The Artists’ Tower of Protest (aka the Peace Tower), originally conceived by Mark di Suvero and erected in LA as a Vietnam protest in 1996, is returning in 2012, and artists are encouraged to contribute two-foot-square panels to this new incarnation.

Remembering art greats who passed in 2011: Cy Twombly, Dennis Oppenheim, John Chamberlain, Leonora Carrington, Lucian Freud, George Kuchar, Richard Hamilton, and many others.

British artist Tracy Emin says her conservative voting record puts her at odds with other artists: “The world I live in, people never vote Tory—especially within the art world—so I am a bit of an outsider on that one.”

“I always felt isolated, alone with these images,” recalls performance artist Carolee Schneemann. “And before I knew it, my work became a bridge through which every younger feminist artist was crawling to what she had to make. Like firecrackers blowing up all around.”

Today’s hi-tech culture of instantly available imagery “is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens” with Richard Prince’s appeal in a copyright case.

Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware has a few inaccuracies, and artist Mort Kunstler has created a version to fix that. Among the changes: a historically accurate flag and a flat-bottomed barge instead of a rowboat.

Helen Frankenthaler, known for Color Field paintings created by pouring pigment directly on canvas (dubbed “Post-Painterly Abstraction” by critic Clement Greenberg), has passed away at age 83.

Photographer Larissa Sansour on being removed from the Lacoste Prize shortlist, allegedly for work the luxury goods company deemed too “pro-Palestinian”: “This kind of situation is exactly what I fear. Money ranking over artistic freedom.”

Just in time for the holidays, a conversation with Brian Ulrich, a photographer who has chronicled American consumer culture, from big-box stores to thrift stores, retail backrooms to the dead chain stores in US suburbs.