You can take a close-up look at artifacts, some of which are over 2,000 years old, in the Shards of the Past: Pre-Columbian Art from the Frost Art Museum exhibition, on display from May 7 through August 31.

The exhibition features 26 works…figures, vessels, bowls, and plates…from Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Central America, selected from the Frost Art Museum’s permanent collection. Pre-Columbian refers to the time in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish explorers. Cultures and civilizations were already flourishing, thriving and evolving, while remaining virtually isolated from other parts of the world. After the arrival of the explorers, we see the collapse of these civilizations and subsequent destruction of their temples and social structures along with a wealth of objects and ritual artifacts. Some of the relics from these cultures are intact for viewers to admire and study; others were ritually broken, and some were destroyed by the passage of time. Most of the surviving objects were found in graves, the remnants of offerings to the dead.

Norman Rockwell's The Rookie has sold for $22.5 million at auction Thursday. The 1957 painting of baseball players in a locker room was sold by Christie's auction house — heady heights for a work that first appeared on a magazine that sold for 15 cents.

While the "hammer price" of the Rockwell painting was $20 million, Christie's says the painting's final price is $22,565,000, reflecting a buyer's premium. We've updated this post to reflect the auction house's final calculation.

The FBI agent in charge of the investigation into the theft of $500 million worth of masterpieces from a Boston museum nearly a quarter century ago says the bureau has confirmed sightings of the missing artwork from credible sources.

MyFoxBoston.com first reported that FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly, who lead the international investigation for more than 10 years, says the trail for the missing artwork has not grown cold.

"We believe that over certain periods of time, this artwork has been spotted," Kelly told the station. "There have been sightings of it, confirmed sightings."

The University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has received a gift of six original never-before-exhibited Andy Warhol prints from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

All with Warhol’s recognizable style and focus, the prints represent a period of the artist’s work from the late 1970s to mid-1980s, not long before the Warhol’s death in 1987 at the age of 58. The prints depict a range of subjects, from fashionable portraits to popular culture, and include such iconic images as Warhol’s portrait of friend and fellow artist Joseph Beuys and his striking representation of Lakota chief Sitting Bull.

 In the 1960s, the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko was commissioned by Harvard University to create a series of murals. Completed in 1962, the large panels were displayed in the University’s Holyoke Center (now the Smith Campus Center), which boasts floor-to-ceiling windows, from 1964 to 1979. Over time, the constant exposure to natural light caused the murals to fade and the once-vibrant paintings were relegated to storage, where they remained until now.

The Harvard Art Museums, which will reopen on November 16 following a major renovation, have devised a revolutionary technique to restore the murals to their original richness. The process, which was developed over several years by a team of conservators, curators, and scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and the University of Basel in Switzerland, involves digitally projecting specially calibrated light to correct the murals’ devastating color loss. The works will be unveiled to the public in the exhibition “Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals.”

From the rivers and lakes of his childhood in the Champagne region to the pond at Clairefontaine, his estate near Paris, French jeweler and glassmaker René Lalique (1860-1945) was inspired by the flora and fauna underwater and skimming the surface—fish, sea horses, dragonflies, frogs, turtles, swans, water lilies—and by the shimmering water itself.

The antiques dealer and collector Joseph Kindig Jr. never fired a shot with any of his hundreds of American rifles made around 1800. He was not a hunter; he was a vegetarian who did not like to kill anything. At his store in York, Pa., he would refuse to sell his gun inventory to buyers who seemed snobbish or ignorant. He believed that the firearms represented the first major American artistic innovation.

His guns came mainly from Pennsylvania workshops, where a single artisan made and assembled each one: the maple stocks, iron mechanisms and brass floral ornaments. Each workman’s product “contained something of his spirit and soul,” Mr. Kindig told an interviewer in the 1950s.

Art Dubai announced today that next year’s edition will take place from March 18 to 21. The fair’s dates will be particularly convenient for crowded art world calendars, as it will coincide with both the Sharjah Biennial and Design Days Dubai. The biennial in Sharjah, fifteen minutes away from Dubai by car, has become one of the foremost events at which to see art specifically from the Gulf regions.

For the ninth edition, Art Dubai’s extensive program of artists’ projects, including a live radio station and cinema, will continue. This includes the five-day Global Art Forum, which will feature 40 speakers; an exhibition of work by winners of the Abraaj Group Art Prize; and Campus Art Dubai, a year-round art school for artists and curators based in the UAE.

On Thursday, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will welcome its newest exhibit.

Robert Morris’ Glass Labyrinth sits on the south lawn of the museum, in the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Garden.

Morris in an internationally recognized artist who is from the Kansas City area. The Nelson-Atkins Museum has wanted to include one of his pieces in its collection for many years.

“I think we were all thinking something indoors, but this is the perfect way to celebrate him and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Donald J. Hall Sculpture Park,” said Jan Schall, Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Today’s auction of American Art at Sotheby’s New York achieved $45,869,625 (est. $33.2/49.7 million)* – among the highest totals for an American Art sale in the last five years.

- Today’s sell-through rate of 80.7% by lot marks the 5th consecutive American Art auction at Sotheby’s with a strong sell-through rate over 80%.

- Ten lots brought prices over $1 million, with more than half of all sold lots achieving prices above their high estimates – including eight of the auction’s top ten works.

- Ten works by Norman Rockwell totaled $20 million, meeting their combined pre-sale high estimate.

- Led by After the Prom, which sold for $9,1,250,000 – the 4th highest price at auction for the artist (est. $8/12 million). The work was last acquired at Sotheby’s New York in 1995 for $880,000.

