A figure in a burgundy t-shirt and black skinny leg pants with electric blue chin-length hair stands facing away from us. They are partially turned towards a large checkerboard black-and-white textile that hangs suspended between two walls. It is tied to the structure by thick red fabric, and more of the black-and-white fabric.

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Video:  How a Skater Used Art to Change the World

Chemi Rosado-Seijo turns skateboard tracks and abandoned pools into works of art.

We look across a cavernous room with a half-domed ceiling where more than a hundred men are gathered at desks and theater-like boxes in this horizontal painting. Almost all of the men have pale, peachy skin and wear black suits with white high-pointed collars. The desks curve in a half-circle facing our left, where two candelabras sit on a dais, a canopied space with polished columns. Seven more columns lining the rounded space are also speckled with fawn brown, bronze, copper, and muted moss green. They have white capitals carved with leaves ands scrolls. Crimson-red curtains hung between the columns have been gathered up along their centers so they drape down to each side. The space is lit by a three-tiered chandelier near the center of the composition. The chandelier has been lowered and a man, backlit in silhouette, stands on a ladder and reaches for a light on the top tier. The other men sit singly or in groups at the desks or gather in small groups throughout the space. The D-shaped rows of desks are enclosed within a curving, waist-high wall. To our right, on our side of the wall, a pair of boys or men lean over an open box that is lit inside. A few people look on from a second-level balcony to our right. This includes a trio of men all wearing black. In the next bay, a man with medium-brown skin wears Pawnee attire with a tall headdress, necklaces, and what seems to be a fur-lined cloak. He looks out at us. A clock on the wall near him reads 6:14. The domed space has nested, ivory-white square or octagonal panels within gold borders. At the center of each panel is a six-petaled, gold flower. The artist signed the work as if he had written his name and date on the base of the wall to our left: “S.F.B. MORSE pinx 1822.”

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The 19th-century artist painted unidealized views of Rhode Island's landscapes.

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We look across a cavernous room with a half-domed ceiling where more than a hundred men are gathered at desks and theater-like boxes in this horizontal painting. Almost all of the men have pale, peachy skin and wear black suits with white high-pointed collars. The desks curve in a half-circle facing our left, where two candelabras sit on a dais, a canopied space with polished columns. Seven more columns lining the rounded space are also speckled with fawn brown, bronze, copper, and muted moss green. They have white capitals carved with leaves ands scrolls. Crimson-red curtains hung between the columns have been gathered up along their centers so they drape down to each side. The space is lit by a three-tiered chandelier near the center of the composition. The chandelier has been lowered and a man, backlit in silhouette, stands on a ladder and reaches for a light on the top tier. The other men sit singly or in groups at the desks or gather in small groups throughout the space. The D-shaped rows of desks are enclosed within a curving, waist-high wall. To our right, on our side of the wall, a pair of boys or men lean over an open box that is lit inside. A few people look on from a second-level balcony to our right. This includes a trio of men all wearing black. In the next bay, a man with medium-brown skin wears Pawnee attire with a tall headdress, necklaces, and what seems to be a fur-lined cloak. He looks out at us. A clock on the wall near him reads 6:14. The domed space has nested, ivory-white square or octagonal panels within gold borders. At the center of each panel is a six-petaled, gold flower. The artist signed the work as if he had written his name and date on the base of the wall to our left: “S.F.B. MORSE pinx 1822.”

Interactive Article:  The Spectacular Failure of Samuel F. B. Morse’s "House of Representatives"

This painting’s unfortunate fate set Samuel Morse on the path to become one of the world’s most famous inventors.

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The 19th-century artist painted unidealized views of Rhode Island's landscapes.

