On August 24th, 79 CE, Vesuvius buried Pompeii. Among its survivors: the Alexander Mosaic (c.100 BC), a vivid Roman copy of Hellenistic art. Alexander charges Darius, frozen in stone. It's an ancient drama preserved by ash, still confronting us across millennia. #art #arthistory

Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free (1867) breaks chains and conventions. A self-liberated Black couple rises as triumphant equals. Sculpted in white marble, this radical vision defied racist norms and declared: freedom belongs to us, not gifted by them. #ArtHistory #art

It's Chess Day! Meet Sofonisba Anguissola: a Renaissance pioneer who painted her sisters mid-match in "The Chess Game" (1555) More than play, it's legacy: a quiet checkmate against the idea that strategy belongs to men. Art, like chess, is a game of foresight. #art #chess #arthistory

Today is Rembrandt's birthday (b. 1606); a master of shadow and spectacle. The Night Watch (1642) wasn’t set at night at all, as restorations reveal that it's a daylight march, frozen in chiaroscuro. Commissioned by the guards themselves, breaking tradition by having natural motion and story. #art

Bastille Day recalls not just revolt, but resistance to rule that crushes the self. Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People shows her barefoot and bold: a symbol that rights are not granted by power, but seized from those who would hoard them.

Young Girl Reading (c.1770) - Jean-Honoré Fragonard On #MalalaDay, we reflect on how reading itself can be revolutionary. To seek knowledge is to resist a world that thrives on silence. This Rococo portrait whispers a truth: the act of learning is defiance. #GirlsEducation #ArtHistory #Art

Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge (1857) First published in 1857, just before Japan’s ports opened to the West, Hiroshige’s print captures Edo in flux. As summer rains swept the city, so too did change. This fleeting moment of shelter and motion embodies elegant impermanence. #ArtHistory #Art

On Canada Day, I look to Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore. Her nindinawemaganidog series transforms past performances into portraits of grief, resistance, and matriarchy. Echoes of care for stolen land and stolen lives. We are all witnesses. You can witness too rebeccabelmore.com #CanadaDay

🎨 Paint with Pride at #PrideToronto is a living canvas of queer joy. One standout: Here, Together, Always by Caylen Monroe, bold portraits that demand space for 2SLGBTQ+ life, loud and bright. We are the art. Always have been. www.pridetoronto.com/art-zone caylenmonroe.com #StART #QueerArt

Outsider art - works by self-taught creators once sidelined - is finally getting its due. Bill Traylor, born into slavery, drew Woman with Umbrella and Man on Crutch in his 80s. No training, just vision. Raw, rhythmic, and real. The canon is cracking open. #OutsiderArt #Art #ArtHistory

🧵The quilts of #GeesBend bold and deeply rooted in African American tradition, turning scraps into stories. Made by generations of Black women in rural Alabama, these fiber masterpieces now hang in museums. This is craft as resistance, memory, and art. #Art www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-qu...

On this Summer Solstice, we celebrate Indigenous wisdom. Morrisseau’s Shaman and Disciples (1979) shows a guide linking spiritual realms: lines radiate between figures and divided circles symbolize cosmic balance. A vivid statement on ancestral knowledge passed down. #NIPD #IndigenousArt

Norman Rockwell’s "The Problem We All Live With" showed Ruby’s courage and the cost of defiance. It’s now 2025, and those shouting “freedom” now march with flags and rifles, silencing dissent. The message remains: obey, or be made to. #art #NoKing

Thornton Dial’s Top of the Line (Steel). A tornado of grief and rage. Rope-bodies claw through chaos, red slashes like open wounds. Patriotism flickers, faint and frayed. It’s not just memory, it’s now. We haven't learned. It never ended. #art #RodneyKing #LA

🎨 Montreal's MURAL Festival (June 5–15) turns Saint-Laurent Blvd into a living art gallery. The city’s walls become stories painted in color, history, and heart. Wish I was nearby to go see. This 2022 video is great! muralfestival.com www.youtube.com/watch?app=de... #MURAL2025 #MontrealArt

Isaac Julien’s I Dream a World at SF’s de Young cuts deep. Queer memory, Black futurism, and sensual defiance, all in motion. It’s art that shows and claims identity. During Pride, it reminds us: we don’t just belong, we shape the world. www.famsf.org/exhibitions/... #Pride2025 #IsaacJulien

