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David Gilmour Blythe, Justice, c. 1860, oil on canvas, 51.1 x 61.3 cm (Fine Art Museums of San Francisco) — The dubious justice of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings.

Blythe, Justice

Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins), If All the World Were Paper and All the Water Sink, 1962, oil on canvas, 96.5 x 142.2 cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) © the artist's estate — From the Manhattan Project to nursery rhymes, a collision of art and science.

Jess, If All the World Were Paper ...

Mahakapi Jataka, roundel relief, Bharhut stupa (Madhya Pradesh, India), currently at Indian Museum, Kolkata (West Bengal, India), dated ca. 2nd century BCE – 1st century BCE — Folktales adapted into Buddhist tradition appear in art across India and beyond.

Jatakas: the many lives of Buddha as ...

Thornton Dial, Blood and Meat: Survival For The World, 1992, rope, carpet, copper Wire, metal, canvas scraps, enamel, and splash zone compound on canvas on wood, 165.1 x 241.3 x 27.9 cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, ©Thornton Dial) — An unflinching memorial to civil rights martyrs by the contemporary artist Thorton Dial

Thornton Dial, Blood and Meat: Survival For ...

Sol Lewitt on conceptual art — Sometimes art is paintings, and sometimes it's a chair. Why?

The Case for Conceptual Art

Folies Bergere Poster — You've likely seen this glassy-eyed late 19th Century barmaid before, but what can we make of this painting today?

Better Know: Manet’s Bar

Great Hall., Metropolitan Museum of Art — The Met Museum in New York is filled with masterpieces of human creativity, but is there a better way to organize what's inside?

Remake the Met

Courbet, The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life — What's the point of making realistic paintings when photography can do the trick?

The case for Realism

Warning sign about nudity — The nude has been celebrated but also censored. What's wrong with seeing the unclothed human body?

The case for nudity

Marina Abramović, Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful (1975) — Should art be beautiful? Revisit ancient philosophers' thoughts on beauty and consider why we might be skeptical of beauty today.

Art must be beautiful

Wayne Thiebaud, Ponds and Streams, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 152.4 cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, ©Wayne Thiebaud) — Can the commonplace working farmland of California's Sacramento River Valley be a place of of breathtaking beauty?

Thiebaud, Ponds and Streams

Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown, c. 1884, oil on canvas, 117.2 x 96.8 cm (de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) — Martyr or murderer? John Brown has polarized political opinion from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.

Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John ...

Masami Teraoka, American Kabuki, 1986, watercolor and sumi ink on paper mounted on a four-panel screen, 196.9 x 393.7 x 3 cm (de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) ©Masami Teraoka — Teraoka draws on Japan's brilliant history of art and kabuki theatre to creating beauty from heart-rending tragedy.

Masami Teraoka, American Kabuki

Masami Teraoka, American Kabuki, 1986, watercolor and sumi ink on paper mounted on a four-panel screen, 196.9 x 393.7 x 3 cm (de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) © Masami Teraoka — Teraoka draws on Japan's brilliant history of art and kabuki theatre to create beauty from heartrending tragedy

American Kabuki

George Caleb Bingham, Country Politician, 1849, oil on canvas, 51.8 x 61cm (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) — Before T.V. and Twitter, politicians talked to voters face-to-face.

George Caleb Bingham, Country Politician

The Morgan Leaf, top register (detail) — The Winchester Bible is among the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts made in England in the twelfth century.

The Morgan Leaf from The Winchester Bible