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Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
From their astounding burial mounds to their dazzling horses dressed up as mythical beasts, this exhibition about Kazakhstan’s ancient nomads shows the power of archaeology to revive the dead
A young archer was buried around 2,700 years ago in the foothills of the Tarbagatay mountains of eastern Kazakhstan. In 2018, his bones were found preserved in the permafrost, surrounded by exquisite ornaments and weapons: beautifully observed figures of deer, finely crafted holders for his bow and arrows and dagger, myriad tiny beads – “and everywhere”, as Howard Carter said of Tutankhamun’s tomb, “the glitter of gold”.
Great archaeological discoveries don’t have to be full of gold, but it helps. That warm yellow metal catches your eye almost wherever you look in the Fitzwilliam’s stunning snapshot of archaeology in action. Gold scabbards, gold torques, gold animals – they all light up a display that also includes miraculously preserved felt and leather, as well as reconstructions of the ancient people of Kazakhstan in their woollen finery, on horses dressed up to resemble mythical beasts.
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Nick Brandt visited five animal sanctuaries in Africa to portray the people displaced by droughts and the creatures whose very existence is under threat
Continue reading...In the 1970s, her art was so influential that Angela Davis credited it with launching the Black women’s movement. At 95, Saar is still creating work - and it is as arresting as ever
When the artist Betye Saar learned the Aunt Jemima brand was removing the mammy-like character that had been a fixture on its pancake mixes since 1889, she uttered two words: “Oh, finally.”
Those familiar with Saar’s most famous work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, might have expected a more dramatic reaction. After all, this was a piece of art so revolutionary that the activist and scholar Angela Davis credited it with launching the Black women’s movement.
Continue reading...Playwright and curator says Black Lives Matter movement has inspired new generation of black creators
Black artists in the UK are producing the most “exciting” and “socially engaged” work at the moment, a leading British playwright and curator said.
Michael McMillan, a London-based artist and academic who was behind the successful The West Indian Front Room, also believes the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired a new generation of black artists to work in innovative ways and produce cutting-edge work.
Continue reading...Loo design has barely changed in 150 years – until now. Will people trade their privacy for the chance to find out exactly what is in their waste?
For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets – and more specifically what we deposit into them. “We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool,” says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. “We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool.”
As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyse waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months. “The toilet that you have in your home has not functionally changed in its design since it was first introduced,” she says, in the second half of the 19th century. There are, of course, now loos with genital-washing capabilities, or heated seats, but this is basic compared with what Grego is envisaging. “All other aspects of your life – your electricity, your communication, even your doorbell – have enhanced capabilities.”
Continue reading...Thirteen-tonne artwork depicting a snake eating its tail will be large enough for visitors to walk through
A new sculpture by the Australian artist Lindy Lee will be the National Gallery of Australia’s most expensive commission so far, with the four-metre-high public artwork costing the gallery $14m.
Ouroboros, which the NGA commissioned to mark its 40th anniversary, will be made of mirror-polished stainless steel and weigh approximately 13 tonnes, with the artist focusing on incorporating sustainable and recycled materials into the design and minimising its carbon footprint.
Continue reading...Protest through Indigenous works is not just the preserve of city ‘rabble rousers’. The home of land rights is in the bush, and our art reflects this
I’ve just spent a week at the Desert Mob exhibitions and gathering in Mparntwe (Alice Springs): blogging about it, reporting on it, buying art and enjoying the art with the crowds of art lovers. There were about 10 events, across that many venues, featuring more than 100 artists from more than 20 Aboriginal art centres, many of them so remote that most of us could not even imagine what it is like living there. Although there were artists from town camps in Mparntwe, some were from as far away as the western end of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands near the three-way border of Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Continue reading...We’re highlighting the best reader photography in print in the letters pages of the Guardian. Share your images with us here
We would like to highlight some of the best of your photography in the Guardian paper. Since 2014 our letters page has carried amazing images readers have shared: some of them being newsworthy, others more abstract.
With our format there will be an opportunity to showcase your images more prominently alongside the views readers have shared.
Continue reading...Deploying a classical dome bathtub and vanishing ceilings, godfather of postmodernism Charles Jencks turned a terraced house into a madcap monument to his voracious ideas. What was it like to live there?