Skawennati’s She Gathers the Rain (2018) reimagines Indigenous futures through a cyberpunk lens. Now on view in Welcome to the Dreamhouse at the National Gallery of Canada, it blends Haudenosaunee storytelling with virtual worlds. textilesandmateriality.com/2025/05/22/t... #art

This piece, Across the Pond by Jon Byrer, channels Van Gogh with a modern pulse: stark trees, a glowing sky, and village warmth. But it’s Byrer’s own swirling, sketchy enamel style that makes it sing. It's a storm of light and shadow that I adore. #Art #Painting

On Memorial Day, we remember the fallen and how we hold them. Maya Lin carved their names into stone, not to freeze them in time, but to let us see ourselves in their reflection. A black granite scar. A silent chorus. 58,000 stories, still speaking. #MemorialArt #Vietnam #Art

Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised is an AI dreamstate built from 200 years of MoMA’s collection. Not replacing artists, but rethinking authorship. Is this art to you? Because to me, it’s undeniable presence. It’s here with immensity, whether you admit it or not. refikanadol.com/works/unsupe... #art #AI

Stepping into Before Yesterday We Could Fly at The Met during #TeensTakeTheMet must feel like time-traveling through Black history and futures. A powerful blend of art and storytelling that speaks to our roots and dreams. #Afrofuturism #YouthVoices www.metmuseum.org/perspectives...

Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt (1886) is survival code stitched by a freed Black woman in Georgia. A cosmic patchwork of faith, folklore, and memory. Quilting here becomes archive, protest, and myth, all wrapped in cotton and truth. www.si.edu/object/1885-... #art #arthistory

Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting shows the body in a confrontation. It’s Bacon’s screaming pope if she were real, raw, and refused to shut up. Her work reminds us that reality is distortion. We’re not marble busts on pedestals. We’re sinew and pulse and breath. And we deserve to be seen that way.

The Parakeet — one of several polychrome woodblock copies made in ca. 1900 from works by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), a Japanese painter of the mid-Edo period notable for his striking modern aesthetic. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/polychrome-woodblocks-of-ito-jakuchu-birds

#OnThisDay in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was opened to the public in Paris. Not to be outdone, London decided to get a new tower of their own and held a competition to design it, with some interesting results! publicdomainreview.org/collection/c... #OTD

Ralph McQuarrie gave myth to machines - Star Wars felt ancient because he painted it like legend. Today’s art lost the grit, the breath, the myth. Take a moment to appreciate what Star Wars worldbuilding once looked like: 🔗 www.iamag.co/star-wars-th... #art #arthistory #StarWars #StarWarsDay

Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s Nkyinkyim Installation is made of clay, sorrow, and the weight of millions. Each face honors the stolen, the silenced. It doesn’t just remember the transatlantic slave trade - it demands we feel it. www.cipdh.gob.ar/memorias-sit... #BlackHistory #Nkyinkyim #Art #ArtHistory

Carla Gannis reimagines Bosch’s triptych for the digital age in The Garden of Emoji Delights. It’s chaotic, beautiful, & unsettling-just like us online. A pop-Baroque fever dream of modern identity, absurdity, and digital sin. 🌀👁️🌐 videoart.net/the-garden-o... #DigitalBaroque #Art #ArtHistory

In The Apple Gatherer, McNicoll paints a moment of reaching - into light, into labour, into the everyday sublime. Her work reminds us: Impressionists aren’t just history. They’re painting near you. Go see. Reach out. Admire something quietly radiant. #Art #CanadianArt

What is art provenance? A Getty Research Institute case study and a new Smarthistory video: youtu.be/pZWRxUxghVY #art #arthistory #Smarthistory #Getty #GRI #provenance

“I Am a Man.” Not an asset. Not a tool. A living thing, standing in the street with hands blistered by labor and heart split by silence. Protest art doesn’t decorate-it declares. This was May Day’s cry: I am worth more than what you squeeze from me. #history #MayDay

Rothko painted to reach the soul, not the market. But he was met with wallets, commissions, and silence. One of his works would go on to sell for over $180 million - yet he was left empty, unreimbursed. What he gave, no price could repay. So he left us. No refund. Just red. #art #arthistory

