News

Hundreds of objects from a collection of almost one million artifacts will go on public display for the first time when new galleries open this week.

Several recent cases of art missing from embassies has raised questions over whether government officials are abusing their diplomatic immunity, the https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/abuse-of-diplomatic-privilege

My friend Richard Snell, who has died aged 69 of a brain tumour, was a furniture designer with an international reputation, specialising in chair design. His ergonomic furniture is widely used in care homes, schools, restaurants and concert venues, including the Royal Albert Hall.

Richard was born in Guernsey and raised with his brother, Eric, on their parents’ smallholding. Jack and Mary (nee Vidamour) worked together growing tomatoes and flowers for export to mainland Britain. Following his education at Guernsey grammar school, Richard enrolled at Birmingham College of Art, where he gained a DipAD, then a master’s degree in 1975.

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An exhibition in Vienna puts the figurine at the center of Edmund De Waal’s 2010 memoir on show, and tells the story of a family forced from their home by prejudice.

The distinctive iconography used by the Indigenous Otomí people has attracted unsolicited attention from fashion houses, which have incorporated similar images in their designs, often without credit.

This year’s Photo Vogue festival in Milan is divided into three: title show A Glitch in the System, tackling stereotypes; Fashion Moving Forward, an exploration of film in fashion; and Inez & Vinoodh: Hi-Lo Transformers, showcasing the duo’s work. Here are our highlights from all three

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“The coast’s gentle, open landscape really lends itself to these minimalist boxes,” an architecture professor said.

The launch of her first major show in the southern hemisphere sees the UK artist trying to disrupt the cosy and suburban

Cornelia Parker is softly spoken and bird-like; an artist who peppers her conversation with nervous little laughs. Yet her work is all about blowing things up.

Over her career, the Turner prize-shortlisted English artist, who was appointed an Order of the British Empire in 2010, has made a name treating objects with what she terms “cartoon violence”. Silver cutlery has been crushed with a steamroller. A garden shed has been blown to smithereens. Wedding rings have been stretched. And stretched. And stretched.

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Earlier this year, community activists sharply criticized El Museo del Barrio in New York for being out of touch with its roots as an institution founded by a coalition of Puerto Rican educators, artists,

Previous exhibitions by Blue Republic, a collective based in Toronto and Krakow, have involved ephemeral drawings, sculptures, and video works that speak to transience and fragility. This more focused

The Italian art historian and curator Chiara Parisi has been chosen as the successor of Centre Pompidou-Metz director Emma Lavigne, who was named president of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris this summer.

Regardless of whether it’s “high” or “fast,” fashion shouts (or dog-whistles) its way through the crowds with branded signifiers. But the linguistically opaque garments gathered here are shanzhai:

Hank Willis Thomas strives for “Unity” in his public artwork at the Brooklyn Bridge.

Her public art installation at Madison Square Park, opening in June, will focus on the so-called ghost forests that have died off because of climate change.

Phillips has appointed Lori Spector as senior international specialist of twentieth-century and contemporary art and as regional director of Zurich, and Kirsten MacDonald as regional director for

Judith Martin and Jol Miskin agree that moving parliament away from London is a good first step

John Forsyth (Letters, 8 November) says he would vote for the party that opts to move on from the constraints imposed by the built fabric of the “mother of parliaments”. Writing from Penzance, he generously suggests parliament should be moved to the Midlands or the north.

I agree, but the first step is to prevent the ludicrous waste of public funds about to be spent on turning Richmond House on Whitehall into a replica parliament while the historic site is worked on. Not only is Richmond House Grade II*-listed, it represents a vast amount of embodied energy, all of which will be lost because parliamentarians cannot conceive of anything other than the division arrangements they have now.
Judith Martin
Winchester, Hampshire

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In collaboration with Emily Coates, the choreographer has reconstructed the rarely seen 1965 “Parts of Some Sextets” for Performa.

Sculptor Gillian Jagger, known for her incorporation of natural materials like animal carcasses and fallen trees into formidable installations, died at eighty-eight years old on October 21. Her death

Among the highlights are a commission for Bill T. Jones, a staging of Monteverdi by Pierre Audi, and Alex Lawther in “Hamlet.”

The Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) announced today its inaugural research fellows, Paul Rucker and Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and the promotion of two staff

On Saturday, November 9, a new, monumental public artwork by Hank Willis Thomas, titled Unity, was permanently installed near the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. According to the

The seventh of a new Guardian Print Shop series featuring classic sports images from the likes of Gerry Cranham, Mark Leech and Tom Jenkins – yours to own for just £55 including free delivery

A shallow depth of field focused on the tips of the swimmer’s toes; a flurry of bubbles rising upwards; an unidentifiable torso powering serenely into the distance … sometimes a picture only needs a few simple ingredients to make it magical. This shot by Gerry Cranham is a classic example of his ability to craft timeless images. It depicts the Scottish swimmer Bobby McGregor, who would go on to win a silver medal in the 100m freestyle at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (although arguably it’s not so important now whom the picture is of). For those wondering how it was shot … isn’t there magic in the mystery, too? Let’s just say that while the early 1960s had seen a boom in underwater photography with the release of the Calypso camera, which was conceived by the famed oceanographer and film-maker Jacques-Yves Cousteau, there were other options. Competitive swimming pools began to install special viewing windows at their perimeters, allowing photographers seeking “underwater-style” images to remain dry while capturing the beauty of a tumble-turn.

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Homosexuality is illegal in more than 30 African countries and punishable by death in four. There is also the widespread belief that homosexuality is ‘un-African’. In his new book Limitless Africans, Nigerian photographer Mikael Owunna documents stories of LGBTQ immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers

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A rediscovered David Hockney and a welded hippo are among some 2,000 works coming to auction. But only a handful are trophies.

A new book celebrates the colorful living spaces of the New Yorkers who still call the legendary building home.

LAST WEEKEND, Ahmadu Bello Way was without chaos, surprising for a road routinely choked with bumper-to-bumper congestion. The facilitators of this calm were none other than the Nigerian army and

Sally Dixon, an early champion of avant-garde film, has died at age eighty-seven in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the institution to whom Dixon donated more than thirty rare

THE MAJOR LABEL SOLO MUSIC CAREER OF PETER IVERS, a figure defined in the popular imagination less by his personal achievements than by his proximities to stardom, has largely been eclipsed by his

She pioneered interactive video and artificial intelligence in art. Now this new-media path-breaker scrutinizes technology’s abuses at the Shed.

Dread Scott is organizing a re-enactment in Louisiana that asks people to think about who the real heroes were in the 19th-Century South.

In the red rock desert of the Southwest, an ancient culture was thought to have vanished. A new view connects it to pueblo dwellers of today.

British artist Rory Pilgrim has won the Netherlands’ Prix de Rome, which honors cultural producers under the age of forty. The $44,000 award, which also comes with a residency at the American Academy

In upstate New York, one family’s treehouse mimics its rustic environment.

Two self-supporting structures, resembling minimalist totems, form Andrea Kvas’s installation Untitled (Cornie), 2019, created for the space of the former Milanese studio of the late outsider artist

Kalu, who has autism, channelled her compulsive behaviour into creativity – and now her bristling, energetic work is wowing Hull

Humber Street Gallery in Hull was a blank slate two days ago, but by the time I arrive the ground-floor space is already half full with newly made sculptures. Nnena Kalu works fast and she works big. The artist repurposes waste material like old VHS tape, and as I watch her in action, she unspools it in long, satisfying reams to garnish her boldly expressive sculptures. A massive stockpile of raw material sits at one end of the gallery, from videotapes to assorted coloured adhesive tapes, and piles of fabric, like puzzle pieces waiting Kalu to fit them together and make sense of them.

She paces across the gallery at regular intervals to dive into this trove, beginning a process that repeats its basic steps yet produces something new each time. A pre-made group of boulder-like forms are bound together, and then attached to an ingenious system of adjustable frame-like structures, where they’re wrapped and bound further, to create messy forms that seem to bristle with energy.

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The Institute for International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London has appointed Sepake Angiama as its new artistic director. Angiama most recently served as curator of this year’s Chicago Architecture

A photography workshop for veterans offered an outlet to help them cope with the challenges of being home. An exhibit of their work is on display in Buffalo.

