The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne is featuring the work of Dutch artist MC Escher in an exhibition titled "Between Two Worlds". Escher's difficult geometries are shown projected on floors and walls, built into houses, and also built into sections with black metal pipes. The designers of the show have tried to emphasize Escher's concept of "geometrical beauty".

Amateur microscopists from around the world have contributed papers and illustrations to a microscopy archive based in the U.K. At this site you will find a current article titled "Views Through a Mathematical Microscope of Some Three-Dimensional Oddities", with detailed examples of how these unusual forms were realized.

Eileen Myles' latest poetry book, titled "Evolution", tackles some pretty fundamental issues in contemporary life, like "are we capable of evolution at this point in our American lives?" The poet confronts issues that we would rather ignore, like gender, whiteness or nonwhiteness, queer and trans identities, and what constitutes a fact? In actual fact, the poet once ran for President and is the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur fellowship, an interesting irony in wordsmithing itself.

An exhibit titled "Devotion" at the California African American Museum presents the draftsmanship of Robert Pruitt, in addition to some of the artist's sculptures. Pruitt examines the dilemma of being black in a basically white man's world, using charcoal, conte, and pastels. His place in the contemporary art world is described by the reviewer as "willfully idiosyncratic", but there is no denying the power of these images.

The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is showing "Cry Baby", the first solo museum exhibition for a young Pittsburgh artist. Devan Shimoyama's work, primarily from the last two years, is featured in paintings and sculptures. Although they include some borrowings from other artists and other times, the reviewer feels that the pieces have a power all their own, although there is some disagreement with what the works themselves say and what the curators write about.

Alex Katz is well-known for his colorful, stripped-down paintings, with more than 200 of them portraying his wife Ada. For decades he has followed his own inner voice, no matter what the art world was demanding, that voice requiring severe, unadorned views of the human body. David Salle says of Katz, "He's like a master class in painterly virtues". At age 75, Katz is still going strong on his own clearly-defined path.

Hajime Sorayama was first known for his Sony AIBO robot dog. Now he has desinged Dior's Pre-Fall 2019 menswear show in Tokyo featuring hyperrealistic female bots which he calls Fembots. This robot weighs just under one ton and required 16 people to put it together. It exemplifies the high-tech futurism that is the inspiration for Dior's new line of mens clothing.

Leah Kennedy has made some impressive aerial photographs of salt lakes in Western Australia. She uses a high-resolution camera while hanging from a single-engine Cessna 210. These stunning images will be followed by others as she travels around Australia documenting the impact of humans on that country's geography.

A 97-year-old Taiwanese man was determined to save his village from being razed, so he turned it into what he calls a "rainbow village". He has painted the walls and grounds of the houses with colorful creatures and figures, so compelling that the government has cancelled its plan to demolish the site. Tourists have been drawn to the strength and brightness of his paintings, which remind some of fairy tales.

In 2016, a combined effort of the Bronx Museum of Art and the U.S. State Department created the Ghana ThinkTank, whose mission is to send artists around the world to work with local artists and young people. The community projects were designed to involve local citizens in problems like housing and isolation. This particular project focused on Moroccans' solution to America's housing crisis. The Ghana ThinkTank became an international art collective that highlights third-world type problems in American cities, with citizens of other nations proposing solutions.

Portraits of the Artist as Wallpaper is being shown at the Long Beach, California Museum of Latin American Art. These elaborate self-portraits by Cecilie Paredes frequently involve the artist's body being painted on. They project her desire to blend into the landscape when she first came to America in 2005.

An artists' protest in Havana was designed to make people aware of the new art edict issued in Cuba. The purpose of the edict is to eliminate creative output by giving the government express power to censor art at its will. A 10-point manifesto - the Manifesto de San Isidro - was produced to voice the community's dismay at the politicization of Cuban culture.

Hannah Starkey uses her camera to record ordinary women doing ordinary things. In this way she chooses to give them voice, a reality, and a presence. Her aim, she says, was to show women pictured by a woman rather than as objects for men. Additionally, as she matured, she realized "there aren't any pictures that I relate to as an older woman. What am I supposed to do, just disappear?

If the world of voice control gadgets has you puzzled and/or frustrated, this article from Wired.com offers a good introduction to the plusses and minuses of Alexa and Echo Dot. It gives a bit of background regarding the efforts of both Amazon and Google to penetrate the market and offers some insights into how the devices are used.

c. Corinne Whitaker 2018