19th Century Algae Edition -ARTnews

A cyanotype by Anna Atkins, 1851-1854.

COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

Heaven/Earth

The Guardian has the story of Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector, which is scheduled to blast off into space—where it will stay to be gazed upon by distant earthlings—on Wednesday. [The Guardian]

Stuart E. Eizenstat, special envoy to the U.S. State Department, isn’t thrilled with the rate of return for art looted by the Nazis. “We must candidly confront the unfulfilled promises we solemnly made,” he said of some 100,000 paintings still missing and unaccounted for. [The New York Times]

Daniel Humm, the decorated chef of New York’s Eleven Madison Park, visited James Turrell’s Roden Crater. [Instagram]

Institutions

Aiming to preserve artists’ legacies, Hauser & Wirth has founded a nonprofit institute for archival projects. [ARTnews]

An ambitious public art project aims to illuminate 15 bridges in London. “The scheme is timely, focusing attention on London’s night-time economy for instance,” said Sarah Gaventa, director of the Illuminated River Foundation. [The Art Newspaper]

Adobe homes are getting more expensive in Marfa, Texas, owing in part to rising property values and attendant taxes. “A century-old two-bedroom partial adobe house with a metal roof and laminate floors, wedged between two much bigger homes on West Dallas Street, saw its annual property taxes rise from $905 five years ago to $3,003 today.” [The New York Times]

Climate

Here’s a rundown of artists and other art-world denizens who sadly lost their homes to the wildfires in L.A. [The Art Newspaper]

On Anna Atkins’s amazing proto-photographic images of 19th-century algae! [The New York Review of Books]

Literature

The New York Times reviews three art books that “trace a history of race relations in America”: Henry Taylor: The Only Portrait I Ever Painted of My Momma Was Stolen; The Sweet Flypaper of Life (by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes); and I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100. [The New York Times]

The Paris Review has a vintage conversation—originally published in the Village Voice in 1990—between New Yorker photography critic (and erstwhile disco journalist) Vince Aletti and Fran Lebowitz, who “sipped Evian and smoked one Carlton after the other” while they gabbed away. [The Paris Review]

The new anthology Dance in America—edited by Mindy Aloff and with a foreward by Robert Gottlieb—tries to tell the story of an art form that is as elusive as it is infectious. [NPR]