Mail & Guardian: Matthew Krouse: It is interesting to see who has laid claim to the legacy of Gerard Sekoto, now the subject of a massive exhibition commemorating his 100th birthday.
Sekoto’s work, today, is the prize acquisition of the corporate world, a national treasure, a conversation piece of the rich, a potential fortune on auction and an insurance nightmare for any exhibitor hoping to show his art.Sekoto, the almost-outsider ­artist who ran away from his country in 1947, today seems to be everything that he was not.Source

You almost certainly know Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl: that inexplicably blue face, big hair, bright-red lips and gorgeously gold-embroidered collar, with some unpainted canvas areas to show how avant-garde the artist was. The painting was recently bought at a London auction for about R14-million by the international diamantaire Laurence Graff and he’s bringing it home. Well, close enough to home — to his Delaire Graff wine estate glittering above the Helshoogte Pass outside Stellenbosch. The estate. Source

Principle Andrew Bott raised eyebrows when he replaced security guards with art teachers at the troubled Orchard Gardens school in Roxbury, Mass.It's the inner-city public school that could.Orchard Gardens K-8 pilot school in Roxbury, Mass., is earning accolades after its principal Andrew Bott fired the school's security officers and replaced them with art teachers. Many considered the move dangerous in a school where backpacks were banned for fear that they might be used to carry guns, but ultimately it yielded success.
NBC Nightly News reported on the school's impressive Sourc

AFP: Arab Idol contestant Abdel Karim Hamdan brought millions of television viewers to tears when he sang about the plight of his home town, the Syrian battered city of Aleppo.
“Aleppo, a flood of suffering, how much blood is shed in my country!” the 25-year-old sang in the Lebanon studio where the hugely popular show, modeled on British hit Pop Idol, is recorded.
“I wanted to sing the pain of my country,” Hamdan told AFP in between rehearsals at the pan-Arab channel MBC in Beirut.. Source

Huffington Post.Ted speaker: An artist with a disability shares many of the same experiences as other artists. We do, however, struggle with ideas and how to convey them on a canvas. Having a favourite artist to emulate provides ideas to pursue. In my case, I like Monet, although many individuals have indicated that my style resembles The Group of Seven, which is probably influenced by living here on the West Coast where I'm surrounded by both the Canadian wilderness and picturesque waterfront. Source