The thorny Acacia tree produces gum arabic, a versatile substance that’s been driving global trade for centuries.

On the centennial of the founding of Surrealism, this reading list examines its radical beginnings, its mass popularity, and its continued evolution.

We take for granted the Titians and Botticellis that hang in galleries across the United States, little aware of the appetites and inclinations of those who acquired them.

More than a century ago, Charlotte Cushman presided over a group of queer female artists who supported one another’s creativity and left a pioneering, if overlooked, legacy.

A founding member of the Prairie School, Mahony defined the movement’s now-familiar aesthetic for a global audience.

A working-class woman with artistic aspirations of her own, Siddal nearly died of pneumonia after posing for John Everett Millais’s iconic painting.

Renaissance painters incorporated the inherent qualities of stone to produce works of art that revealed the beauty of nature and hand of God.

There’s a specific term for these irregular pearls: “baroque,” from the Portuguese barroco.

The famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously loathed commercialism, and yet he (reluctantly) designed commercial homewares to be mass produced.

The kimono that the world associates with Japan was actually created in the late-nineteenth century as a cultural identifier.