Sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, a U.S. expatriate renowned for her dignified portrayals of African-American and Mexican women and who was barred from her home country for political activism during the McCarthy era, has died at the age of 96, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Maria Antonieta Alvarez, Catlett's daughter-in-law, said the artist died Monday in a house in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she had lived since 1976.

An extremely rare Chinese porcelain bowl fetched nearly $27 million -- smashing pre-sale estimates by about three times -- at a hotly anticipated Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong, the Agence France Presse said Wednesday.

The modest-looking imperial ceramic bowl that was made around 900 years ago had been expected to fetch up to HK$80 million, but it was snapped up by an unidentified telephone bidder for HK$208 million ($26.7 million).

Six galleries in Australia Wednesday joined the Google Art Project, which provides an online platform to view thousands of artworks in detail from anywhere in the world.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales will have 415 of its key works available for viewing. More than 250 of these will be accessible via the 3D museum-view walkthrough.

Most people associate the drama of the Titanic with icebergs, lifeboats, and flares fired into the night. Few think of the heartbreak that took place as news of the tragedy filtered home.

A tiny Slavic minority in Germany is keeping alive a long and intricate tradition of hand-painting Easter eggs with the help of feathers and wax.

Shortly after Christmas every year, Karin Hannusch gets to work decorating up to 600 eggs for the annual Easter market in Schleife, a center of the small Sorbian community.

Auctioneers in Hong Kong sold 10 paintings seized from a South Korean bank that collapsed amid a corruption scandal to raise $2.4 million to help repay depositors, the Associated Presse said Tuesday.

Contemporary paintings by Chinese and Western artists were among the works that went on the block, including works by noted Chinese artists Zeng Fanzhi and Zhang Xiaogang and American Julian Schnabel.

Neslisah Sultan, the oldest member of the dynasty that ruled the former Ottoman empire, has died at the age of 91, Turkish media reported Tuesday.

The granddaughter of the last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, died on Monday and will be buried in the former Ottoman capital later Tuesday after a religious ceremony, the Agence France Presse reported Tuesday.

Iranians flocked to parks and orchards to mark Sizdeh Bedar, an ancient festival that predates Islam and goes back thousands of years to the time when Zoroastrianism was the predominant religion of Persia.

Iran's hard-line ruling clerics have discouraged many pre-Islamic rituals, but they've been unable to put Iranians off the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, and its ending celebration of Sizdeh Bedar.

Pickled sharks, a diamond skull, polka dots and butterflies are all on display in a new exhibition devoted to bad-boy British artist Damien Hirst.

The Tate Modern show is Hirst's first major UK retrospective. It ranges from spot paintings and drug cabinets to works like "A Thousand Years" — a rotting cow's head abuzz with flies.

Booms from rocket launchers and automatic gunfire crackled around Mali's fabled town of Timbuktu, known as an ancient seat of Islamic learning, for its 700-year-old mud mosque and, more recently, as host of the musical Festival in the Desert that attracted Bono in January.

On Sunday, nomadic Tuaregs who descended from the people who first created Timbuktu in the 11th century and seized it from invaders in 1434, attacked the city in their fight to create a homeland for the Sahara's blue-turbanned nomads. Their assault deepens a political crisis sparked March 21 when mutinous soldiers seized power in the capital. The Tuaregs have rebelled before, but never have they succeeded in taking Timbuktu or the major northern centers of Kidal and Gao, which fell Friday and Saturday as demoralized government troops retreated.