Robby Moore in his studio

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A man and woman stand look away from us toward a moonlit, rocky, coastal inlet with misty, midnight-blue mountains along the horizon in this shadowy, horizontal landscape painting. The sky fills the top two-thirds of the painting, and the people are small in scale against the landscape. Along the horizon, pearl-white clouds float against a lilac-purple and pale pink haze. The sky deepens to ultramarine blue above, and a band of nickel-gray clouds sweeps in across the top edge of the painting to partially obscure the bright white moon, to our right of center. The moonlight gleams on the water below, which winds around the rocky coastline and small islands dotted with trees. Closer to us, the land stretches across the lower edge of the composition. Hulking, rocky formations line the left edge of the painting, and a wooden structure with mossy growth along its roof sits to our right. Long poles lean against the building’s roof. At the lower center of the painting, the woman, to our left, links her arm through the man’s elbow. She wears a long, rust-brown dress and a broad brimmed bonnet, while he wears a dark, knee-length coat and a round cap. They stand near the water’s edge, silhouetted against the bright reflections of the soft purple and pink sky above. Out in the water but close to the shoreline, brown nets hang like slings from a line of twenty-three, irregularly spaced poles. A three-masted ship is anchored near the shore to our right. Two rowboats, one with a person inside, and a few more sailboats are pulled up along a dock beyond the ship. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right, “Dahl Januar 1827”.

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Our series In Plain Sight explores what it means to open yourself up to an art museum, one artwork, or conversation, at a time. The series Sound Thoughts on Art explores the intersection between sight and sound.

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In Plain Sight: You Already Belong in This Museum

A parent and child look at Edgar Degas's The Riders together

In Plain Sight: Finding Your First (Art) Love

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A young woman with pale, peachy skin and flushed cheeks sits facing our right in profile as she plays a guitar in this horizontal painting. The scene is painted with blended strokes, giving it a soft look and making some of the details indistinct. At the center of the composition, the guitar rests against the woman’s shoulder so it almost spans the width of the painting. The instrument has a caramel-brown body, and the dark brown neck lightens to slate gray by the sound hole. The woman’s eyes are lowered as she looks toward her left hand, her long fingers pinning the strings along the fretboard. She plucks the strings with her other hand. Her hair is covered in a red headscarf tied at the nape of her neck. One end rests on her left shoulder, farther from us, and the other hangs down her back. A low, flat-topped, black, brimmed hat sits atop the scarf. The woman’s features are delicate, and her pink lips are parted. She wears a gold chain with an oval pendant around her neck. Her jacket is gold with a pattern loosely painted with dabs of lapis blue, butter yellow, and rose pink. A yellow ribbon or band is tied to the neck of the guitar and slung over her shoulder. The indistinct space behind her is painted with strokes of moss green, goldenrod yellow, and a few swipes of marigold orange near her face. The artist signed and dated the painting in brown in the lower right corner: “Renoir.98.”

Sonia De Los Santos and Auguste Renoir’s “Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar”

A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”

Maria Schneider and George Bellows’s “The Lone Tenement”

Delfeayo Marsalis and Hawkins Bolden’s “Untitled”

A naked man with ghostly white skin sits upright in a canopied bed set in a narrow room in this tall, vertical painting. Wearing a black cap, he looks to our left in profile toward a skeleton who comes through a door along the left edge of the composition. The man gestures at the skeleton with one hand and, with the other, toward a bag of money held up by a small demon next to the bed to our left. The skeleton wears a white shroud and holds an arrow. A winged angel kneels next to the man in the bed, one hand on the man’s shoulder and the other lifted to gesture at a crucifix hanging in the window over the door. A small devil on the canopy above looks down onto the bed. At the foot of the bed, a man wearing a green robe and headdress drops coins into a sack held by another demon. Three more demons crawl about and hide under the chest. Pieces of armor and weapons lie on the ground to the right in front of a stone ledge in the foreground. Two pieces of clothing drape over the ledge to our left.

Peter Sheppard Skærved and Hieronymus Bosch’s “Death and the Miser”

A young man sets out in a golden boat on a river that winds from the bottom right corner of this horizontal painting across a lush landscape and into the distance before disappearing beyond two rocky outcroppings far off to our right. Hazy in the distance, the jagged peaks of a barren red mountain rise into an almost cloudless blue sky. To our left, a semi-transparent, white palace looms above and beyond the mountain, filling most of the upper left quadrant of the composition. Hills and valleys leading from the mountain and palace are dotted with trees and carpeted with grass. A winged and haloed angel wearing a white robe stands on the bank of the river under a towering palm tree in the foreground, in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The angel has pale skin and long golden hair. One hand is lifted toward the palace or a young man in a boat in the river nearby. The small boat is angled away from the riverbank to our left and toward the palace. The boat is ornately decorated and at its bow, a winged, golden figure holds an hourglass aloft above her head. The young man has pale skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and he wears a red and gold tunic. A profusion of flowers and trees line the riverbank.

