On Tuesday, August 12, Columbia University announced that New York-based architect Amale Andraos has been named the 13th dean of its Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning (GSAPP). Andraos, who was born in Beirut and has practiced in Montreal, Paris, and Rotterdam, has been an associate professor at the school since 2011. Andraos will assume the position on September 1, replacing Mark Wigley, who announced his retirement in September 2013. Andraos has also taught at Harvard University, Princeton University, Parsons School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Institute of Technology, and the American University of Beirut.

Andraos is a principal at WORKac, the architecture firm that she runs with her husband, Dan Wood. Established in 2003, WORKac is interested in positing architecture at the intersection of the urban, the rural, and the natural.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is mounting an exhibition this fall of important photographs by Gordon Parks, some of which have never been publicly exhibited, museum officials announced Tuesday. “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story” will be on view from Nov. 15 through June 7, 2015.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation, showcases more than 40 of Parks’s color prints. Most are on view for the first time in over half a century. They were created for a 1956 Life magazine photo essay, called “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which chronicled the daily lives of an extended African-American family living in segregated Alabama.

A Napoleonic medal cabinet has been saved from export from the UK after a successful fundraising campaign to buy it for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

In January, on the recommendation of a reviewing committee administered by Arts Council England, the British government decided to defer granting an export license for the cabinet until July, allowing the V&A time to raise the required sum of £534,000.

The court calls them “The Intervenors,” which sounds as if it could be the name of a performance art collective. If that were true, the past few weeks would have been quite a show for the group Save the Corcoran.

The scrappy group of students, staff, faculty and concerned observers dedicated to preserving the nearly 150-year-old museum as an independent institution in the face of a merger with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University see themselves as David fighting Goliath — which makes their recent legal intervention the proverbial sling to the forehead. They won’t find out whether they’ve slain their giant until Aug. 20 at the latest, which makes this week an anxious wait.

The building at 421 E. 6th Street looks unassuming enough. It’s still got the facade of the Con Ed substation that it was in the 1920s, and chances are, if you’re strolling by on the way to Tompkins Square Park, you probably wouldn’t stop and stare.

But inside, the gigantic space is filled with the minimalist installations of Walter De Maria, who purchased the lot in 1980 and turned it into his studio and home that he occupied and built upon until his death last year. He transformed the building into a work of art itself, perhaps the encapsulation of his entire career and life.

At the New York headquarters of Cora International LLC, Suzette Gomes is spellbound by a sight of rare beauty.

“You can’t describe that blue,” said Gomes, chief executive officer of the diamond-cutting company. “You just drown in it.”

“That blue” refers to the Blue Moon diamond. Cora paid $25.6 million for the uncut, 29.6-carat stone in February.

Colored diamonds are the world’s most expensive stones. A 14.82-carat orange diamond sold for $36 million at Christie’s International in Geneva in November, setting a record $2.4 million a carat. The same month, Sotheby’s sold the Pink Dream, a 59.6-carat pink stone, for $83 million.

The Frick Collection announced the launch of a new mobile app, which provides instant access to content related to every work of art in the Frick’s permanent collection. Via this new platform, users can browse for information about particular objects and search the collection by artist, genre, gallery location, and audio stop number. Works of art can be saved as favorites to enjoy offline or share via email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. The app connects to The Frick Collection’s database (collections.frick.org) to provide continually updated information.

Also available to users is audio commentary (in English) for select works of art, as well as audio guides to the galleries in six languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Japanese). Visitors can listen to audio content, with headphones, on their own smartphones. Access to free Wi-Fi is available in the museum. Additionally, an interactive map allows app users to navigate the galleries and a comprehensive, up-to-date events calendar lists upcoming gallery talks, lectures, and special events.

The Van Gogh Museum has is received its millionth visitor for 2014. The lucky visitor, Mrs. van Waveren from Zwaag, received a bouquet of sunflowers an a voucher for ten gallons of decorative paint after entering the museum. 

As compared with recent years, more attendees are stopping by the Amsterdam museum, which is expecting the rate of visitors to keep rising. Last year saw a total of 1.4 million people pass through the museum’s doors.

Robots are set to give art fans a night at the museum with a series of after-hours tours around Tate Britain.

People from around the world will be able to view online as four camera-equipped mechanical guides roam the galleries for five consecutive nights, starting tomorrow.

There will also be a live commentary, and some visitors to the website for the After Dark project will be able to direct the robots themselves.

Sometimes museums get in trouble. Deep trouble. Not because they damage art, or let it get stolen ... but because they sell it. The Delaware Art Museum is the latest target of the art world's ire — for selling one painting from its collection to try and tackle a debt, and for revelations in the past few days that two more paintings are up for sale.