The National Galleries of Scotland https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/bp-portrait-award-2019 announced on Monday that it plans on ending its relationship with the oil giant British Petroleum,

Move increases pressure on London’s National Portrait Gallery to sever its links

National Galleries Scotland (NGS) has become the latest arts organisation to end links to BP, citing its “responsibility to do all we can to address the climate emergency”.

It said on Monday that the 2019 BP Portrait Award exhibition opening at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh on 7 December would be the last time it would take place there in its present form.

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“YOU HAVEN’T GIVEN UP / ON A WORLD HAVE YOU?” asked Bernadette Mayer in the epilogue to a slim volume of poems titled Utopia (1984). “You know traditional utopias are no place / as ours will ever be,”

She photographed the biggest stars. But it was the Clash she clicked with. Pennie Smith relives their first explosive US tour – and reveals how she took ‘rock’s greatest photo’

Pennie Smith was standing less than six feet away when Paul Simonon, bass-player with the Clash, smashed his guitar to pieces on stage at the Palladium in New York. She’d been on the road with the band for two weeks, photographing their first US tour, but she’d always stayed on the other side of the stage, next to lead guitarist Mick Jones.

That night, to mix it up, she switched sides and remembers Simonon suddenly spinning toward her. “He was in a really bad mood,” she says, “and that wasn’t like him.” She took a step back to get a better focus with her 35mm Pentax – and then all hell broke loose. Simonon, seething, raised his Fender Precision like an axe, turned his back to singer Joe Strummer, and brought it crashing down. “It wasn’t a choice to take the shot,” Smith says. “My finger just went off.”

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Maybe the time has come to stop deluding ourselves that great work must be created by great people, says Bernard Lyall

With yet another reminder of Roman Polanski’s problematic history (Woman accuses Roman Polanski of raping her in 1975 when she was 18, theguardian.com, 8 November) and the recent furore over Peter Handke’s Nobel prize (Report, 17 October), maybe the time has come to stop deluding ourselves that great work must be created by great people. Indeed, to acknowledge that it’s frequently the product of those whose morals range from dubious to disastrous. Why not just drop the idolatry wholesale: award the film not the film-maker, the sculpture not the sculptor, the poem not the poet. And, likewise, accept that some of the best people do the worst work. My parents, the writers Katharine Whitehorn and Gavin Lyall, explained their refusal to ever provide reviews by saying that anyone would do the same, who had as many good friends who wrote bad books.
Bernard Lyall
London

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Somerset House, London
An enjoyably restless multimedia show explores the nonstop nature of our round-the-clock world, where day and night merge and elusive sleep is the last refuge

There is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, dated 1782, that looks as anomalous as anything by Magritte. It shows a landscape by night, eerie and dark beneath a clouded moon. But in the distance squats a five-storey building with all its windows illuminated like some modern apartment block. This is Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill in Derbyshire, where the 12-hour shifts ran right through the night, ending (and beginning all over again) at 5am. Arkwright’s machines never stopped.

Our 24/7 society began long ago, with industrialisation. Of course we have always been up through the night, with babies, bedside vigils, illness, anxiety. But the rest of the world mainly slumbered around us. With mass production came the erosion of any distinction between night and day. And now consumption has taken over: buying, watching, playing, tweeting, we are always online.

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Avant-garde ceramics – made in the 19th and early 20th century by four siblings who lived in poverty – are back under the hammer

Eccentric ceramics made by the four Martin brothers, who lived and worked in near poverty in London in the late 19th century, are now highly prized by collectors. This month an unusual bird jar, originally made to store tobacco and typical of their surreal style, is expected to sell for up to £50,000 at a Salisbury auction house, despite the fact that it is just a few inches high.

In 1873 the brothers – Robert Wallace, Walter, Edwin and Charles – began their strange 50-year creative journey when they first fired up a kiln inside the family home. Four years later they moved into a disused soap works in Southall and together created an avant-garde cast of varied ceramic characters and animals, each made and sold as mugs, jugs, jars, vases and spoon-warmers. The brothers could only afford to fire the kiln once or twice a year, and had no money to pay for protective containers to keep the pots safe during firing.