The Morgan Library & Museum announced today that it has completed the digitization of its entire collection of Rembrandt etchings: nearly 500 images of works by the Dutch master are now available online. According to the Morgan, “Rembrandt used the process of etching to test concepts and themes, and the digitized works offer the opportunity to explore up-close his use of line, shading, and subject matter.” The prints feature Biblical scenes, self-portraits, and depictions of the Dutch countryside and society in the artist’s day (including both beggars and art patrons).

The Morgan holds in its collection most of the roughly 300 known etchings by Rembrandt, including rare, multiple versions (hence the discrepancy in number of etchings versus number of images). Their digitization is part of a larger effort by the museum “to expand access to its holdings,” says the press release. This includes the digitization of over 500 music manuscripts begun in 2010 and the ongoing digitization of the institution’s collection of nearly 12,000 drawings.

The Orange County Museum of Art has been without a director since the end of 2013, leading many in the local art world to speculate about the executive search being conducted by museum leaders.

On Wednesday, the Newport Beach museum announced that it has named Todd DeShields Smith as its new chief executive and director. Smith has served as executive director of the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida for the last six years.

Smith will begin his term at OCMA on Aug. 4. He succeeds Dennis Szakacs, who served as the director and CEO of the museum for 10 years before stepping down in 2013.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has announced plans for a major renovation of its Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. Completed in 1987, the Wing houses the museum’s Modern and contemporary collection, which includes works by the circle of early American modernists around Alfred Stieglitz, including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, and John Marin; large-scale paintings by Abstract Expressionists, such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko; and modern design, from Josef Hoffmann and members of the Wiener Werkstätte to Art Nouveau jewelry by René Lalique.

The Met, which is the largest art museum in the United States, is in the midst of re-evaluating its layout, and addressing the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing’s shortcomings is a top priority. As it stands, the Wing does not allow for a chronological presentation of the museum’s collection, creating a disjointed visitor experience. To remedy the issue, The Met plans to rebuild the Wing, potentially from scratch. Enhanced exhibition space will also allow the museum to better display its Modern and contemporary art holdings, which got a considerable upgrade last spring when philanthropist and cosmetics mogul Leonard A. Lauder donated 79 Cubist paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

If you want to see the future of car design, you might want to look to the past, to the concept cars designed decades ago.

Take L’Œuf électrique, a three-wheeled, egg-shaped electric model built for personal use by the French artist, industrial designer, and engineer Paul Arzens in 1946. It was conceived as a response to gas shortages during World War II, and it never went into production. But its fuel efficiency and compactness foreshadowed today’s Smart cars and hybrids.

In 1855, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, student friends at Oxford, decided to abandon their theological studies and become artists. They turned for guidance to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a leader of the recently disbanded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1853), a group that galvanized British painting by rejecting academic convention and sought to emulate the vividness and sincerity of art from before the time of Raphael.

The creative dialogue between Burne-Jones, Morris, and Rossetti was remarkable for its intensity, productivity, and duration, and stimulated fresh goals and styles that defined the second wave of Pre-Raphaelite art, in the key decades from the 1860s through the 1890s.

This summer the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston will host Jamie Wyeth's first career retrospective.
 
Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946) -- born into one of the strongest family of artists in history with Andrew Wyeth (1917-2000) as his father and illustrator great N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) as his grandfather -- has always led a quieter, more behind-the-scenes life as a painter. Now, as he is a mere two years away from 70, he is reflecting on almost six decades of artistic production and allowing one of the top museums in the country to organize his first career retrospective. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is working busily to finish this highly anticipated exhibition -- titled "Jamie Wyeth," on view from July 16 through December 28, 2014 -- which will include approximately 100 paintings, works on paper, illustrations, and assemblages in a variety of individual and combined media.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Director Gary Tinterow announced an unprecedented exhibition: Houghton Hall: Portrait of an English Country House, which will be on view at the Museum from June 22 to September 21, 2014. The exhibition marks the first time the renowned collection of the marquesses of Cholmondeley, housed at Houghton Hall, the family estate in Norfolk, will travel outside of England.

The house and much of its collection were built in the early 1700s by Sir Robert Walpole—England's first prime minister and the ancestor of the current marquess. Renowned as one of the finest Palladian houses and one of the most extensive art collections in Britain, Houghton became notorious when Sir Robert's collection of Old Master paintings was sold by his grandson to Catherine the Great, in 1779. But the house and all of its furnishings, considered to comprise William Kent's Georgian masterpiece, remained intact; Walpole's descendants added considerably to the collection of paintings. From great family portraits by William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds and John Singer Sargent, to exquisite examples of Sèvres porcelain, rare pieces of R. J. & S. Garrard silver and unique furniture by William Kent, the exhibition vividly evokes the fascinating story of art, history and politics through the collections of this aristocratic English family over three centuries.

Seven months after David Franklin abruptly resigned as director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, with museum officials later saying he had lied to them about his extramarital affair with an employee, the institution has named a high-profile successor from New York, signaling a new chapter in its 98-year history. He is William M. Griswold, who has led the Morgan Library & Museum for nearly seven years. Mr. Griswold, 53, who will start his new job in the fall, said he decided to leave New York because he relishes running a bigger institution, with one of the most encyclopedic collections in the country.

“All told, I’ve been at the Morgan for 13 years,” Mr. Griswold said, including his years as head of its drawings department, from 1995 to 2001, as well as his years as director, from 2008. “I’m ready for my last big challenge.” Mr. Griswold also ran the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for two years.