Olga Costa was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1913, at the outset of World War I. Her parents, Jacobo Kostakowsky and Ana Falvisant Bovglarevokeylandel, were immigrants who had fled czarist Russia to escape persecution of the Jews. Costa and her younger sister Lya were raised in Berlin, where their father, a violinist and composer, exposed them to the arts at a young age. But after the end of the war, her family, along with many other Russians, fled Germany. In 1925 they set sail from the French port of Saint-Nazaire, arriving in Veracruz, Mexico later that year.
Jansson (March 18, 1862 - June 15, 1915) could be described as the first gay Swedish painter. His academic painting career started fairly conventionally as he began studies in 1878 at Slojdskolan (later known as the Technical School). However upon meeting painters returning from France, he joined a Swedish avant-garde movement known as the Opponents who showed their work independently. Jansson stayed with the group which later became known as the League of Artists to its conclusion.
The United States has debated immigration since the country's founding, and the Statue of Liberty—a potent symbol for immigrants—is often invoked as an argument for why we should usher in those who seek safety and opportunity with open arms. A little-known fact about Lady Liberty adds an intriguing twist to today's debate about refugees from the Muslim world: according to the Smithsonian Institute the statue itself was originally intended to represent a female Egyptian peasant as a Colossus of Rhodes for the Industrial Age. That might be surprising to people more familiar with the statue’s French roots than its Arab ones.
Octopuses have three hearts, parrot-like beaks, venomous bites, and eight semi-autonomous arms that can taste the world. They squirt ink, contort through the tiniest of spaces, and melt into the world by changing both color and texture. They are incredibly intelligent, capable of wielding tools, solving problems, and sabotaging equipment. As Sy Montgomery once wrote, “no sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange” as an octopus. But their disarming otherness doesn’t end with their bodies. Their genes are also really weird.
