"A Post-Human 3D Printed Piece of Art" is the title of an article on Whitaker's CAD models (blobs) and 3D printed sculpture. The author, Brian Krassenstein, has written an insightful description of the work.

In the late 18th century, poets, artists and writers, mostly financially secure, made a pilgramage to Italy to visit the ancient sites of Rome. Francis Towne was one of them, and he produced watercolors of tombs and monuments. Long considered fairly benign pieces, they are now being re-evaluated as moral warnings about the fall of Rome and its application to other empires. Towne bequeathed his work to the British Museum. However you read them, they are masterfully executed.

Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University and until recently Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, has written a book of poetry called "Waiting for Rainbows". Alternately piercing and gentle, always revelatory, he has put his political agenda aside and allowed us to see deep into the soul of a thoughtful human being. My favorite lines: "Perhaps If I came again, I would do better". There are many others as well.

We are all familiar now with TED talks, from which we have come to expect brilliant minds and original thinkers. You will be happy to know that Shonda Rhimes, the singular force behind some of our favorite TV shows, has just filmed a talk called "My Year of Saying Yes to Everything". Rhimes' success with dramas like Grey's Anatomy and Scandal have made her a towering figure on television.

A new theory has emerged on the inhabitants of Easter Island and its shards of glass. Originally considered evidence of the warring nature of the Islanders, these fragments are now being seen instead as remnants of a resourceful people using tools for cultivation and hunting.

The elegantly detailed and sophisticated works of Iain Macarthur are arresting in their immediacy. Bold and dramatic, done with exquisite care, his illustrations are hard to ignore.

At a more gentle end of the spectrum are the drawings of James Edward Deeds, Jr. with their improbable history. Beginning at age 25, Deeds spent much of his life in mental institutions in Nevada, Missouri. A teenager found Deeds' album in the trash, with 283 hand-numbered drawings on ledger paper. Poignant and incisive, the drawings are being examined in a treatise called "The Electric Pencil, Drawings from inside State Hospital No. 3" to be published later this month, with an introduction by Richard Goodman.

The glories of art nouveau architecture in Barcelona have been presented to us by architectural photographer David Cardelus. Emphasizing mainly apartment buildings, these photographs treat us to elaborate wrought iron facades, stained glass windows, and intricate detailing. Dramatic and fanciful, bold and stunning, they have a contemporary feel to them that fits right into today's world.

Tara Donovan delights in taking ordinary everyday objects and making them into sculptural delights. She may use things like buttons, straws, rolls of paper tape, whatever comes easily to hand. Just imagine taking Slinky toys, those wiring fascinations that we all used to watch climbing down stairs, flattening them, inking them, and putting them through a hydraulic press: that's Donovan's mind at work.

Using ancient Chinese scrolls as his model, Beijing artist Yun-Fei Ji has produced remarkable works using ink on paper and focusing on landscape. Ji sharply delineates conditions in China today as people are being forced to leave the countryside for urban environments as a result of politics, economics, and social pressures. The dramatic transformations of human beings as they are being uprooted and forcibly relocated is a sharp reminder of what is happening across the planet today.

23 architects were selected to imagine a reinvented Paris, in a project aimed at reinvigorating the French Capital's landscape in a more contemporary mode.

Just imagine a 3D printed wearable headpiece that moves in response to activities in the brain. The shape-changing helmet is fascinating to watch, and frightening to think about. Tomorrow is here, folks.

You may remember that last year we marveled at the New York City Ballet's glorious glass sculptures by Dustin Yellin, placed in the lobby of Lincoln Center in New York City. We show you now the development of a new Art Series being sponsored by the Ballet for the same space. It should be equally fascinating.

Francis Bacon's first and last paintings will be on display at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. The first, a watercolor from 1929, and the last, Study of a Bull, 1991, are part of a collection of some 2500 Bacon items assembled by businessman Majid Boustany, born in Lebanon and now living in Switzerland.

Amalia Ulman is showing "Excellences and Perfections" at the New Museum. Ulman sets the stage with expensive lingerie and props, using primarily her Instagram shots to portray the obsession with make-overs and re-do's that characterize our age. At issue is the rebranding of our selves via social media to create the fantasy person the world expects us to be.

Greek artist Lila Polenaki uses acrylic and textiles on paper and canvas to create writhing abstract body shapes that seem to come alive in front of you. Combining elegance and drama, she uses a sense of Chinese landscape painting with forms that de Kooning might have imaginged..

c. Corinne Whitaker 2016