What happens when you mix a pro-football player, a passionate interest in the arts, the new MoMA and 60 NYC youth? You get Tiki Barber, player for the NY Giants talking about his own work and introducing the museum to a group of students on the inaugural day of Exploring the Modern, a new program, (sponsored by the JP Morgan Chase Foundation) that offers educational tours to NYC students. Or do you?

The work of Kenyan-born British artist Sneh Mehta (b.1954) is now going through a significant mutation, both in terms of aesthetics and content. Oscillating between painting and sculpture, digital photography, film and animation, the work manages to retain a powerful link to Mehta’s dominant subject-matter: the biological mysteries of human life. The new work healthily incorporates what came before it, and there is no brutal jettisoning of the old in favour of a redemptive new.

Large, sweeping art fairs tend to elicit a mixed bag of emotions from Miami’s art viewing miscellany: curiosity from cultured locals eager for the opportunity to see work of a global scale; cynicism from seasoned pundits huffily moaning at the vacuous mechanism of the art market; gluttonous excitement from collectors, well-heeled art honchos and the tourism sector all ravenous for the big cheese spectacle; and, typically, a wise release of sighs from the critics and reporters.

Boris Mikhalevkin is a master of black-and-white photography. Hie does not require a complex color scheme to convey his thoughts and feelings with the viewer. He expresses, in simple words his thoughts on life and man. "I find black-and-white self-sufficient," says Mikhalevkin. "Moreover, it is a philosophic conception. It is less distracting and easier to perceive. Photography is a dialogue between the author and viewer. If the dialogue occurs, then the photograph has helped the viewer understand what the author wanted to say."

The 2005 art fair season has been in Florida. Following the third year of Art Basel/Miami, several smaller fairs took place: the Connoisseur Fair in West Palm Beach, held at Kravis Center; the 15th year of Art Miami; then followed the very newest concept in art fairs, Palm Beach 3. Redesigned and renamed, it really encompassed three fairs in one.

Staring’s radiant, vibrantly colorful abstract paintings, are inspired by water, nature, and New Spirituality. He has shown in the US, Asia, Europe and Brazil. Of his paintings, Staring comments: "Behind a painting is my life, my travels through Asia, the Pacific and Latin America–all those colors, all those impressions. Not just beautiful things; I have also seen deeply miserable things and helped to improve them." Born in Venezuela, this Dutch economist/diplomat now lives and works as a fulltime artist in both The Netherlands and Spain.

W. G. Sebald died in December of 2001 in a car accident in Norwich England during a particularly bad winter when the roads had turned to ice. "I don’t think you can write from a compromised moral position," he had said in an interview earlier that year. His commitment to this position put him at odds with much of the contemporary publishing industry. He was uneasy with cultural truisms or doctrines regardless of their acceptance in the academic milieu in which he lived.

In New York, where anything interesting in the overpopulated expanses of the art world is hard to come by, exists a subculture with a vocabulary rooted in graffiti, tattoo art, hot rod detailing, comic book illustration, punk rock and hip-hop. It’s practitioners look down on Andy Warhol as a vapid rip-off artist who took their best ideas and made millions. They think Clement Greenberg was an asshole for devaluing their influences as mere kitsch. There is a value placed on craft, skill, labor and narrative representation that is a refreshing alternative to the sloppy slipshod shit that all too often passes for objects of worth at art fairs too numerous to count or care about anymore.

Ritchard Rodriguez was a realist painter for a good fifteen years before deciding to make the dramatic switch to abstract art. He attributes the change to a trip to Germany in 1981 to see the Neue Sachlichkeit paintings especially those of Otto Dix. Being in Germany pried his eyes open and made him hungry for qualitative art. He experienced the 1983 retrospective of Willem de Konnings’s paintings. He realized that he too needed to find his own abstraction and signature.

The European Fine Arts Fair (TEFAF) is now regarded as one of the most, if not the most influential art and antiques event in the world. Several factors have contributed to this. The exhibitors are very international. There are some 200 leading art and antiques dealers from fourteen countries. Although the fair takes place in Maastricht in The Netherlands, only 20% of its exhibitors is Dutch. 33 modern art dealers from nine countries show one of the greatest cross sections of 20th century European and American art. TEFAF Maastricht offers an unequalled variety and depth of cross cultural periods and disciplines. Many of the objects are of museum quality. Each year collectors and art professionals are surprised to find "hidden treasures"

Anna Socha VanMatre's paintings scream at the viewer–expressing VanMatre’s shock and fear and hope. Her post-September 11 works act as a cry for sanity, their emotional content even more penetrating then VanMatre’s previous works. VanMatre, a Polish born artist who has been painting since 1978, constructs graphite paintings on monumental three-dimensional surfaces. Her works have been presented on many exhibitions in different countries and have been described by critics as "symphonies of blackness, gray and light" and a significant step in "liberating" the drawing idiom. At the exhibition in Jerusalem Center for the Arts, her installation was praised as much more then the series of static drawings: "a thing of theatrical character, an interaction between the stage and the audience."

"Just as Kandinsky and Miro strove to create visual interpretations of jazz and classical music with line, shape and color, so my focus is to visualize the essence of Latin music in texture and color. I integrate primary colors, as well as tropical colors and shapes into harmonies that explode into saucy riffs and spontaneous improvisations. These forms appear to fly, dance and shake to an exhilarating internal rhythm. The marriage of line and texture suggest the endless exchange between the dancer and the music." — Carol Caputo

Transmediale presents new and outstanding projects in the field of digital culture and provides reflections on the role of digital technologies in contemporary society. It is a forum of communication for artists, media workers and a broad public interested in arts of vital and still increasing international importance.

Madrid Abierto is a project within what is generically known as Public Art. In the words of its organizer, Ramon Parramon, its objective is to "stimulate creative work in determined places that relate that which is typical of the place and the time in which the creativity takes place.

Anna Socha VanMatre's paintings scream at the viewer shock and fear and hope. Her post-September 11 works act as a cry for sanity, their emotional content even more penetrating then VanMatre's previous works.