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The photographer didn’t like having his picture taken. Luckily, his wife had a diverting prop at hand…

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great photographer, hated to be photographed. In 1987, however, he reluctantly agreed to have a portrait made for Life magazine to publicise a forthcoming exhibition of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. John Loengard, the picture editor of Life at the time, and a distinguished documentary photographer, took no chances and assigned himself to do the portrait.

When Loengard arrived to meet Cartier-Bresson at his summer house in Provence, the master insisted that he would only be photographed from behind. There was a little debate about this. Aged 79, Cartier-Bresson was, Loengard recalled, “still a simmering teakettle. There’d be steam and the lid would be rattling. Then just as quickly he’d quiet down and be his attentive self again.”

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New book from artist Matthew Frost collects pictures of tourists capturing their own moments in front of the famous sign

Two years ago, on his morning run up the Hollywood Deep Dell, Matthew Frost began taking pictures of tourists capturing their own moments in front of the famous sign.

Related: LA suspends Uber’s scooters and bikes permit after company refuses to share data

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An arresting exhibition from activist charity Project Pressure uses conceptual photography to capture the decline of the ice caps

‘What is it about those melting glaciers and desperate polar bears that makes us want to look away?” the activist and author Naomi Klein asked in 2015. In her book This Changes Everything, she laid the blame on powerful global corporations and acquiescent governments, which both simultaneously underplay the scale of the climate emergency and exploit our collective sense of helplessness in the face of it. Since then, a new urgency has driven climate activism, most successfully in the disruptive protests of Extinction Rebellion. Can art, though, have a meaningful role in raising awareness of that urgency?

A forthcoming exhibition, Meltdown: Visualising Climate Change, at the Horniman Museum in London sets out to answer that question in the affirmative. It focuses on the fate of the world’s glaciers through the prism of art, photography and film. “We are using art as a kind of seduction to draw people in, then shock them,” says photographer Simon Norfolk, one of the artists involved.

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In 2011, visual artist Medina Dugger, from California, moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where she was inspired by local Muslim women to create her series Enshroud. “The series doesn’t take a stance in favour or against veiling, but supports both a woman’s right to choose and her religious expression,” she says. Each digital collage is created by layering two separate images: first, Dugger photographs the women in hijabs, then she superimposes them on top of plastic prayer mats. “I photographed them twirling, jumping and skipping to recreate moments I’d witnessed in the city, which were often incongruent with my previously held notions of women in hijab.”

See more at medinadugger.com

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V&A Dundee
From pet cyber-seals to cars with minds of their own, an exploration of the science and fiction of robots raises more questions than it answers

There was a time when Nineteen Eighty-Four required some suspension of disbelief: it didn’t seem possible, in the first several decades after the book’s publication, that any government or institution would have the resources and organisation to put transmitting and receiving devices in every home and then monitor the information they captured. We now know how very plausible that is. What Orwell didn’t guess was that people would, at the prompting of Amazon and Apple, actually invite such things into their homes. No state programme of installation was needed.

That the future has become the present, in shapes that weren’t quite predicted, is part of the premise of Hello, Robot, an exhibition now showing at the V&A Dundee. Its aim is less to stargaze the future than to question what is actually going on, now that smartphones, for example, have in effect made people into cyborgs – that is to say into interdependent alliances of the organic and the electronic. The show, to make its intention clear, is subtitled Design Between Human and Machine.

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Art historian uncovers secret behind impressionist master’s ‘off-the-cuff’ sketches

The snails and curled-up cats that decorate the margins of Édouard Manet’s letters are admired for their effortless spontaneity. But an art historian has discovered that the artist recycled these enchanting watercolour doodles by tracing them from designs he had prepared earlier.

By comparing Manet’s illustrated letters with his sketchbook drawings, all thought to date from 1880, Dr Emily Beeny has realised a “reuse of motifs” with which he created “an illusion of effortlessness”. She believes that he made “extensive use of tracing” in an apparent attempt to “conceal the effort … required to produce these ‘spontaneous’ works”.

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