The controversy relates to a serious museum practice with an unfriendly name: "deaccessioning," or the permanent removal of an object from the collection. There are rules around when and how deaccessioning can take place. Break those rules and there are some unpleasant consequences.

The Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, is currently hosting the exhibition “Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation.” The show, which features works by artists such as Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Andy Warhol, traces printmaking’s rise to prominence in post-war American art. Drawn from real estate mogul Jordan D. Schnitzer’s vast collection, “Under Pressure” includes examples from major movements within contemporary art such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Photorealism, and Minimalism.

During the late 1950s, the art world experienced a groundswell of interest in printmaking. Ignoring the stigma associated with the process, pioneering artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns began experimenting with a variety of techniques, including offset lithography, screen printing, wood-cutting, lino-cutting, and laser-cutting.

In a great work of art, the artist's hand is invisible. Not so in the traveling exhibition "Revealed," which shows famous artists at work in their studios. The series of nearly 40 photographs has been culled from the archives of the French weekly magazine Paris Match by Pablo Picasso's grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso.

The pictures are showing in lobbies and other public spaces at Sofitel hotels in five cities, beginning in New York and ending in Beverly Hills next April. In between, the exhibit will be in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Montreal.

The Smithsonian Institution is now actively seeking volunteers to aid in the digitization of its collection. Through a new website launched today, the public can sign up for various transcription projects which will take thousands of hand-written artifact labels and make them available digitally for researchers.

Among the hundreds of thousands of documents that need transcribing are the labels attached to 45,000 bumble bee specimens in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History. The museum hopes digitizing that information will aid scientists studying the current global bee decline.

Sculptures by the two artists featured here in temporary presentations at Storm King Art Center this year couldn’t be less alike. A single Minimalist piece by the New York sculptor Virginia Overton is gracefully fitted to the landscape of gently rolling hills. Six monumental, figurative sculptures by Zhang Huan of Shanghai are ponderously theatrical.

Ms. Overton’s untitled piece is a straight, nearly 500-foot length of brass tubing about four inches in diameter elevated four feet above the ground by thin rods. From a valley between low hills, it follows an upward slope to its peak and then disappears over the other side.

Around the corner from the loft apartments that were once Manchester's fabled Hacienda club, hemmed in by railway arches on the site of an old gas and dye works, Britain's cultural economy is being rebalanced. Next spring, Home will open as the largest multi-arts complex to be built since the Brutalist concrete ramparts of the Barbican in London were breached by the public more than three decades ago.

Amid political talk of narrowing the economic divide between the rest of the country and London with promises of £15bn fleets of high speed trains, motorways and digital highways, Home has come to symbolise the determination of Britain's northern cities to close the artistic gap.

The Historic Houses Association and Sotheby’s announced that the 2014 Restoration Award has been given to Norton Conyers, near Ripon, North Yorkshire, home of Sir James and Lady Graham. The late medieval house, extensively rebuilt in the 17th century, has been the home of the Graham family since 1624. It is perhaps most famous for being an inspiration for Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s celebrated novel Jane Eyre. The novelist is believed to have visited Norton Conyers in 1839 and the family legend of a “madwoman” secretly confined to an attic room might have given her the idea for the crazed Mrs Rochester.

Sir James and Lady Graham, a former museum curator, began the restoration of Norton Conyers in 2006. Their assiduous work over the past eight years revealed fascinating layers of history, which visitors will be able to discover in July 2015, when this Graded II-listed house reopens to the public.

Recently acquired prints by Andy Warhol and works by other internationally renowned artists will be on display at Indiana State University, Aug. 18-Sept. 19.

The exhibition “POPOP: Pop and Op Art” consists of 53 works in a variety of mediums — screenprints, lithographs, paintings, ceramic sculptures, and multiples — dating from 1965 to 2011. Among the highlights of the exhibition are two paintings by Ed Paschke from his shoe and accordion series, two large screenprints from Andy Warhol’s “Cowboys and Indians” portfolio, Claes Oldenburg’s 1965 “London Knees” portfolio, two large ceramic sandwiches by Dick Hay and Richard Anuszkiewicz’s “Inward Eye” portfolio.

The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs is offering an app featuring tours of public art around Michigan.

The "MI Amazing Art Tour" app is free to download via iTunes. Users can search categories of art, including murals, sculpture and architecture.

The app will lead them through a tour of those pieces, some within a small radius and others spanning the entire state.

Bonhams auction house could be sold to China’s Poly Culture, which has emerged as one of the frontrunners bidding for the company.

City sources said several heavyweight private equity firms – including Bridgepoint and CVC Capital Partners, one of the biggest shareholders in Formula 1 – have dropped out of the sale process, leaving the China-based firm in pole position.

Poly Culture is China’s largest auction house. It was formerly a subsidiary of the Poly Group, which is controlled by the Chinese government and has business interests ranging from property to arms exports.