OTTAWA, CANADA — At the threshold of the National Gallery of Canada’s contemporary department, a newly installed lodestone looms. It’s vast and furious, awash with crimson and ochre, blood and fire, centuries of trauma fastened tightly to the here and now.

Lord Cultural Resources and Nordicity Group undertook an Evaluation Study for the National Gallery of Canada in 2005.  

OSSINING, USA — Leaders in Ossining are embracing the notorious prison as a tourism opportunity these days.

Lord Cultural Resources has been engaged to develop a Program Plan for the future museum.  We are preparing a visitor program and concept study, which includes development of institutional and interpretive goals and objectives, main messages, major themes, primary topics, narratives and key program elements.

OTTAWA, CANADA - The Bank of Canada is embarking on a new mission with its soon-to-be-opened museum – to show people just how much fun monetary policy can be.

In 2002, Lord Cultural Resources was contracted to assess whether the Museum should enhance its merchandising capability through an expanded boutique operation.

OTTAWA, CANADA — It's dark and cool when you first step into the new Arctic Gallery at Ottawa's Canadian Museum of Nature, as the sights and sounds of the Far North are projected onto ice.

Lord Cultural Resources was recently engaged to conduct a study of visitor movement within the existing atrium/ lobby space.

LOS ANGELES, USA — Changing audiences are making creators and institutions rethink art itself. Gail Lord weighed in, offering a look at how soft power can persuade people and help set agendas.

NEW YORK, USA — In January, rumors swirled that the art collector and patron Agnes Gund had sold her prized 1962 Roy Lichtenstein “Masterpiece” for a whopping $150 million, placing it among the 15 highest known prices ever paid for an artwork. She parted with the painting for a specific purpose: to create a fund that supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States.

ATHENS, GREECE — The world-class 37 million euro Documenta arts festival comes to Athens – and brings challenging questions about art’s relevance amid economic and humanitarian crises.

USA — A new report shows how the nonprofit cultural sector stimulates the economy both locally and nationally.

BEIJING, CHINA — The most attended museum in the world last year was Beijing’s National Museum of China, according to a new report published by the international nonprofit Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) in collaboration with engineering company AECOM.

INTERNATIONAL — A calisthenics circuit around the Metropolitan Museum, interval training at the Berlin Biennale, yoga among the statues in the Beaux-Art Court of the Brooklyn Museum or in the halls of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum: Fitness has, over the past year, crept ever more directly into museums, spaces which for centuries have been temples to stillness.

PARIS, FRANCE — It is the latest chapter in the art-world rivalry of two of France’s richest businessmen: a saga of momentous contemporary art collections and a quest by their owners to build Paris museums that would transform the city’s landscape.

JORDAN — The World Monuments Fund (WMF) is launching a £500,000 scheme to train Syrian refugees living in and around the Zaatari camp on the Jordanian border in traditional stone masonry.

COLOGNE, GERMANY — On the night of 30 May 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, launched the first of his 1,000-bomber raids on Nazi Germany. The target was the ancient city of Cologne.

INTERNATIONAL — Historic sites continue to be victims of warfare, and terrorism. Do we rebuild them? Create simulacra of them? Or do we leave the ruins as haunting reminders?

FRANCE — The French ministry of defence is funding a US-French consortium that is working to democratise the technology used to digitally document heritage sites threatened by war.

BROOKLYN, USA — While we're lucky enough to have a meme for every aesthetic and stage of existential angst, perhaps no one has honed the craft of art memeing better than Brooke Baldeschwiler, senior manager of digital communications, and her social media staff at the Brooklyn Museum. 

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM — For years galleries and museums have been racing to scan, photograph and digitise their collections, in order to open up their collections for a global audience. But is this really a good idea?

UNITED KINGDOM — No one studies fine arts expecting to become a billionaire. But new data released by the U.K. Department of Education suggests that young people with creative arts and design majors face the lowest median earnings across all disciplines.

INTERNATIONAL — Alex Logsdail, international director of Lisson Gallery, remembers the first time his father encountered Carmen Herrera’s work. It was 2008, and the painter Tony Bechara had brought some of her canvases to London for the Pinta art fair. None of them sold, says Logsdail, but his father, Lisson Gallery founder Nicholas Logsdail, was smitten.

CANADA — With a push from Canada 150 and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, galleries and museums are making more space for First Peoples’ arts and culture – and inviting Indigenous people to lead the way, Robert Everett-Green writes.

SAN FRANCISCO, USA — Earlier this year, George Lucas rejected Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay as the home for his new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. But San Francisco arts officials remain committed to developing the island as a major cultural destination and this week are releasing their Treasure Island “arts master plan” to the public.

LOS ANGELES, USA — We write this in hopes that more artists will finally break with their sense of exceptionalism and consider the roles they play in the gentrification process.

KASSEL, GERMANY — Kassel’s city council has settled on a location to build a new Documenta Institute to serve as a research centre and to host events, conferences and exhibitions studying its significance in the contemporary art world.