Archives of American Art Presents “Breaking Down Walls: Art as a Portal for the Incarcerated” - Smithsonian

Museum closures are expected to take place across Paris on Saturday, in anticipation of planned protests, reports Le Figaro. The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Musée de l’Orangerie, Picasso Museum, and the Grand Palais’s exhibition spaces will all close their doors on Saturday. The news follows the cancelation of Art Basel Paris over the weekend, which is held at the Grand Palais. In a statement on Friday, the French Ministry of Culture said that all establishments must ensure “the safety of visitors, the protection of agents and the preservation of works.” All national and public museums are being urged to shut their doors; meanwhile, many shops have started boarding up their windows in case of a second round of looting, following last weekend’s civil unrest in the wake of mostly peaceful protests held across France, in response to social and economic inequality amid a rising cost of living.

The researchers identified discrepancies between the celestial alignments in June 1889 and Vincent van Gogh’s painted night sky. Visitors taking a photo of Vincent Van Gogh's ''The Starry Night" (1889) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in November 2023 (photo Mairo Cinquetti/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Deborah Cook, costumer designer at stop-motion animation studio Laika, discusses creating tiny costumes for puppets in a fantastical world set in the forests of Portland, Oregon

With their low ceilings, timber beams and roaring fires, many of England’s inns lay claim to being the oldest in the land and to have been visited by Vikings and Saxons. But an archaeologist working for Historic England says not one of the more than two dozen pubs that make this claim is being accurate. While many claim origins dating back 1,000 years, Dr James Wright, a buildings archaeologist, said it was difficult to verify whether any pubs were built and used as inns or ale houses and kept in continuous use prior to the 1400s. After painstaking investigation, including tree-ring dating on the wooden beams of pubs – a process known as dendrochronology – Wright named the George Inn, of Norton St Philip, Somerset, which has been in continuous use as an inn since around 1430-1432, as the oldest pub in England. Inside the George, set up in the 14th century by the monks of Hinton Priory.