When Hannah Traore was working on her undergraduate honors thesis in art history at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, she began exploring the work of Malick Sidibé, whose legendary studio portraits and street photography featured everyday people in Mali, where her father is from.

Skidmore has a renowned university art museum, the Tang Teaching Museum, and in 2017, Traore organized an exhibition there titled “Africa Pop Studio” that included Sidibé’s work and that of various artists he had influenced, including Derrick Adams, Zanele Muholi, Aida Muluneh, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Hassan Hajjaj, who collaborated with Traore on the exhibition’s colorful installation.

“From then on, I knew I wanted to open a gallery because I realized I wanted to go down the curatorial route,” Traore said in an interview. “But you can’t always realize your true vision in someone else’s space: one, they won’t let you, and two, you want to keep that close to you. I realized early on I would have to do it in my own space.”

That goal is now a reality, as Traore has launched her own gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, in a move spurred on by reflecting on her career amid the pandemic. Traore, who was been a curatorial intern at the Museum of Modern Art and worked at Fotografiska New York, looked for spaces in the Lower East Side because she was drawn to the possibility of the foot traffic her gallery might attract outside of the art world.

The gallery’s first show, which opened on Thursday, is titled “Hues” and features the work of artists of color who foreground bold tones in their work, such as Wendy Red Star, Patricia Renee’ Thomas, Muzae Sesay, Camila Falquez, and Jeffrey Cheung.

Alongside the main area where “Hues” is on view is a backroom “for different kinds of exhibitions where artists can play more and for more immersive experiences—larger-than-life installations,” Traore said. Inaugurating it is “Mi Casa Su Casa,” a group show organized by Hajjaj that features his work alongside that of 14 emerging artists from Morocco, arranged salon-style.

When she worked on the exhibition at Skidmore, Traore wanted the exhibition’s installation to “feel like an African portrait studio,” so she reached out to Hajjaj to see if he would be interested in collaborating. Hajjaj agreed, and he designed an installation with bright red and yellow walls, chandeliers made from recycled materials, and poufs for sitting. The two met at that exhibition’s closing reception and have stayed in contact over the years.

Her primary focus will be on presenting the work of “artists who have traditionally been left out of the conversation—and when they’ve been brought into the conversation, it’s often been in a performative way,” she said. “I think the dynamic changes a lot when the person giving the platform is in multiple underrepresented groups as well.

A blue glass bowl estimated to be around 2,000 years old was unearthed by archaeologists excavating a site in Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands. The site is located along the Waal river, roughly six miles from the German border, and its maker may have had contact with the Roman empire.

With no visible cracks or chips bowl, the bowl remains undamaged, making it a remarkable find. It is believed to have been made in glass workshops in German cities such as Cologne and Xanten, or possibly in Italy. Archaeologist Pepijn van de Geer told local media, “The bowl is of Roman manufacture.”

Around the time of the bowl’s creation, Nijmegen was a Roman military camp. Later, it grew in scale and became the first settlement in present-day Netherlands to be named a Roman city, thereby granting Roman citizenship to local inhabitants.

“For the residents of the settlement on the Winkelsteeg, this bowl was a great value,” van de Geer said, adding that residents “had a great need for leather and liked to buy cattle hides.” According to one theory, locals working at outposts along the uppermost border of Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland for the Roman army would have been paid well enough to purchase a piece like the newly found bowl.

No larger than the palm of a hand, the bowl features a ridged vertical strip pattern with a rim at the top. “Such dishes were made by allowing molten glass to cool and harden over a mold,” says van de Geer. “The stripe pattern was drawn in when the glass mixture was still liquid. Metal oxide causes the blue color.”

During the excavation, the team also discovered Roman graves, homes and wells, and objects such as dishware and jewelry, all of which van de Geer hopes can be used “to tell more about these people and their way of life.” The site was being excavated in advance of a construction project for a new housing and green development in the area.

Ghana has announced the three artists that will represent it at this year’s Venice Biennale, set to open in April. The exhibition for the country’s national pavilion will be titled “Black Star—The Museum as Freedom,” a reference to the black star that is in the center of the Ghanian flag which acts as a symbol of freedom from colonialism.

The exhibition will include work by Na Chainkua Reindorf, Afroscope, and Diego Araúja. The pavilion’s curator is art historian and filmmaker Nana Oforiatta Ayim, who is the director of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge in Accra and director of Ghana’s Museums and Cultural Heritage.