The first challenge facing visitors to Charles Jencks’s house is choosing which knob to push on the front door. Two identical brass fixtures flank the entrance to 19 Lansdowne Walk in Holland Park, the first indication that this is no ordinary west London pile. Push the correct one and you enter a bewildering oval lobby lined with numerous mirrored doors and topped with a ceiling of intersecting ovals that appears to taper upwards to infinity. The faces of Pythagoras, Erasmus and Hannah Arendt peer down from a mural, above a frieze of gnomic inscriptions about the cosmos. There’s a lot to digest already – and you’ve barely stepped through the front door.
As an architecture critic, cosmic landscape designer and all-round polymathic funster, Jencks was never one for half measures. His Cosmic House, as 19 Lansdowne Walk is known – which opens to the public this Friday, two years after his death – stands as a madcap monument to his voracious appetite for ideas. As the godfather and chief promoter of postmodernism, or pomo, he spent a lifetime championing eclecticism, wit and meaning over what he saw as the bland, faceless tedium of modernism. And he lived his theories to the max.
Diego y yo is expected to become most valuable Latin American artwork ever publicly sold
A sorrowful Frida Kahlo self-portrait which shows her cheating husband, Diego Rivera, in the centre of her forehead, is expected to smash auction records as it becomes the most valuable work of Latin American art ever publicly offered for sale.
Sotheby’s announced on Wednesday it was offering for sale a 1949 painting titled Diego y yo (Diego and I) with an estimate in excess of $30m.
Continue reading...‘I took this near where people work out for my guerrilla-style Wait Watchers series. When it went viral, I started getting hateful messages about my body’
It all started when I took a self-portrait in Times Square, New York. After I got the film developed, I noticed this man in the background appeared to be smirking at me. I thought: “What happens if you turn your camera around?” And it became a social experiment for the next five years.
I would find a heavily populated area, position myself to do something “mundane” to fit in, something similar to what other people were doing there, and then I’d take a burst of self-portraits, showing me but also the wider scene. So here I’m stretching because I’m at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, and about 10 feet to the left is Muscle Beach, with people working out.
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This year marks the 30th anniversary of film-maker Derek Jarman’s canonisation by an activist group of gay male ‘nuns’ known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. At the time in 1991, Derek Jarman was the most prominent person in the UK living openly with HIV. He was outspoken, radical and unapologetically queer. The perfect antidote, in the Sisters’ eyes, to Ian McKellen’s acceptance of a knighthood in the 1991 new year honours
Continue reading...Stormtroopers, ghostly figures and runaway hens … a new book of photos examines the peculiarities of Kent and beyond
Continue reading...- Gerry Barney says temporary branding update by rail industry group uses too many colours
The designer of the familiar British Rail logo has warned against government plans to revamp the symbol and dismissed a separate attempt to give it a temporary green makeover as a “load of old bollocks”.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, has said his plans for the new Great British Railways will involve “updated versions of the classic ‘double-arrow’ logo” when the system is launched next year. He has promised “a single familiar brand with a bold new vision for passengers – of punctual services, simpler tickets and a modern and green railway that meets the needs of the nation”.
Continue reading...The chief executive of Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum has lived her life through objects, but it is the pieces made by family that she holds dearest
For more than 15 years, Lisa Havilah has been one of the most forward-thinking names in the Australian arts. After beginning her career at the Casula Powerhouse and then Campbelltown Arts Centre, in 2011 she stepped up for the role of director at Carriageworks. It became an eight-year tenure she used to transform the venue into one of the most-visited arts precincts in the country.
Today Havilah serves as the chief executive of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. This spring and summer the Powerhouse will unveil new exhibitions from the first annual program under her direction – a series that spans photography, ceramics, design and more. Among them is Glitterati, a collection of more than 300 photographs from the renowned fashion and social pages photographer Robert Rosen, and Eucalyptusdom, which presents more than 400 objects that examine Australia’s political and cultural relationship to the gumtree.
Continue reading...Mass Isolation Australia was created during lockdown in March 2020 to establish a visual record of the pandemic. It quickly became a way to see the Covid crisis unfold through Australian eyes, as well as a source of connection and community in a time of social distance. With the Ballarat lockdown to end at 11.59pm on Wednesday, the Ballarat International Foto Biennale is scheduled to reopen on Thursday 23 September
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From subtle riffs on traditional script-based decoration to a late father’s letters to his lover, the artists vying for the Jameel prize generate deep emotion from meticulousness
Words have had outsize importance in Muslim culture since the beginning. The Qur’an, which literally means “recitation”, was of course revered as the word of God. But, crucially, images of human beings and animals were disapproved of because they could distract people from prayer; as a result, artists poured all their creativity and imagination into calligraphy. Facing the same restriction, craftsmen and architects created dazzling geometric forms into which words were often incorporated. The discipline imposed by not being able to depict living things gave rise to some of the most beguiling decoration on the planet.
