a selection of recently published articles

New York Times: Art Basel’s Other Exhibition Hall Is a City
It was an odd yet endearing interaction that would likely have stuck out in anyone’s memory. While in the countryside outside Oaxaca, Mexico, almost a decade ago, the Mexican artist Rodrigo Hernández saw a pigeon on the street. All of a…

New York Times: Galleries Introduce Themselves at TEFAF, Virtually
LONDON — For fans of Pre-Raphaelite art — the mid-19th-century London-born Victorian artistic movement — Martin Beisly’s gallery in St. James’s is a fantastical treasure trove of sumptuous paintings, drawings and sculpture.Works…

New York Times: Back at the Barre, Lessons Learned
LONDON — When students at the Royal Ballet School scattered to their homes around the globe during the first British lockdown last spring, classes went virtual and, at first, proved quite tricky.It was not just about time differences, with…

New York Times: In Zimbabwe, Women Dig for Aquamarine
As Iver Rosenkrantz and Patrick Tendayi Zindoga drove through the fertile countryside of northern Zimbabwe one day in late 2018, they noticed something out of the ordinary: A woman who had just started plowing a field with a few oxen under…

New York Times: An Early Fascination With Caves Leads to a World Stage
Kabage Karanja had one of his earliest and most profound experiences when, as a teenage member of Hodari Boys, a youth mentoring club, he camped in the Suswa Caves, northwest of Nairobi, Kenya.It was a special memory for Mr. Karanja, now an…

New York Times: Sarah Ball’s Simple Portraits Hint at Complex Stories
LONDON — Even if Britain had lifted its Covid-19 international travel ban in time, Sarah Ball would still not have been able to accompany her work to Frieze New York this week.That’s because in February the British painter — who is also…

FT Weekend: Surrogacy, America and Me
LONDON: Two decades ago, I got a tattoo of an Akua’ba statuette on my inner right ankle. A female fertility symbol in Ghana, the disc-headed figure comes from the Akan legend of Akua, a woman who went to a priest for advice because she was…

New York Times: How a New Year’s Concert Was Composed
While there won’t be an in-house audience for the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert this time around, classical music lovers across the globe will still be able to experience it — and applaud the musicians — together.Viewers…

Foreign Policy: Girls Have Greater Access to Education Than Ever, But Equality Still Long Way Off
LONDON—When Adelaide Tsogo Masenya was six, she switched primary schools. Her local school, Dr Knak Primary School, in the poor Johannesburg township of Alexandra, only taught in her native language of Sepedi. Her new school, Marlboro Gardens…