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Hundreds of rare props and costumes from more than 350 films, including Alien, Batman and Gladiator, will be going up for auction in early December
Continue reading...Family gatherings, naked bodies, in bed with Tracey Emin ... a new exhibition examines the punk polymath’s intimate side through five decades of his photographs
Continue reading...The Scottish-Ghanaian architect resigned as dean at the Spitzer school after less than a year citing ‘a lack of respect and empathy for black women’
When the Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko was appointed to head the architecture school at the City college of New York last year, her arrival was hailed as bringing “renewed energy and an exciting new vision” to the school. But after less than a year in the post, Lokko has resigned, citing a “crippling workload and lack of respect and empathy for black women”.
She became the dean of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer school of architecture in December 2019, after five years running the graduate school of architecture at the University of Johannesburg, the first such postgraduate school of architecture in Africa, which she founded in 2015. With 25 years of teaching experience across the UK, US and Africa, Lokko is widely regarded as one of the most progressive voices in architectural education. But the obstacles that she encountered in New York were unlike anything she had come up against before.
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The art world rebels have spent 35 years fighting against sexism and inequality in the art world and they have only just begun
In 1984, a group of women in New York gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art as part of a protest. A group show, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, was showing 165 artists, 152 male artists exhibited alongside just 13 women.
Outraged, they attended the protest, bringing placards and chanting outside the museum. But a handful of women within the larger crowd learned something.
Continue reading...Crisscrossing tracks and clues make for high-stakes viewing in this BBC Four documentary about a sensational haul of art that vanished into thin air 30 years ago
Charley Hill is a retired detective for the Metropolitan police’s art and antiques squad. He helped to recover Edvard Munch’s The Scream after it was stolen from the Oslo National Gallery, and assorted other old masters, including a Vermeer, a Goya and a Titian – functioning as a one man A(rt)-Team. If you have a missing painting problem, if no one else can find it and if you can find him …
Last year he got a tipoff from one of the many contacts he has made in the shadows over the years about the location of 13 art works – including three Rembrandts, five Degas, a Manet and a Vermeer – that were stolen 30 years ago from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. They were, says his informant, a career criminal called Martin Foley, taken out of the US and have resided ever since behind the wall of a safe house somewhere in Dublin. The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC Four), written and presented by the arts journalist John Wilson, follows Hill as he chases down the latest lead in a case that the FBI (and private hires, and hobbyists, and fellow retirees, and bloggers and assorted recidivists) have never ceased pursuing. The reward for their safe return now stands at $10m (£7.6m).
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From the disappearance of Andy Warhol to the march of Martin Luther King Jr, these ‘works of imagination’ are up for sale for just $100
Continue reading...From dramatic seascapes to misty woodlands, to urban street scenes, cityscapes and detailed closeups, the winning photographs in the Landscape photographer of the year awards aim to inspire visitors to explore and discover the wonders of Britain’s countryside. A shot of Woolland Woods on a spring day in Dorset made Chris Frost the 13th overall winner
Continue reading...The area around London’s Olympic Park is a regeneration hothouse with micro-breweries, tech startups, speakeasys and spas. Now their spiritual needs are being met – with a beautiful chapel on a barge
A narrowboat moored to the towpath is offering passersby a “Shamanic ritual spa experience”. Its roof is decorated with an assortment of gongs, which are bonged occasionally by a man in a homemade cape. Across the water bobs a floating speakeasy cocktail bar that advertises a craft-beer-and-cheese-pairing cruise. Further along, diners are enjoying Szechuan aubergine with cashew cream in a Dutch barge that’s been converted into a restaurant. Beside it, a canoe hire company is running team-building paddleboarding expeditions.
As any Hackney Wick local will tell you, this corner of east London has changed drastically since the Olympic Games landed here in 2012. And this shift hasn’t just affected the kind of boats moored along the towpath. The once gritty edgeland of car-breaking yards, slaughterhouses and mountains of knackered fridges has long been swept away, replaced with all the trappings of hipster-infused regeneration. Tech startups now rub shoulders with microbreweries, while fresh rows of new-build warehouse-style apartments are accompanied by novel floating lifestyle concepts. But the latest arrival to the Lee Navigation moorings takes a more unexpected form.
Continue reading...Exhibition exploring how women have been treated in art world runs into criticism
The last face that meets visitors to the Prado’s first post-lockdown exhibition is one of the very few that appears to look the spectator squarely in the eye.
The cool gaze of the Portuguese-Spanish artist María Roësset – free of guilt, shame, saccharine virtue or predatory intent – comes as something of a relief after the sanctimonious, salacious and often sad series of pictures that precede it.
