News
Ron Galella, nicknamed the Godfather of US paparazzi, has died at his New Jersey home aged 91. The photographer gained notoriety for his candid shots and celebrity feuds, including with Jackie Onassis and Marlon Brando – who punched him outside a New York restaurant and broke his jaw
Continue reading...A cast including Naomie Harris and Noma Dumezweni gather in a new exhibition of photographs and films citing women who influence them
Continue reading...Finding it tough to break into conceptual art, David O’Mara shot all the people he worked with in his day job instead – from bricklayers to painters and decorators
David O’Mara is reminiscing about the job that started it all. “A family friend knew someone who had a painting company and they said, ‘Oh, you’ve been to art college, you’ll be all right!’” He laughs. “But I hadn’t touched a paintbrush in years. I was into conceptual art.”
It was 2001 and O’Mara had just moved from Ireland to London with his girlfriend; he’d never envisaged working on a building site but he needed the work and soon found he could pick up the skills. He also realised the money was good, much better than in the arts. “I looked into working in a gallery, but those jobs are hard to find and often they don’t want to pay you,” he says. “It’s insane. A lot of the time, you need a lot of cultural capital even to be considered.”
Continue reading...From Studio 54 to Paradise Garage, Bernstein was there to document the euphoric late 70s peak of the New York City disco scene
Continue reading...Simon Casimir Wilson says there is no connection between the killer and the artist, while Dr Anette Magnussen feels uneasy about Tate Britain’s exhibition
Jonathan Jones’s review of the Walter Sickert exhibition at Tate Britain gives fresh credence to the idea that Sickert had some connection to the Jack the Ripper murders (Walter Sickert review – serial killer, fantasist or self-hater? This hellish, brilliant show only leaves questions, 26 April). In his acclaimed 2005 biography of Sickert, Matthew Sturgis includes a comprehensive demolition of the whole myth, including a detailed examination of the matter of the letters and the matching paper, mentioned in your review. Jones gives the source of this information as the catalogue of the Tate Britain exhibition; it seems that its curators have not been keeping up with the literature.
Simon Casimir Wilson
London
• I feel uneasy about Tate Britain’s Walter Sickert exhibition. Wasn’t it possible to curate an exhibition and ignore the links to the Ripper letters? Is this most notorious crime just being exploited for attention once more? Jonathan Jones puts Sickert on a par with Edvard Munch and Otto Dix, both drawn to the dark side of humanity, but to my knowledge neither of them was an imagined or indeed real murderer.
Dr Anette Magnussen
London
In a new exhibition titled A Movement in Every Direction, the migration of Black Americans from the rural south to the urban north has inspired a range of new artwork
The way we talk about the great migration is often oversimplified, limiting it to the movement of Black Americans from the rural south to the urban north through the early and mid 20th century. But there are many more stories of the great migration than just this one. The new joint exhibition between the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, A Movement in Every Direction seeks to complicate that tidy narrative through freshly commissioned artwork that adds new stories to the great migration, and explores how it continues to this day.
Ryan Dennis, co-curator of the exhibit and Chief Curator of the Mississippi Museum of Art, told me that, “our vision for the show was to think more expansively about the great migration and to its deep connections to the south”. Revising predominating narratives of this massive exodus, Dennis believed that “it was really important to move away from the deep trauma connected to the great migration and to think more about how self-determined agency and possibility were a part of the story”.
Continue reading...La Borda, whose model of community living thrived during pandemic, wins prestigious Mies van der Rohe prize
A Barcelona housing co-operative that had been in existence less than a year when Spain imposed one of Europe’s toughest lockdowns has won a prestigious architecture award after its model of community living thrived during the pandemic.
The wood-framed La Borda scheme of 28 apartments and several shared spaces has won the prestigious Mies van der Rohe prize for emerging architecture for a project that the awards committee described as “a transgressive … model based on co-ownership and co-management of shared resources and capacities”.
Continue reading...University will host major survey of Robert Blomfield’s shots of student life in 1950s and 60s
Previously unseen work by a photographer who captured life in Edinburgh and has been compared to the great Henri Cartier-Bresson is to go on display at an exhibition in the city where he lived and worked.
Robert Blomfield moved to Edinburgh from Yorkshire and studied medicine in the city while living a second life as a pioneering street photographer who shifted between shooting university students, locals and the landscape of the Scottish capital.
Continue reading...Seth Rogen and Serena Williams have joined the growing ranks of amateur potters, and fashion designers are being drawn to the wheel too. We get our hands dirty with the new ceramicists
It’s Saturday morning and a group of women are standing in a nervous huddle, waiting to see if the vases and bowls they popped into the kiln last week have survived. “That came out really nice,” says one student. “Oh, wow!” proclaims another, holding up a small bowl. “I’m so proud of me.”
Freya Bramble-Carter, their 30-year-old teacher, looks on at this studio in Kingsgate Workshops, in London, like a mother watching her children make fairy cakes for the first time. “It’s really fun seeing their reactions,” she says. “Especially after they’ve applied the glaze. Then the clay’s been through all of its transformations.”
