The global pandemic has affected everyone in countless ways. Adjustments we are making to our personal, lives will stay with us long after a vaccine has been distributed. The auction world is having to make similar shifts. The business, which has historically been based on splashy viewing parties, global tours and in-person sales, had to drastically rethink its model when Covid upended the Spring 2020 sales. Now that we’re seven months into the pandemic, the auction world has found its footing, thanks to continued demand and impressive cutting edge technology.

If you're an artist or medical or scientific illustrator who wants to share your work with a broader community, we want to hear from you!

Open Scholar is building an image library for their world class clients, composed of 25,000+ researchers, scientists and faculty at labs, institutions and prominent universities around the United States.

Join a community of artists and designers whose imagery brings to life a network of powerful, connected research websites.

Whether it’s extravagantly carved and accented with 23 karat yellow gold or simple natural maple, a picture frame's primary goal is to protect our art. Frames create an outer shell that safeguards valuable and nostalgic works from damaging environmental conditions. But what goes into choosing the right one? When to use glazing (what even is glazing?) and how to pick a style or color? I spoke with three local framers to learn what goes into custom framing, and why it matters. Thanks to experts Liz Levitt of A Street Frames, Alex Jacobson of Adjective Art & Framing and Richard Siegel of Stanhope Framers who contributed insights and technical details for this article.

I'm excited to share two projects I've been working on that will run through the summer.

The first is a speaker series I've organized with OpenScholar around the topic "Science is Beautiful". OpenScholar helps research institutions and their faculty produce professional, research-centric websites to share with the world. Dr. Gamaliel Herrera kicked off the series last week with a discussion about how he approaches collecting contemporary art through the lens of a radiologist. Tomorrow, please tune in to Lucy Kim, who will be speaking about her artist-in-residency at the Broad Institute. For the next six weeks we will be speaking with artists, curators, collectors, scientists, professors and doctors to learn more about the intersection of the arts and science.

UBS recently hosted a panel to discuss the art market in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The goal of the conversation was to assess the impact and consider the possible evolution the future art market might undergo. 

As illustrated in the graph above, this is a deeper and more pervasive crisis than the 2009 subprime mortgage recession. One attribute of 2009's rebound was the globalization of the art market that had occurred in the decade leading up to 2009 with an influx of new galleries, artists, auction houses and collectors.

As we entered our second month amidst the devastation of the Coronavirus pandemic, we continued to look to art as a bright spot in our lives. After spending the first two weeks of social distancing cleaning out her studio, Brookline-based photographerRania Matar turned to her camera as a way of processing all that is happening around her. To document this unique moment in time and because she missed seeing people, she started a photo project called "Connections Across Barriers", shooting neighbors from behind their windows and doors.

I love the insider access many of these Podcasts provide. Guests open up and share with the hosts about their collections, productivity hacks and other fantastic advice from experts in their respective fields. 

I’ll continue to update this list as more courses and videos come online.

The kids aren't the only ones who can be home schooled. There are a wide variety of excellent courses and recorded lectures to catch up on. A few that I'm looking forward to:

• William Kentridge's 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. 

• MoMA is offering the course What is Contemporary Art?  In this free six week course, curators guide you through more than 70 works of art made between 1980 and the present. At the time of this email, 42,462 people were enrolled. 

I’ll continue to update this list as more museums and galleries come online.

Looking for a mystery? Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a walk-through with its director of security, Anthony Amore, retracing the path taken by the thieves who broke into the museum on March 18, 1990

Love Contemporary art? The Metropolitan Museum in New York produces short videos of contemporary artists talking about their favorite works in the collection. It's a wonderful series to enjoy. I particularly like hearing Nick Cave talk about his interest in the Kuba cloths. They also have a series of six short videos that invite viewers around the world to virtually visit The Met's art and architecture in a fresh, immersive way

COVID-19 has uprooted how we interact, work and live. As we change our behavior there has been a quick shift by museums, galleries, artists and other arts organizations to continue to engage and inspire their audiences. If anything, I hope that this time enables us to take stock, organize and emerge appreciating so many simple aspects of life that we can't enjoy during this time.