Mount Athos isn’t just a place - it's a living legacy. A sanctuary for Orthodox monasticism, where centuries of faith, art, and ascetic life converge. From its sacred icons to its autonomous spirit, it remains a profound beacon of tradition and timeless devotion. #History

Karl Hofer’s Three Female Figures in a Landscape captures a quiet resilience - a reminder that even in fractured worlds, beauty and solidarity remain. A timeless reflection, now reimagined in bloom at #ArtAlive2025 #SDMA #ArtAlive www.sdmart.org/artalive/

A painting that breathes in riddles-Primavera. Venus presides, Cupid fires blindly, and Flora blossoms from a stolen kiss. 138 plants, each a whisper of intent. Hung once above a Medici’s bed. Spring eternal. Beauty unsolved. #Art #Arthistory

Everyone remembers the melting clocks, but it’s the limp, faceless self and the swarm of ants that haunt me. Dali didn’t just paint warped time; he showed how it eats at us. Memory rots slow, quiet. Time bends, but decay stays hungry. The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali #art #arthistory

Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827) is Romanticism’s love of chaos and ruin. Inspired by Byron’s play, it imagines the Assyrian king torching his palace-lovers, art, animals-rather than surrender. It's opulent, brutal, and still echoes in how we destroy what we fear to lose. #art #arthistory

Picasso’s Theatre Curtain for Parade (1931) is so unlike his usual work: bold, almost cartoonish, with a surreal edge. It feels theatrical, fragmented, maybe even mocking. Was he celebrating the absurd or critiquing it? #art #arthistory

Angle your phone left ‘til the skull comes into focus. Or don’t. Either way, the discord’s on the table: science, religion, mortality, politics - all duking it out on a cosmic chessboard. Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) is a Renaissance mind game. #Art #ArtHistory

🌿✨ Zen gardening, childhood wonder, and stacking rocks in Tears of the Kingdom - what do they all have in common? In my latest Retroglyphs video, I explore the Zen philosophy behind Zelda and why play still matters. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfp5... #Zelda #Retroglyphs #TOTK #Art #ArtHistory

Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth - how did I miss this? Featured in Westworld, 2001, and more. The haunting landscape begs projection: why is she there? What’s in that house? And it's real, at the Farnsworth Art Museum. I’ve got some learning to do. #art #arthistory

Happy #WorldWaterDay! Fetch yourself a big glass of the good stuff and take a look at the watery wonder which is Hamonshu (1903), a Japanese book of wave and ripple designs: publicdomainreview.org/collection/h...

Raft of the Medusa (1819) - by Gericault captured a nation’s neglect by survivors clinging to hope, abandoned by those in power. Over 200 years later, we still see the raft. Different waters, same storms. Who do we leave behind when the tide rises? #art #arthistory

Saint Paul Preaching at Ephesus by Eustache Le Sueur captures a the fiery destruction of pagan literature Books, knowledge, and education cast into flames. Centuries later, people still burn ideas they fear, erase lessons we should learn. History repeats, and ignorance never fades #art #arthistory

Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836) is more than a landscape - it’s a crossroads of wilderness and civilization, storm and calm, chaos and order A panoramic view from Mt. Holyoke, it captures America’s uneasy balance between untouched nature and human expansion. A masterpiece of the Hudson River School

This was challenging to write, as there's definitely an impostor syndrome with identity. And while there's variations of how this is experienced, I feel compelled to share to connect because I know I'm not alone in that feeling.

Goya knew the deal: when reason sleeps, monsters wake. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters isn’t just about nightmares; it’s about the power & peril of imagination. What happens when we stop questioning? When fear takes the wheel? #ArtHistory #Art #ReasonVsMadness

They say 'Baroque' comes from the Portuguese for an uneven pearl. Seems fitting for Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring - a masterpiece of light, shadow, and mystery. ✨ #ArtHistory #Art

Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire (1839) isn’t just a painting - it’s a farewell. A war hero, now a ghost, towed to its grave by industrial progress. The setting sun, the cold tugboat - it’s the death of an era, beauty fading into steel and smoke. I LOVE TURNER SO MUCH! #Art #ArtHistory

Oh how disappointing this was - @jackboxgames.com Please tell me there will be another attempt at this