The powerful and privileged have hoarded precious artifacts in museums for centuries, and it's only recently that these treasures were made available to the rest of us. What purpose did museums serve? And why does every city have one today?

Ryan Lott, also known as Son Lux, is a musician and composer who works in collaboration. His assignment for this week offers an opportunity for YOU to collaborate with his music. Sarah then explores how collaboration is found among many...

Can you solve the bottle riddle and the magnet riddle?

Death as a character reveals how we process one of life’s greatest mysteries, and there’s a lot more breadth to how the grim reaper is depicted than you might think. It's Lit! is part of THE GREAT AMERICAN READ, a eight-part series that...

When art is generated by Artificial Intelligence, what or who can we call the artist? We look to art history to consider the long collaboration between humans and technology.

Today we visit artist Allison Smith in her Oakland, California studio. Her work focuses on historical reenactment and how the past influences the present -- and now she wants to know what YOU are fighting for. Sarah discusses how there...

This week we gathered some friends and challenged ourselves to an art assignment marathon - how many assignments can we complete in a day?

Behold the 2017 Venice Biennale. Called the "olympics of the art world," the exhibition invades historic (and tourist clogged) Venice, Italy, every two years, and has since 1895. Contemporary art abounds, with installations and...

On this international art trip, we travel to Tijuana to meet with Ghana Think Tank and Torolab, explore the city, and visit artist Hugo Crosthwaite's studio.

We take an art pilgrimage to Houston, Texas, and visit the likes of the Rothko Chapel, James Turrell's Twilight Epiphany, the Menil Collection, and Project Row Houses, among others. Come with us we feast upon Houston's many cultural...

This week Sarah breaks down why The Art Assignment sign-off cannot be "Please Don't Break the Law," and discusses artists Ai Weiwei and Pussy Riot who have broken the law for good reasons. What should our sign off be?

What is public art? Who funds it, owns it, and shapes it? Who does it serve? And why is it important? We try to answer some of these questions by looking at an example of public art that never came to be - Fred Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum.

This week we share some of your excellent responses to two assignments -- Geof Oppenheimer's Embarrassing Object and Diana Shpungin's Object Empathy.

In which we feature some of the best and most interesting responses to Robyn O'Neil's Art Assignment to draw a psychological landscape.

You might being asking yourself-- Why do ghostwriters even exist? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t literature supposed to be the result of one person’s agonizing need to create? Aren’t books supposed to be the blood, sweat, and tears of the...

We've spent quite a bit of time exploring art in other people's cities, so we figured it was time to come back home and try being tourists in our own town.

This week we report to you from VidCon! We asked some members of the Art Assignment community to share their experience of participating in an art exchange and making a Lost Childhood Object. Here's what they said. Many thanks to...

This assignment comes to you from Chicago based artist Geof Oppenheimer. Geof's work reflects personal experience and the social and political atmosphere they were created in, and he wants you to make an object that does the same. John...

We sit down with artist Desirée Holman to talk about her current project, Sophont, which explores ideas of science fiction, aliens, new-age ideology, mysticism, and tech culture. Her assignment asks you to become a science fiction...

In which Los Angeles-based artist Robyn O'Neil challenges you to draw a psychological landscape.

Peggy Noland, Garry Noland, and Sarah Urist Green discuss some of their favorite responses to the Under the Influence assignment.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 - 1978) was one of the most influential artists of his generation, and was also the brainchild behind the infamous BONE MEAL in 1971 at the artist-run Food restaurant in New York City's SoHo neighborhood. He...

*and other things I learned about art from the internet.

We visited New Orleans for the Prospect.3 exhibition and saw some fantastic art by Carrie Mae Weems, Camille Henrot, Shigeru Ban, Kerry James Marshall, and Tavares Strachan. Let's talk about it!