Continue reading...For Ngugi/Quandamooka women Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael, their works are a link to millennia-old traditions of North Stradbroke Island
The first works you see as you come down the stairs into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Tarnanthi exhibition – the gallery’s annual show of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art – are large cyanotype prints.
The edges of the deep blue cotton gently flutter, capturing a sense of the life of the ocean that surrounds North Stradbroke Island in Queensland. These prints, by Ngugi/Quandamooka artist Sonja Carmichael and her daughter, Elisa Jane Carmichael – who goes by the name Leecee – express the life of the island. The life in weaving, in shucked shells, in fallen leaves, in sharp white relief against the blue.
Continue reading...The graphic designer Shalom Schotten, who has died aged 86, worked closely with artists such as David Hockney to design art book covers for Thames & Hudson, where he worked for five decades.
Schotten’s role was not easy as he had to please both publisher and the author, or the artist subject of the book. Naturally, he had his own convictions as to what would make the most aesthetically pleasing design and the best advertisement for the book. Despite this, artists such as Lucian Freud, David Bailey and Hockney found him a pleasure to work with.
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Government’s planning reforms will favour new builds over repurposing old structures
Britain’s architectural heritage is facing a “once-in-a-generation” threat, the head of one of the country’s foremost conservation groups is warning.
Joe O’Donnell, the new director of the Victorian Society, predicted that sweeping changes proposed for the planning system will encourage the demolition of old buildings at a time when heritage groups, reeling from the impact of Covid, have limited resources to protect them.
Continue reading...Whitechapel Gallery, London
The provocative German painter plumps for quantity over clarity, while a son-et-lumière by Indian artist Nalini Malani is simply stunning
Kai Althoff has been the enfant terrible of German painting for almost quarter of a century. It is a curious pose for a man in his middle 50s, but his shows are still designed to bemuse and provoke. Althoff is both as good and as bad as he wants to be, showing the cack-handed alongside the accomplished, the dumb against the tender, the delicate gouache beside the cruddy oil, sometimes painted on what look like chunks of old carpet. He never wants your eye to settle.
Born in 1966, in Cologne, Althoff gave up art school to run a bar, co-found a band and produce dance music in the 90s. He gained early notoriety from peeing on a series of his own canvases before they were sold. This acute ambivalence persists, notably in a letter he wrote to his agent in 2012 explaining that he wasn’t showing anything at the international Documenta show because life had intervened. The letter, needless to say, became the exhibit.
Continue reading...Snow, lightning and tornados were among the natural phenomena captured in the 7,700 entries to the Royal Meteorological Society’s Weather Photographer of the Year awards. Here is a selection of some of the best
Continue reading...Turner prize winner reveals how drawing gave her comfort in lockdown
Rachel Whiteread, one of Britain’s leading visual artists, has urged creative young people to hold on to their dreams and skills in the face of the pandemic and spoken of the solace she has found in drawing.
“I really want people to carry on doing what they were doing. It is important they don’t give up on their dreams, and they follow through with what they have trained for,” Whiteread told the Observer. She was commenting on an advertisement put out last week by a government partner organisation encouraging artists and performers to consider switching to a career in “cyber”.
Continue reading...Diana Markosian captures the dissonance between the California her mother knew from American soap operas and what she found when she arrived
In 1996 Diana Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, decided she had to abandon her life in Moscow. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of her marriage she had been dreaming of a new start in California, which she mostly knew from the soap opera Santa Barbara. Through an agency, she advertised to be a mail-order bride and, having chosen a new partner, Eli, from a stack of replies, left her home and got on a plane with her two children. Diana was seven years old.
Santa Barbara was not how Svetlana imagined it. And neither was Eli, who was waiting at Los Angeles airport with a bunch of flowers – 20 years older, and a hundred pounds heavier than in the photograph he had sent. They married anyway and lived together for eight years. Diana was asked to call Eli “Dad” and did not see her own father again until she was in her 20s.
Continue reading...Exhibition at British Museum features newly finished Sakha sculpture
Ancient mammoth tusk is a seriously niche material to work in, but there is one place where the skills and carving techniques involved are still passed down the generations.
A major new British Museum exhibition, Arctic: Culture and Climate, which starts this week in London, will feature an extraordinary piece of “very rare” sculpture, one that details an arcane ritual and has been completed in collaboration with the Sakha people of north-eastern Russia.
Continue reading...When he was young, designer Adam Kimberley would often wake up with beer mats stuffed in his pockets after a night out. When he went on to study graphic design he found his drunken souvenirs inspiring, and two years ago, he began Instagramming a daily mat at @beerstainedpulp.
