A winning project in the 2021 Idea Challenge by Civic Europe - one of 18 projects selected for funding out of over 550 contributions from 12 countries. The Danube Design Lab brings architecture & design education to socially excluded youth.

Simone Bingemer’s first (and only) self-portrait creates a web of gazes that crosses generations and tells a deeply personal story.

With brushes, sticks, fingers and cloth, Atanas Matsoureff creates haunting watercolors that show the past is so close, we can touch it.

What if digital learning was not a compromise, but a chance to achieve even more? Dr Sanjeev Khagram shares a radical vision for transforming higher education and vocational learning. He is the Director-General and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University. Dr Khagram explains why educators have reason to be excited about digital learning, and what they need to do to make the most of it.

Parks, palaces, and palm-lined promenades: what to see and do if you have a couple of days in Seville.

Лични впечатления, породени от десетина години живот между две култури.

Alma Thomas was the first African-American woman to be featured in the White House art collection, the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the first person to graduate from Howard University with a degree in Fine Art. During her life, she never fit into a certain artistic category, and the problem still stands of whether she belongs on the ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ of twentieth century art.

The protagonist of Sisters of the Cross, Marakulin, falls on hard times and leaves his nice apartment in the Burkov House to move into a rented room three floors up. This change in circumstances gives him a new perspective on the city. He is exposed to the city’s noise — “that wearisome sound of iron hitting against stone,” and to black soot that accumulates between his windowpanes. Burkov House’s various faces reveal the strikingly different life-worlds contained within St. Petersburg’s fabric.

Cavin-Morris Gallery was founded by a couple, Shari Cavin and Randall Morris, around 1980. The project unites their differences. “We have places where we diverge,” Cavin tells me as we chat in a sunlit private room behind the Chelsea gallery. Objects ranging from birdhouses to ritual masks line the walls. Cavin remembers that one of their first fights as a couple was over a Haitian wax skull.

In post-Communist Bulgaria, where I grew up, I often encountered traces of the fallen regime’s language. Houses marked “Exemplary Home” with a special blue plaque. Old newspapers reporting that agricultural brigades had overfulfilled their quotas. An inscription on a monument claiming that our republic needs friendship with the USSR just as every living being needs air and sunlight. The most ridiculous slogans, once posted on factory walls, are now circulated as internet jokes: "Communism is inevitable." "Every jar of compote: a fist in the face of imperialism!"

It is the last day of the 2017 Outsider Art Fair. With sixty-two exhibitors, this is the event’s biggest iteration so far. As we wander around the Metropolitan Pavilion, pushed along by the crowds, the exhibitors’ booths reveal their treasures: Domenico Zindato’s rhythmic patterns and Hiroyuki Doi’s circles. M’onma‘s nightmarish clown masks and Gil Batle’s carved eggshells. A brochure for the fair invites us to see our visit as a “road trip” across the United States and beyond.

The plot unfolds over a few days in Yanji—in a hotel, a couple of restaurants, and on the bank of the Tumen River, which separates North Korea and China. In addition to the two long-lost brothers, we meet a Chinese Korean woman from Yanji who is bitter about the prejudice she experienced in the South; the overly zealous “Mr. Reunification,” who bores his companions with his utopian pronouncements; and a cynical businessman engaged in mysterious trade with the North.

Hiroyuki Doi’s first drawing workshop in the United States is held in the Folk Art Museum’s Collections and Education Center, on a narrow industrial street in Long Island City, Queens. The street is lined with factories -- I sense the hum of machinery and the faint smell of acetone. I find the number and ring a bell. I enter a dimly lit space. Quilts by American folk artists hang on the walls. Doi is sitting at the far end of the room in semi-darkness, with his sunglasses on.

The figure of the nineteenth-century urban explorer, popularized by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, embodied a new, detached way of being. The Parisian flaneur would drift through the crowds, keeping a low profile, and record small dramas of urban life such as a prostitute negotiating with a client, flirtations in private boxes at the opera, or the bodies of wretched folk pulled daily out of the Seine. Like a detective without a case, the flaneur would stroll down the tree-lined boulevards or sit in cafes, cool and alert, observing the new social relations and the overall waning of affect. Not so in Russia, judging by Alexei Remizov’s 1910 tale, Sisters of the Cross. In Remizov’s novel, Marakulin, an unemployed clerk, finds a reason for living in being present for those around him and witnessing their suffering.

West 20th Street has one of the highest concentrations of art galleries in Manhattan. On a cool, misty November evening, most windows were brightly lit. The only dark spot was the former Bayview Correctional Facility on the corner of 11th Avenue, whose solid brick walls guard its hidden past. That evening, Gil Batle’s debut show, "Hatched in Prison," opened at the Ricco Maresca Gallery across the street from Bayview.

After John Kayser’s death in 2007, stacks of home-developed black and white photographs and cheap drugstore prints surfaced among his personal effects. Kayser’s oeuvre could easily have ended up as pornographic curios in a California garage sale. Yet something differentiates his work from clichéd amateur erotica or mere smut. In part, it is his vision of femininity. It is also the fact that Kayser works with an awareness of his medium. His compositions include inside jokes about the nature of representation or the entanglement of high and low genres.