Daniel Ho and Thomas Cole’s “Voyage of Life” Series

This print shows a person sitting down with their knees drawn up to their chest and their arms folded on their knees, their head resting on their arms. The person has short, curly hair, and they are wearing a jacket, pants, and shoes. Their face is mostly obscured by their arms and hands. Their skin and hair appear to be black, outlined with thin cream-colored lines. The background features a textured pattern resembling a brick wall. Below the print is a signature for "M. Burroughs" and the year 1953, with the words "Sleeping Boy" written on the left. A border of cream-colored paper surrounds the print.

Sa-Roc and Margaret Burroughs’s “Sleeping Boy”

Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.

Jenny Scheinman and El Greco’s “Laocoön”

Created with tiny, colored stones and glass, this mosaic shows groups of people along and near the edge of a brilliant, topaz-blue body of water with a large, lemon-yellow, stylized sun in the sky in this horizontal composition. The aquamarine blue and vibrant yellow along with lime green, lilac purple, oyster white, and teal used in the people and landscape give this work a shimmering look. A pair of people recline together under a tree in the lower right corner. A sheep stands nearby, and a bird perches in the tree above. Beyond the tree and to our left, a cluster of box-like forms suggests a city in the distance. Larger in scale, so seeming closer to us, a man wearing a lapis-blue toga and a yellow cap holds a stringed instrument, a lyre, in front of his body. To the left, at the center of the composition, a trio of women each wearing amethyst-purple, magenta-pink, or lapis-blue dresses stand close to each other. They have long, dark hair and their bodies and garments are outlined in black. Between them and the large sun to our left, a winged horse with a buttercup-yellow body and turquoise-blue wings rears up. Near the upper left corner, the stylized sun is represented by a disk surrounded by pointed peaks, surrounded by a larger disk outlined with another ring of triangular points. A winged person holding a set of pan pipes flies above the sun to our left, over a small crescent moon below. Near the lower left corner, two groups of people gather around a body of bright blue water occupied by two fish. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “MArC ChAgAll 69.” The mosaic is displayed outside in front of a screen of trees, with a band of bushes with green and orange leaves below.

Dom Flemons and Marc Chagall’s “Orphée”

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West to East

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Sonya Kelliher-Combs stands with her work Goodbye, 2018, an installation of cultural belongings from the Anchorage Museum's collection in the 2020 exhibition Place of Origin at the Korundi Museum, Rovaniemi, Finland. Copyright Rovaniemi Teide Museo / Adam Eronen Piper. The work is a memorial to those who have lost their lives to suicide. Alaska is two times above the national average in the rate of suicide, and Alaska Natives are three times above the national average.

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Elizabeth Catlett in her studio, 1942

Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett in Her Studio, 1942, Courtesy of The Charles White Archives.

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The painting features a valley with purple and brown mountains in the distance, surrounding a reflective body of water with a small rowboat floating on it. Closer to us, there are gray rocks, brown tree trunks and branches, and lush green vegetation at the edge of the water. The sky above is painted in warm shades of yellow, peach, and orange, which transition to pale greenish-blue at the top. The water below reflects these colors, as well as those of the distant mountain and surrounding trees.

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Greg Weight, Emily Kngwarreye, 1994, gelatin silver photograph on paper, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2004. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program. © Gregory Weight/Copyright Agency, 2024

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This painting looks like a family portrait with five people: two seated adults and three children. The person on the far left is a seated woman with dark hair styled up and short, curling bangs, wearing a gray dress with puffed sleeves and lace details at the neckline. She holds a folded piece of paper in her lap and has one arm around the girl next to her. On her right stand two young girls with curly reddish-brown hair tied back, both dressed in white dresses with puffed sleeves and lace around the necklines. The girl to the left holds a pink flower, while the other holds a small pink bud. On their right is a seated man with short reddish-brown hair, wearing a dark jacket over a yellow vest and a white cravat and green trousers, holding a small book partially open. Standing to the right, partially behind the man, is a young boy dressed in a green coat with gold buttons over a pink vest and white shirt. All five of the people have pale skin. Behind the family is a black semi-circle, and around that is a gradient of brown, darker at the top and lighter towards the bottom.

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