Continue reading...By chronicling day-to-day life in 1940s Britain, Picture Post became a visual media pioneer, as Rob West’s inspiring documentary reveals
With photo-editing software and deepfakes continuing to steadily erode trust in visual media, it feels almost alien to hark back to a time of reverential interest and belief in photographs – when they held a totemic power to broaden worldviews and shape politics. With photospread succinctness, Rob West’s inspiring documentary about the British news magazine Picture Post, which was published between 1938 and 1957, lays out the case for its pioneeringly demotic photojournalism, high artistic credentials and impact on public policy.
Picture Post was the brainchild of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant, whose editorship of German magazine Münchner Illustrierte Presse led to Hitler imprisoning him. He brought his antifascist, socialist sympathies with him to Britain – as well as a troupe of superb photographers, schooled by the European photojournalist tradition and able to frame these islands with an outsider’s eye. Selling nearly two million copies a week by the mid-40s, it featured itinerant jobseekers, sex workers, blitz firefighters and so on, socially conscious chronicling of day-to-day life that was also unafraid to make clear entreaties to those in power. After the war, the magazine canvassed readers about what kind of healthcare they would like to see.
Continue reading...Various venues, Yorkshire
An alternative audio tour of Barbara Hepworth’s works is pure poetry, while digital ghosts from slave voyages haunt us. But is there enough sculpture?
In the early 20th century, a youthful Barbara Hepworth would observe “the granite sets, the steep hills of industrial Yorkshire, the scurrying of mill girls in their shawls” and “imagine stone ‘images’ rising out of the ground”. These reflections, captured in 1966 in Barbara Hepworth: Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, detail how the hefty figures and forms that would define Hepworth’s practice sprung straight up out of Yorkshire’s undulating fields and industrious communities. The region would also raise that other influential British sculptor, Henry Moore, and that YBA with an interest in controversial monstrosities, Damien Hirst.
With such a heritage, Yorkshire Sculpture International’s claim of “Yorkshire as the home of sculpture in the UK” seems a lot less presumptuous. Especially when the county is still producing a roster of emerging sculptors and artists, four of whom are participating in Yorkshire Sculpture International’s 2021 programme. Taking place across Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute, the three-month festival – which culminates this week, now all the sculptures are in place – includes new commissions from Shezad Dawood and Ariel René Jackson alongside the Yorkshire-based practitioners (Akeelah Bertram, Claye Bowler, Nwando Ebizie, Ashley Holmes) who are part of the YSI Sculpture Network.
Continue reading...Green lawns are terrible for the environment. They’re also embarrassingly old-fashioned and out of style
Americans love front yards with big, carefully manicured lawns. In fact, homeowners spent a record $47.8bn in lawn and garden retail purchases in 2018 alone. Then there’s the water usage: 9tn gallons a year nationwide just on gardening. We consume this water even as parts of the American west are in the grip of a horrific drought that has paralyzed farmers, triggered huge wildfires, and has some states considering water cutbacks.
The reason we spend so much time, money and natural resources on our lawns, as Kristen Radtke recently noted in the Los Angeles Times, is that decades of television and popular culture have cemented in our brains a certain image of the American dream: house in the suburbs, white picket fence, two-car garage, glossy green lawn. The problem isn’t just that that image is difficult to attain for a lot of Americans. It’s that it’s embarrassingly dated.
Continue reading...Switzerland’s first and only art fair dedicated to photography is back with vivid images of fairytales, fabrics and firepower
Continue reading...Role will alarm those who accuse Boris Johnson’s government of stacking cultural institutions with supporters
A venture capital investor who donated more than £200,000 to the Tory party in 2017 has been appointed chair of the National Gallery.
John Booth will succeed Tony Hall, the former director general of the BBC who stood down as chair in May during the fallout over Martin Bashir and the Diana, Princess of Wales interview.
Continue reading...From Western Australia to Norway, photographers around the world capture animals and plants in their natural environment – and under threat from human activity
• Deep impact: the underwater photographers bringing the ocean’s silent struggle to life
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