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In response to Sophie Elmhirst’s long read, Steve Townsley and Mike Abbott recall their days with BT, and Tony Vinicombe, Mark Newbury and Peter Avery extol the virtues of Giles Gilbert Scott’s kiosks
I greatly enjoyed Sophie Elmhirst’s article on the last of the UK’s phone boxes (The long read, 28 April). In the late 1980s, I worked for British Telecom in east London and when a new boss of “public call offices” (as phone boxes were officially called) was appointed, I was asked to take him on a tour of some of his new property. I took him to the site of one that I knew was frequently vandalised. All that remained were a few metal stubs poking out of the ground. It at least gave the new guy a feel for the scale of his job. From what I remember, he didn’t last long.
Steve Townsley
Bridgend
• Your article was a joyous trip down memory lane. In the mid-1980s, I was the press officer for the international division of British Telecom. Due to a lack of interest from the corporate centre, I found myself managing the 30 or so BT district press officers dotted around the UK on matters of red phone boxes. As part of that, in tandem with my BT colleague Dave Wenlock, I toured schools, Dave suitably dressed in his “Mr Payphone” costume, imparting to young children the importance to the community of a working, reliable payphone network, key in those pre-mobile phone days. Wonderful memories.
Mike Abbott
Chiswick, London
The self-taught singer and sculptor from Alabama exists in a state of constant, spontaneous creativity. He talks about his roots and his new project with Artangel, inspired by Orford Ness
In his elaborately discursive way, Lonnie Holley is telling me about the first time he set foot on Orford Ness, a 10-mile-long shingle spit on the Suffolk coast earlier this year. Now a protected nature reserve, it is an austere, windblown landscape of deserted roads and the shells of military buildings, the residue of its former use as a military testing site during the first and second world wars.
“Stepping off the boat and walking over the levee to encounter all these strange structures, my brain was taking me all over the place,” he says, his eyes widening at the memory. “I’ve always wandered deep into ruins, but this was something different. I could feel the energy. I could feel it.”
Continue reading...Tate Britain, London
Rented rooms, sickly streets and gaslit pubs... this superbly curated show explores a British artist who specialised in suppressed malevolence
It would be hard to imagine a more sinister sequence of self-portraits than those lurking at the start of this riveting Walter Sickert survey at Tate Britain. The artist paints himself glowering in a miasma of shadows, one eye homing in on you like a target. He hovers menacingly behind a bust of a bare-knuckle boxer. He is a grizzled Lazarus attacking his first posthumous meal, a man in a bowler hat tipped at an angle to match his barbed and sarcastic glare. Or he is a single arm, barring the way between a nude model and what might be us – or, more frighteningly, the exit.
This is how Sickert (1860-1942) wished to be seen and known: as a man who must never be taken for granted, a disrupter, an actor, a menace, a taunt.
Continue reading...Riba, London
A playful exhibition puts three British buildings co-created by women centre stage, complete with dancing floor plans
The collective effort that goes into any building is underplayed, the roles of craftspeople, builders, assistants and clients – co-creators, often women – are overlooked. The fixed and the eternal is favoured over the transient and the mobile, exteriors over interiors, masonry over fabrics. One shouldn’t assign gender roles to building materials, but as that is in effect what was done in the past – stonecutting for boys, weaving for girls – historians’ privileging of the hard stuff again masculinises architecture.
Radical Rooms, an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba), sets out to challenge these perceptions. It focuses on three houses commissioned and designed wholly or in part by women, and describes them from the inside out. It focuses on the floor plan – that is to say the arrangement of internal rooms – more than external form. Other projects relevant to the show’s themes, using material from Riba’s magnificent and underseen drawings collection, are also shown.
Continue reading...Spotting a gap in the market, two friends have set up Doyle Wham to spotlight the continent’s neglected talent
Of the hundreds of galleries in London, none has been given over exclusively to the growing and vibrant market for African photography. Until now, that is.
Doyle Wham is the creation of two young Londoners who are eschewing Britain’s “elite” art scene to open what they say is the country’s first ever gallery dedicated exclusively to African photographers.
Continue reading...Gorey’s ‘sinister whimsy’ has influenced other oddball creatives including Lemony Snicket and Tim Burton
A campaign has been launched to recognize American queer artist Edward Gorey, whose “sinister whimsy” drawings inspired everyone from the novelist Lemony Snicket to film director Tim Burton, with a US postage stamp on his 100th birthday in 2025.
“Eccentric” isn’t strong enough to describe the writer, illustrator, puppeteer and theatre designer known to some as the “Grandfather of Goth”.
Continue reading...Lucas Foglia’s image of a child at a religious ceremony in Georgia reflects his vision of prayer in nature
The Green the Church movement seeks “to expand the role of churches as centres for environmental resilience”. Its charismatic leader, Dr Ambrose Carroll, argues that communion with the natural world is fundamental to the past and future of his congregation: “We’re ex-slaves,” he says, “migrant farmers, people who spent eons with our hands in the ground. Even though we don’t speak the language of environmentalism, it’s very close to who we are.”
Carroll’s ministry is one focus of photographer Lucas Foglia’s project about prayer in nature. Foglia’s own mission is clear, he says: “In a divided time in the United States, I want to point to a common ground. The people I photographed from every major religion share the belief that wild places are both a refuge and our responsibility.” This picture of a child, Omari, being lifted into magnolia blossom, on show later this month at a photography fair in New York, was taken at the annual open-water baptism ceremony that takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, each year.
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