On January 23. 2026 SEEDs for Autism is proud to present The Art of Inclusion, a special one-night art exhibit and fundraiser that brings together the creative talents of professional artists and adults on the autism spectrum. This inspiring event highlights the transformative power of art while raising funds to support the life-changing program at SEEDs for Autism.
The Art of Inclusion will feature a diverse collection of artwork celebrating creativity without boundaries. Guests will experience a vibrant evening filled with paintings, mixed media, and unique works that reflect both professional artistry and the authentic voices of SEEDs participants.
50% of all art sales will directly benefit SEEDs for Autism, helping fund essential vocational training, life skills, and job readiness programs for adults on the spectrum. Every purchase supports not only the artist but also the mission of creating opportunities, independence, and brighter futures.
“This event is about more than just art—it’s about connection, accomplishment, and celebrating every individual’s creativity,” said curator and artist Richard Bledsoe. “The Art of Inclusion shows what’s possible when we come together and share our unique perspectives and talents.”
Event Details: 📅 Date: Friday January 23, 2026 🕕 Time: 6:00pm to 8:00pm 📍 Location: SEEDs For Autism 3420 S 7th St Phoenix AZ 85040
Admission is free. Guests are encouraged to arrive early to enjoy the exhibit, meet the artists, and support the mission of SEEDs for Autism.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Thanks to Biden and Obama, Jimmy Carter is no longer known as the worst president of the modern era. I never realized like another failure, George W. Bush, Carter turned to painting in his retirement.
“When Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100, he left behind quite the legacy as the 39th president of the United States. But he also left behind something else: a cache of paintings. Now, several of these artworks are heading to Christie’s New York, which is hosting a major auction in celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary this year.
“Carter first gravitated toward painting in the 1980s following his presidential term, although he’d also dabbled with the medium during his time in the U.S. Navy. For the former president, art offered a “rare opportunity for privacy” in an otherwise public life. “These times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world,” he remarked in an interview with the Associated Press.
“The Christie’s auction gathers a selection of these compositions, including scenes of the Georgia church where he was baptized, a still-life of pomegranate, and a waterfall landscape, each of which are estimated to sell for less than $10,000. The Hornet’s Nest, from 2003, is expected to snag between $8,000 and $12,000, and depicts a troop of American soldiers taking aim at British forces during the Revolutionary War.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Éduoard Manet, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (1882)
Viewing real art leads to health benefits, according to a recent scientific study.
“Supporting existing research on the benefits of viewing original artwork versus reproductions, a new study found that seeing authentic art can help drop cortisol levels, among other positive effects on the nervous system.
“Still in pre-print since its submission last October, ‘The Physiological Impact of Viewing Original Artworks vs. Reprints: a Comparative Study’ was conducted by researchers from the Department of Psychological Medicine at King’s College in London working in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art.
“Fifty adults between the ages of 18 and 40 participated in the experimental study — one half was made to view five authentic paintings with their wall labels in a gallery setting for a 20-minute period, while the other half was shown high-quality reproductions of those paintings in a similarly curated setting. All participants had their heart rate and skin temperature monitored, and they provided saliva samples before and after the viewing sessions.
“The selected works (and subsequent reproductions) were all late 19th-century figurative paintings by European artists from the Courtauld’s collection: ‘Jane Avril in the Entrance to the Moulin Rouge’ (c. 1892) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; ‘A Bar at the Folies-Berère’ (1882) by Éduoard Manet; ‘Banks of the Seine at Argenteuil’ (1874) by Éduoard Manet; ‘Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear’ (1889) by Vincent van Gogh; and ‘Te Rerioa (The Dream)’ (1897) by Paul Gaugin.
“The recorded data showed that those who viewed original artwork had higher heart rate variability patterns compared to the reproductions group, indicating that authentic viewing experiences contribute to a more receptive and adaptable nervous system. The post-viewing saliva samples also yielded a 22% cortisol decrease among the original art group, as well as a measurable drop in two of four recorded inflammatory proteins.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Before Iran was taken over by radical terrorist Islamists, its leader Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife formed a connection with American artist Andy Warhol.
“Andy Warhol is famous for his pop art work, especially his painting of 32 Campbell’s Soup cans. Few remember he once painted the queen of Iran.
“He went to Iran in 1976, when it was led by the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Three years later, the Shah would be overthrown in the Iranian Revolution.
“Fereydoon Hoveyda, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations at the time, extended the invitation to Warhol to come to Iran and create a portrait of Empress Farah Pahlavi. Warhol was joined on the trip by Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello, Warhol’s biographer.
“‘Tehran then seemed quite modern. For the most part, the world that we saw [was] very modernized,’ Colacello recalled recently.
“The empress had a passion for the arts, Colacello says, and wanted to create a few museums, housing works ranging from traditional Iranian to modern and Western creations.
“One of those museums is the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, where the empress housed the art she collected. According to Colacello, the collection remains in the basement of the museum and is probably worth $2.8 billion.
“Warhol liked the empress and, apparently, she wanted to get to know him better, too.
“‘Andy was invited to a state dinner for the shah of Iran, given by the president and Mrs. Ford. At that dinner, he had a brief conversation with her. In fact, after the dinner, he was kind of avoiding her because he said he was afraid she was going to dance,’ Colacello says. ‘She told me later all she wanted to do was talk to him some more.’
“Colacello says their trip was criticized.
“‘The Village Voice newspaper ran a front page photograph of Andy in front of her portrait and the headline was, “The Beautiful Butcher,” and the opening sentence was “Torture tastes better with caviar,”‘ he recalls.
