A one-room school in rural Onatario gave the young Janet Cardiff a sense of dreaminess and self-direction that has served the artist well for fifty years.

As the Met’s Costume Institute opens an exhibition about the interplay between handmade and mass-produced fashion, Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch for a sequin-making machine evokes a longer historical view of the topic.

An African-American woman who turned to painting full-time at age sixty-nine, Alma Thomas faced many professional barriers—and overcame them all with her colorful mosaiclike abstractions.