“They’re a great source of visual communication,” he says, “part of the history of design, print and advertising and a record of popular culture.”
Continue reading...The poet on vintage TV, elegant writing about architecture and Dylan’s endearing take on the Great American Songbook
John Cooper Clarke is a performance poet, comedian and presenter who rose to fame in the 1970s as one of the first “punk poets”. He was born in Salford in 1949 and his third album, Walking Back to Happiness, released in 1979, featured the UK top 40 song Gimmix! (Play Loud). Clarke has toured with Linton Kwesi Johnson, and performed alongside the Sex Pistols, Joy Division and Buzzcocks. He released his first poetry collection, Ten Years in An Open Necked Shirt, in 1983 and has appeared on TV shows including Would I Lie to You? and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. His memoir, I Wanna Be Yours, about growing up in a Salford suburb, is published this month.
Continue reading...Artwork showing girl playing with a bicycle tyre appeared on street corner last week
Banksy has posted a picture of a mural of a girl hula-hooping on social media, ending speculation over whether he was behind the work.
The mural appeared on a wall on Tuesday on the corner of Rothesay Avenue in Lenton, Nottingham.
Continue reading...Almost 600 cultural groups across England to benefit from latest funding round
Comedy clubs, circuses, choirs and theatres across England are in line to receive a share of £76m of government funding for the cultural sector.
The Military Wives Choirs, Somerset House and Kneehigh Theatre in Cornwall are among the 588 organisations that will share the latest round of grants of up to £1m as part of the £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund.
Continue reading...Starting with experimental film in the 60s, video art has revolutionised the art world. We celebrate the medium through its most groundbreaking pieces
Video art emerged in tandem with experimental film during the 1960s, as lively, open-ended alternatives away from the centre. Practitioners with contrarian agendas and backgrounds in disparate fields – music, performance, literature, visual art and the moving image – took to experimenting with audiovisual configurations. Feeling unconstrained, they explored consumer tools alone in their studios, or in the supportive environment of artist-run, nonprofit spaces.
During this early phase, contemporary art museums concentrated on concrete, commodifiable forms, namely painting and sculpture. Many considered the moving image anathema, horrified by how sound would invade adjacent sacrosanct white-cube spaces. Yet by the late 1990s, museums were finally contemplating video and media as exhibitable art forms.
Continue reading...From books to ballet, from big to small screen, from art to theatre, there is much to enjoy despite the pandemic
Autumnal days are drawing in and Covid-19 restrictions are tightening. But it is not all doom and gloom. The world of culture is fighting back, aiming to boost the spirit of a nation. Here are just a few highlights to look forward to.
Continue reading...Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Hurricane Delta makes landfall in Louisiana, demonstrations in Santiago, and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world
Continue reading...The artist intended to self-inseminate over a live stream, in a work that could demystify queer parenthood. But after news got out, the grant was revoked
On 1 May 2020 the Australian performance artist Casey Jenkins received a $25,000 grant from the Australia Council to present a work, titled Procreate, at festivals in the UK and Chile.
But as the pandemic spread, international borders closed, and Jenkins – who uses they/them pronouns – sought a variation to the funding, proposing a new Covid-safe project instead: Immaculate. The work would feature a live stream of Jenkins – who hopes to fall pregnant – self-inseminating with donated sperm, while discussing their past experiences with conception.
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Chris Killip, who has died aged 74 from lung cancer, was one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers. His most compelling work was made in the north-east of England in the late 1970s and early 80s and was rooted in the relationship of people to the places that made – and often unmade – them as the traditional jobs they relied on disappeared. In 1988 he published In Flagrante, a landmark of social documentary that has influenced generations of younger photographers. His friend and fellow photographer Martin Parr described it as “the best book about Britain since the war”.
Killip later said that he had unknowingly photographed the “de-industrialisation” of the north-east. He had set out to render meaningful the lives of those who had been marginalised by the end of traditional industry in the region – miners, shipbuilders, fishermen and the like – and he did so through acute observation and empathy. “In recording their lives, I’m valuing their lives,” he said later of his mainly unemployed subjects. “These people will not appear in history books because ordinary people don’t. History is done to them. It is not acknowledged that they make history.”
Continue reading...Mark Haworth-Booth on ‘a remarkable talent and a very special human being’
Your article (Chris Killip, hard-hitting photographer of Britain’s working class, dies aged 74, 14 October) says “Killip was not given the recognition he deserved by major British art and photography institutions.”
On the contrary, Chris Killip’s first book – on the Isle of Man – was published in 1980 with support from the Arts Council. The master set of 69 photographs from which the book was printed was bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum (home of the national collection of the art of photography) in 1980.
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