“To Colacello, however, this was just ‘red, yellow journalism. It was guilt by association. It was left-wing McCarthyism.'”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
One of several versions of the angel visiting Mary that El Greco (October 1, 1541 – April 7, 1614) painted.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
“Bacon often credited the power of his paintings to accidents. ‘I want a very ordered image, but I want it to have come about by chance,’ he told Sylvester in the same 1966 interview. He believed that through embracing spontaneity—and accepting ‘accidents’ as integral aspects of the composition—he’d achieve true emotional candor. Spontaneous marks and images, for the artist, resembled the unexpected welling up of passionate, unbridled feelings.
“In another interview with Sylvester, Bacon described the unexpected imagery that emerged while creating one of his butcher shop paintings, a series depicting dripping cuts of meat. ‘I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field,’ he said of his initial idea for the composition, ‘but suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture.’ Instead of forcing his original idea, he accepted the new form that had pushed through. He recalled that not only was it a powerful image, but it ‘suggested an opening-up into another area of feeling altogether.'”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
“Becoming the Sea,” a new show of works by German artist Anselm Kiefer, at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Immense new works by German artist Anselm Kiefer are showing in St. Louis, MO.
“Even on a casual walk, German artist Anselm Kiefer is always searching for inspiration. ‘Look at this tree,’ he said walking alongside the Mississippi River. ‘This is a fantastic tree, you know?’
“And here in St. Louis, Missouri, it’s an American river that’s fired his imagination. He said, ‘This river goes through America, and so with this conscience I have an inner overview of America, of the continent, of the world.’
“Kiefer has turned those reflections into a series of paintings, each three stories tall. They are now holding court at the Saint Louis Art Museum, home to an Anselm Kiefer retrospective. Dozens of Kiefer works are on display, but it’s these monumental canvases that are the showstoppers.
“The paintings depict the Mississippi and Europe’s Rhine River – waterways brimming with history, symbolizing the cycle of life. Kiefer said the inspiration for their name, ‘Becoming the Sea,’ came from Beat Generation poet Gregory Corso: ‘Spirit is life … like a river unafraid of becoming the sea.'”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Artist Cjay Roughgarden poses for a portrait in front of her sculpture, Naga, in Golden Gate Park, on Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2025. Photo by Reese Brindisi
California has lots of infrastructure issues. Add the maintenance of a whimsical public art sea serpent to that list.
“When Cjay Roughgarden was crafting what would become the largest public art installation in Golden Gate Park’s history, she sought inspiration from her favorite children’s book. The Richmond-based artist and fabricator has long been captivated by the story of ‘Cyrus the Unsinkable Sea Serpent,’ a 1975 tale of an enormous maritime monster who is urged by a shark to sink a boat of civilians, but overcomes the peer pressure to save them from the dangers at sea.
“Now, her resulting sculpture named Naga — a bubble-blowing behemoth of steel, aluminum and wire mesh measuring 100 feet long, 25 feet tall and weighing in at approximately 12,000 pounds — is facing a plight of its own.
“The process to build the mythical creature started in July of 2023, when early pen and paper illustrations became clay renderings. Within months, more than 250 volunteers joined Roughgarden and co-creators Stephanie Shipman and Jacquelyn Scott to fabricate Naga, carefully shaping the humps on its back so it could fit on a semitruck for safe transportation, and one by one, placing over 5,000 iridescent scales on its body by hand…
“All told, an estimated 35,000 hours of work went into Naga’s installation, with several groups backing the $400,000 project. They included the primary funder of San Francisco’s Big Art Loop, the Sijbrandij Foundation, as well as art production studio Building 180 and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department. Also involved in the partnership is Illuminate, the arts nonprofit behind the Bay Lights, the naked, towering R-Evolution statue on the Embarcadero and the rainbow lasers that lit up Market Street during Pride last year. It was Illuminate’s founder, Ben Davis, who came up with the idea for the serpent’s current home after its stint at Burning Man in 2024…
“But the cost to maintain the work of art modeled after the heroic character from her childhood has surged beyond what Roughgarden ever anticipated, forcing her to pay thousands out of pocket to keep it above water. ‘The toll this took on my life was pretty big,’ she said.
“First, there was ‘the mystery at the bottom of the pond’ — a layer of thick, sludgy muck that needed to be removed via an industrial suction truck, Roughgarden recently learned after a $10,000 assessment. The Recreation and Park Department didn’t have one, and neither did anyone else she knew, so the artist had to hire a company to do it after draining the historic pond that sits just east of Crossover Drive, which set her back another $30,000.
“Then there was the lack of electricity. To make sure Naga’s blinking purple and green LED lights worked properly, Roughgarden’s team had to figure out how to design and install their own 220-volt service panel and electrical system in the pond. That was yet another $35,000 after they needed more time than expected to rent the necessary equipment prior to the summer installation. Ongoing maintenance has also added up: Refilling Naga’s bubble tank alone costs $500 a month.
“’None of these unexpected expenses were in our initial budget, but once we had final dates, the pond drained, and cranes on the way, we had to go ahead no matter the cost,’ Roughgarden wrote in the caption of a December Instagram post asking people to donate to her team’s Crowdfundr, which has raised $356,064 to date. ‘We made up the difference with credit cards and not paying our lead for her labor, and using what would have been the maintenance budget. We still owe our concrete installer a not-insignificant amount as well.’”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Alex Schomburg (May 10, 1905 – April 7, 1998)cover art for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1980
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 
