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Iranian born Shirin Neshat is one of the most important visual artists of the 21st century.  She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. In December 2010 Shirin Neshat was named Artist of the Decade by the  Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson, for “the degree to which world events have more than met

In recent years, a lot of emphasis has been placed on ensuring young people are not only welcomed but actually encouraged into museums and cultural institutions. Almost every venue now has, or is developing, a family scheme with children their main target. But what about teenagers – a group that could have benefited the most

        Napoleon Bonaparte was an extraordinary and contradictory man: a warlord who saw himself as a champion of civilisation. One of his most ambitious attempts to prove himself a cultural as well as military titan was to commission a team of scholars to produce the legendary Description de l’Egypte. This was the first thorough

For more than a thousand years all manuscripts were written and illustrated by hand. By the Middle Ages, books were being made by folding sheets of parchment, arranging them into gatherings, and assembling and binding them together. This animation from the Getty Museum illustrates how medieval books were constructed–a feat of engineering that remains essentially

The ancient Egyptians developed a sophisticated method to preserve a dead body for the afterlife: mummification. First, the internal organs were removed and all moisture from the body was eliminated. Next, the body was wrapped with long strips of linen, and then covered with a large linen cloth. Follow the steps of the mummification process

When handling rare and often valuable historic objects and books, are gloves always necessary? Object Curator Matt Anderson and Acquisitions Librarian Patrick Coleman discuss when gloves are helpful versus when they do more harm than good; several specific examples are shown. Artifact and Rare Book Handling: To Glove or Not to Glove? – YouTube.

For nearly 60 years, Auschwitz has told its own story, shaped in the aftermath of the Second World War. It now unfolds, unadorned and mostly unexplained, in displays of hair, shoes and other remains of the dead. Past the notorious, mocking gateway, into the brick ranks of the former barracks of the Polish army camp that the

Mr. Sarkozy has now decided that he wants a cultural legacy after all. He has cooked up the Maison de l’Histoire de France, the country’s first national museum of French history, to open in 2015, in a wing of the rambling palace in the Marais district of Paris currently occupied by the National Archives. The idea is