For the pavilion, Reindorf will present large-scale, mixed-media installations. Afroscope’s will show Ashe, which will use technology to embody the flow of life through natural elements. And Diego Araúja’s contribution will be A Congress of Salt, which will reimagine the Atlantic Ocean, the main conduit for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as the birthplace of a new, rich creole society.

The pavilion will be designed by architect DK Osseo Asare and draws on the ideologies of the “Mobile Museum”, an art exhibition and educational program that travels into communities across Ghana that is part of the ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge. At each stop of the Mobile Museum, people are encouraged to contribute to its curation, affording them influence over their culture’s institutional representation. During the Venice Biennale, a program based on the Mobile Museum will be held in spaces throughout the city.

In a statement, Oforiatta Ayim said, “Ghana in its 65th year still grapples with political, economic, cultural, social and knowledge systems not made of or for its contexts. Systems created within its communities over thousands of years were deemed inferior to ones termed ‘universal’ by dominant powers.”

She continued, “As we outgrow and move beyond ill-fitting systems; new ones, not yet defined, that draw on rich histories, not with nostalgia but with discernment of hindsight and experience; are forming.”

In 2019, Ghana presented its first pavilion at the Venice Biennale, a series of interlocking spaces by architect David Adjaye that presented work by painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, sculptor El Anatsui, installation artist Ibrahim Mahama, and video artist John Akomfrah. Oforiatta Ayim oversaw that exhibition with input from the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who worked as an advisor until his death in March 2019. Those pieces touched on themes including environmental damage, colonial violence, and Ghana’s path after achieving independence from Britain in 1957.

Heirs of Pablo Picasso, the famed 20th-century Spanish artist, are vaulting into 21st-century commerce by selling 1,010 digital art pieces of one of his ceramic works that has never before been seen publicly — riding a fad for “crypto” assets that have influenced the art and financial worlds.

For an exclusive interview before the formal launch this week, Picasso’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, and her son Florian Picasso opened up their apartment — which is swimming in works from their illustrious ancestor — in an upscale Geneva neighborhood. There they offered up a glimpse, however tantalizingly slim, of the piece behind what they’re billing as an unprecedented fusion of old-school fine art and digital assets.

They’re looking to cash in on and ride a wave of interest in so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which have netted millions for far-less-known artists and been criticized by some as environmentally costly get rich schemes.

In economics jargon, a fungible token is an asset that can be exchanged on a one-for-one basis. Think of dollars or bitcoins — each one has the exact same value and can be traded freely. A non-fungible object, by contrast, has its own distinct value, like an old house or a classic car.

Cross this notion with cryptocurrency technology known as the blockchain and you get NFTs. They are effectively digital certificates of authenticity that can be attached to digital art or, well, pretty much anything else that comes in digital form — audio files, video clips, animated stickers, even a news article read online.

“We’re trying to build a bridge between the NFT world and the fine art world,” said Florian Picasso, the artist’s great-grandson.

The artist’s descendants are playing close to the vest, to drum up interest and protect — for now — a family heirloom. They’re showing only a sliver of the underside of the work linked to the NFTs, a ceramic piece about the size of a large salad bowl. The exposed parts show forms like a thick yellow line, a dribbling green splotch, and a brushed-on number “58” at the base.

Marina Picasso says the cherished pottery piece dates to October 1958, when she was a child.

“It’s a work that represents a face, and it’s very expressive,” she said. “It’s joyful, happy. It represents life … It’s one of those objects that have been part of our life, our intimate lives — my life with my children.”

Sotheby’s is hosting an auction in March that will include a unique NFT as well as the actual ceramic bowl.

Florian Picasso said they agreed on the colorful ceramic piece because it was “a fun one” to start.

An NFT Picasso brings with it almost epochal symbolism. The family and its business managers say the aim is to create a younger community of Picasso fans.

“Everything is evolving,” said Florian Picasso, insisting that the NFT honors the great artist.

“I think it fits within Picasso’s legacies because we are paying tribute to him and his way of working, which was always being creative,” he said.

How quaint seem those days of yore when Picasso, as the legend has it, would simply doodle on a napkin as payment for a restaurant meal — his handiwork supposedly carrying a value far in excess of the cost of the food and drinks he had enjoyed.

Some of the proceeds will be donated — one portion to a charity that aims to help overcome a shortage of nurses, and another to a nongovernmental organization that wants to help reduce carbon in the atmosphere. The NFTs will also come with music put together by Florian Picasso, who is a DJ and music producer, along with songwriter John Legend and rapper Nas.

Even a full rendering of that track isn’t being publicly released just yet: Florian Picasso played a snippet for a reporter, then turned it off.

“And to hear more, you gotta purchase the NFT,” he quipped.