite what people suspected. The statue is even older than thought, and may have been worshipped by the people who came before the Inca. And belying the grisly lore that surrounds it, the so-called Pachacamac idol was painted with cinnabar, not drenched in blood, the researchers found.” – Live Science

All told, glass buildings are responsible for up to one billion bird deaths in the United States each year. At a time when two-thirds of North American birds are in danger of extinction from climate change, it’s no exaggeration to say that glass architecture is a threat to life on Earth. Yet buildings sheathed in smooth glass walls continue to go up, not because they are cheaper to construct or better from an architectural standpoint, but because they embody modern luxury. – The New Republic

“The thieves who stole priceless jewels from the Dresden Green Vault treasury at the end of last year are allegedly trying to sell some of the loot on the dark web. Investigators from an Israeli security company claim they made contact with the criminals online, but authorities in Germany say it has received no evidence of the ransom demand.” – artnet

“Decades before becoming New York’s Pied Piper for nonobjective art, he had established a reputation in Europe for navigating and remaking realism in his own image.” – Hyperallergic

“Eric Wirth, vice president of the Guild of French Architects, … forcefully argued that wood — rather than concrete, material, or other materials that have been suggested — was the most ecological and structurally sound material during at a hearing at the National Assembly this week. …’If the structure had been made of steel, there would be no cathedral to speak of today,’ he said. In a fire, ‘iron holds for half an hour, an hour, and then writhes, pulls on the walls and collapses everything.'” – artnet

Says the former master builder (i.e., chief preservation officer) of Cologne Cathedral, “The risk of further collapse is quite realistic. The vault is unlikely to collapse as a whole, but more parts could come down. What most people don’t realize is that heat can also damage stone. Intense heat dissolves — simply put — the structure of the stone.” What’s more, the scaffolding that was in use for a restoration project before last April’s catastrophic blaze “was completely welded into place by the intense heat generated by the fire” and the stone walls could be damaged further as that scaffolding is removed. – Deutsche Welle

Just one business day after articles were published detailing accusations that he propositioned subordinates in Erie, Pa. and in his previous post at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and after a petition demanding his ouster attracted hundreds of co-signers over the weekend, 31-year-old Joshua Helmer is “no longer employed at the Erie Art Museum,” according to a brief statement on the museum’s Facebook page. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

A statement signed by hundreds of current and former employees says that “the reporting in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer seems to barely scratch the surface of the abuses perpetrated by this man.” Helmer, who left the Philadelphia Museum abruptly in 2018 and was later banned from the building, has been ousted as director of the Erie (Pa.) Art Museum in the wake of those reports. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

A tour of some of the many paintings created in 1924. – Hyperallergic

Cecilia Alemani, born in Milan in 1977, has directed the High Line’s art program since 2011, where she has commissioned large-scale works by artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Carol Bove, El Anatsui and Sarah Sze. – The New York Times

Britain, with London as its hub, is the second-biggest art trading nation after the United States, with 21 percent of global auction and dealer sales in 2018, according to the report. But will the new regulatory framework put British-based dealers and auction houses at a competitive disadvantage? – The New York Times

Walker has emerged as one of the country’s preeminent voices for the arts, and social justice, and for new strategies to ameliorate inequality. He has delivered the annual Nancy Hanks Lecture sponsored by Americans for the Arts and was the subject of a glossy profile in the New York Times titled “The Man With the $13 Billion Checkbook.” And in September, the National Gallery of Art announced that Walker would be joining its board, one of the smallest and most exclusive governing bodies in the art world, with only nine members, four of them ex officio positions, including the chief justice of the United States and the secretaries of the Treasury and State departments. – Washington Post

The direct legacy of the ancient Iranians can be found across the Middle East, the Caucasus and Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. – The Conversation

Starting in the early 1970s, Baldessari became one of the first professors at the California Institute of Arts, a school in Santa Clarita that became a locus of artistic experimentation on the West Coast when the art scene there was perceived as less significant than New York’s. Baldessari, famously, taught a class whose name signified a lot: “Post-Studio Art.” – ARTnews

“The technologies allowed me to show things to you—for example, how past landscapes can change overtime, how you can look from the scale of a beetle, how you can change your perspective. These things are what this technology is very good at. You can also jump around in time and you can slow down time in virtual reality—you can change your scale in different dimensions.” – Artnet