【推荐2】New York-based Ecovative has been creating environmentally friendly packaging made from mushrooms and agricultural waste since 2009. Now, the company wants to bring their amazing material into homes and offices with a new line of compostable (可堆肥的) furnishings that are grown using just three materials: mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms), hemp (麻类植物), and salt.

While creating hard material from mushrooms might sound magical, the company’s CEO Eben Bayer says it is a relatively low-tech process and compares it to “making bread”. The company begins by adding a few mycelium cells to damp hemp or other agricultural waste.

The mycelium that grows like little hairs is allowed to twist with the waste until everything is ”glued“ together. The combination is then mixed again and placed into the desired mold (模具) where it continues to grow and harden. The resulting material is then baked in the oven. In addition to making it as strong as wood, the heat also kills the mycelium, thus giving the compostable material a similar shelf life to wood.

Also, though the table tops of the stylish Tafl and King’s tables released at the recently held Biofabricate 2016 conference in New York City resemble marble, they are far from it. The perfectly carved blocks are made of a material grown by a North Carolina-based company named bioMASON using grains of sands and bacteria.

As you have probably guessed, this waste-free furniture does not come cheap. Customers can expect to pay anywhere from $249 USD for the Tafl to $699 USD for the King’s table, both of which are only available in limited quantities. Those that cannot afford those prices can choose cheaper GIY (grow it yourself) ones made of various products ranging from Christmas tree decorations to lamp shades.

【推荐1】American illustration changed dramatically. Pictures that Norman Rockwell created with oil paint on canvas (油画布) were gradually superseded by “photo illustrations.” Today, illustrators are able to make pictures with computers to put in magazines that arrive on the Internet. Digital images and electronic art are more and more popular.

But the heart of illustration will always be its creativity, not its tools. Just ask award-winning artist Gary Kelley. He is no software engineer working in Silicon Valley; instead, he has enjoyed a long and successful career working from a town in Iowa. He still uses traditional media such as oil paint and pastels, but his ideas are new.

Illustrators drawing for advertisements get paid the best, but that is not always the most fun. For Kelley, it’s the storytelling aspects of art that make illustration fun and interesting. He started by illustrating stories for magazines such as Time, The New Yorker, and so on. With fewer magazine stories to illustrate, he started to create a series of murals (壁画) for the national bookstore chain Barnes & Noble. He also illustrated a number of books. More recently he has illustrated novels.

But perhaps the most interesting innovation was Kelley’s attempt to illustrate music. Kelley recalled that he was listening to The Planets, an orchestral suite by a famous English composer, when images began to appear in his mind. He decided to see if he could create pictures that showed the qualities of the music. He said, “I’m going to see what happens.”

He associated a series of beautiful pictures to be projected on a huge screen above an orchestra while it performed. He found a willing partner in the WCF Symphony Orchestra in the creation of the illustrated music. Their work was well received, which motivated Kelley to create more. The Planets was followed by Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Gustav Mahler’s Nachtmusik, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, and even music by Duke Ellington.

The lesson here is that a true artist can find all the creativity they want, right where they are.

【推荐2】Across all four walls of a vast hall, Oscar Claude Monet’s Three Pots of Tulips begin to swing. They bloom gently at firsts then more violently, as the music gradually increases. Visitors to “Immersive (沉浸式的）Monet”, now sit or stand in socially distant circles on the floor of a former music hall in San Francisco, their bodies bathed in the glow of these animated laser projections (投影).

On America’s other coast, visitors will be amazed more when a new exhibition space covering 50,000 square feet opens on April 22nd. At Superblue Miami they will be able to touch the blossoms winding across a huge wall, and doing so makes the artwork move and change. “A Whole Year per Year,” — a digitally projected work by teamLab, a Japanese art group, is a lightening cycle of the seasons in which visitors’ hands cause plants to bloom and fade, petals (花瓣) scattering in a balletic display. No two visits are ever the same.

“Immersive art” experiences are on the rise, not just in America but across the world. Tens of thousands of people have walked completely dry through a “Rain Room” of streaming water in Shanghai, Melbourne and Shaijah. Others have visited a mirrored “Infinity room” in New York. More and more, the experience of contemporary art is just that: a novel experience.

These displays share a common trait：an urge by artists to create--and audiences to enjoy — a space in which visitors participate and play. “It’s a bit like going into the museum and being in the picture,” says Florian Ortkrass, co-founder of Random International, an art organization which has followed its amazing work ”Rain Room” with other exhibits that explore the relationship between human bodies’ and technology. “If this kind of world is done well, it engages people emotionally, it lifts them out of their everyday routines, adds Hannes Koch, Random International’s other co-founder.

【推荐3】An exhibition held at the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai, showcasing artworks by fifty 20th-century masters, alongside more than 300 copies of textbooks and other historical documents, some of which are on public view for the first time.

Tushanwan Orphanage, established in 1864 by the Catholic Church in Xujiahui district of Shanghai, is believed to be the cradle of “Western painting” in Shanghai to teach elementary painting techniques. Then the Tushanwan art studio, which was founded by a missionary (传教士) from Spain, taught arts in a completely different way from the traditional Chinese practise. On show at the exhibition are some of the textbooks and letters in French from the Tushanwan era. While most of the teachers at the time were Western missionaries, the curriculum included Chinese characters and translation between French and Chinese.

Liu Haisu was one of founders of the private “Shanghai Academy of Art”. “From 1919 to 1933, Liu conducted research visits to Japan and Europe respectively, which marked important turning points for the art school,” says Jin Wenyi, the director of the Liu Haisu Art Museum.

Liu adopted the style of administration and teaching of the art schools in Tokyo, broke further away from the traditional system, and expanded the curriculum to modern art and science. A school board with outstanding members such as Cai Yuanpei and Liang Qichao was founded, which brought more funding and social influence for the art school.

Another area of the exhibition features Shanghai University, the first university founded by the Communist Party of China in 1922. Documents on display also reflect the changes in the art education system after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

“It was only in an open city such as Shanghai that modern art education could develop so well, with curricula and teachers shared between institutions and a confluence of different ideas,” Jin says.

【推荐2】The saying “You need to walk a mile in their shoes” couldn’t be truer. It goes for a person in a wheelchair to attend an event. You can’t fully grasp what it would be like for your attendees who use a wheelchair to experience your event until you’ve sat in their seat.

With that in mind, Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) offered participants an opportunity to attend the “Event Mobility & Accessible Design — An Immersive Tour” in a wheelchair. The event was led by accessibility advocate Rosemarie Rossetti, who has been in a wheelchair since an accident paralyzed (使瘫痪) her from the waist down 25 years ago. Rossetti took us for a test run of the wheelchair tour, which opened our eyes to the challenges those in a wheelchair face when attending events and gave us a better understanding of how to make those events more welcoming for them.

After we started pushing ourselves around, I was immediately reminded of a recent article on how San Diego Comic-Con attendees were disappointed except for those in a wheelchair. The exhibit hall of the event was not carpeted. The first thing you realize when pushing yourself in a wheelchair is that it’s far less physically taxing on cement (水泥) than on carpeting. You should know the truth that it takes more energy and time to navigate in a wheelchair.

I hope that my temporary experience in a wheelchair won’t fade from memory and that I will look at every event with fresh eyes. In the registration form, it’s not enough to ask whether the attendees need wheelchair access but what convenience they need.

What can be especially helpful to those in wheelchairs, Rossetti shared, was to feature an accessible navigation map in the app to highlight a wheelchair-only access route. Rossetti accompanied planners on their site visits to make sure the attendees would be fully accessible, but she also suggested proactive use of a wheelchair on the next site visit.