Category Archives: Museums

Art History Book Profiles: ‘The Story of Art Without Men’ Author Katy Hessel

PBS NewsHour (May 3, 2023) -How many women artists can you name? That was a question Katy Hessel, then a 21-year-old art history major, asked herself. The results were disappointing. And so she set about learning and teaching herself and then others.

Art historian, author and presenter Katy Hessel poses for photos at the Falmouth Book Festival on October 19, 2022 in Falmouth, England. Her new book "The Story of Art Without Men" showcases the lives and work of women artists from the 16th century to the present. (Photo of Hessel by Hugh R Hastings/Getty Images; book cover courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company)
Art historian, author and presenter Katy Hessel 

That resulted in her new book, “The Story of Art Without Men.” Jeffrey Brown discussed the book with Hessel for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Exhibitions: ‘Jaune Quick-to-See Smith -Memory Map’

Art Trip (April 30, 2023) – A tour of the new exhibition – ‘Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map’, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The first New York retrospective brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

Apr 19–Aug 13, 2023

Light yellow background with red shapes in the foreground.

This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date. 

Smith’s work engages with contemporary modes of making, from her idiosyncratic adoption of abstraction to her reflections on American Pop art and neo-expressionism. These artistic traditions are incorporated and reimagined with concepts rooted in Smith’s own cultural practice, reflecting her belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Employing satire and humor, Smith’s art tells stories that flip commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Smith’s approach importantly blurs categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value.  

Museum Exhibition Tour: ‘Man Saves Comics’ In Ohio

CBS Sunday Morning (April 30, 2023) – Bill Blackbeard was something of a superhero. During his lifetime, he collected and preserved 2.5 million ephemeral artifacts of comic strip art, including newspapers and Sunday color sections dating as far back as 1893.

MAN SAVES COMICS! BILL BLACKBEARD’S TREASURE OF 20TH CENTURY NEWSPAPERS

Treasures from his collection are now featured in a new exhibit, “Man Saves Comics,” at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. Correspondent Luke Burbank reports.

Art: ‘Must-See Museum Exhibitions’ – May 2023

Sotheby’s (April 28, 2023) – Looking for some inspiration for your next museum visit? This month, we’re taking a tour of six of the world’s most exciting and innovative museum exhibitions with Tim Marlow, Director of the Design Museum, London.

Doris Salcedo – Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, 21 May–17 September 2023 – Salcedo is a Colombian-born artist, whose central subject is human trauma and tragedy. Though much of her work emanates from the violent conflict over the last three decades in her native land, its resonance is universal. Doris Salcedo presents eight major series of works from across her career – from untitled pieces of wooden furniture filled with concrete to the remarkable Palimpsest in which the names of over 300 refugees and migrants who died at sea quite literally weep before our eyes.

Vincent van Gogh 2023 marks the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh. Three exhibitions opening this month look set to enhance our understanding of the great Dutch painter:

Van Gogh and the Avant Garde The Art Institute of Chicago 14 May–4 September 2023 – Van Gogh and the Avant Garde takes the modern landscape as its central subject and looks at how the artist – along with Seurat, Signac and others – turned his attention from urban Parisian life to wrestling with the surrounding countryside with a formal inventiveness that set the tone for the development of Modernism.

Van Gogh’s Cypresses The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 22 May–27 August 2023 – From the religious connotation of trees in graveyards to their role as the backdrop of his incarceration at the asylum in Saint-Remy, the artist’s flame-like evergreens will be presented with all their evocative resonance in Van Gogh’s Cypresses,

Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 12 May–3 September 2023 – The unsurpassable Van Gogh Museum will celebrate its own 50th anniversary with Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months – an exhibition delving into the tremendously productive final period of his life, in which he made several of his most renowned masterpieces.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Art Newspaper April 27, 2023: This week: AI and art. We explore some of the key aspects relating to artificial intelligence and its use in the art world: the works being made using AI technologies and exploring their impact; anxieties about machines replacing humans; the idea of AIs being able to think and create independently; and whether we can truly grasp the significance and possible effects of the technologies and those who control it, and more.

Host Ben Luke talks to Noam Segal—an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, whose focus is on technology-based art—about AI, its history in art, its social and environmental effects, and how artists are using it today. The Art Newspaper’s live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist and writer Gretchen Andrew about making art with AI and together they explore its wider application across the art world.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, an image made using AI by the photographer Boris Eldagsen. The piece caused controversy earlier this month when it was awarded a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, which Eldagsen refused to accept. The researcher and photographer Lewis Bush discusses the work, the controversy and wider questions around AI and photography.

Exhibitions: ‘Dia al-Azzawi- Painting Poetry’ At The Ashmolean Museum, UK

Ashmolean Museum (April 26, 2023): ‘The Arab world’s most influential living artist’, Dia al-Azzawi is best known for monumental and colourful canvasses. His work spans many genres, including a type of artist books known in Arabic as ‘dafatir’.

DIA AL-AZZAWI

PAINTING POETRY

Here Francesca Leoni, curator of Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry at the Ashmolean, introduces us to the work of this important contemporary artist and takes us through the exhibition currently on display at the Ashmolean Museum.

Dia Al-Azzawi is an Iraqi painter and sculptor, now living and working in London, and one of the pioneers of modern Arab art. He is noted for incorporating Arabic script into his paintings. 

Dia al-Azzawi: Painting Poetry is open and free to visit until 10 June 2023.

International Art: Apollo Magazine — May 2023

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Apollo Magazine – May 2023 issue:

FEATURES | Jaune Quick-to-See Smith talks to Samuel Reilly about breaking the ‘buckskin ceiling’Grant Lewis on Handel’s art-buying habitElisa Germán talks to Apollo about the watercolours of Richard Foster YardeLouisa McKenzie on wax figures through the agesJonathan Griffin on the creative curating of Walter Hopps
 
REVIEWS | Imogen Tedbury on the experimental side of Giovanni BelliniNicola Shulman on tartan at the V&A DundeeMatthew Sperling looks at Alice Neel’s paintings at the BarbicanWilliam Carruthers digs deeper into the life of a formidable French archaeologistAlice Minter is dazzled by a catalogue of the Louvre’s gold and silver
 
MARKET | Jane Morris on New York’s domination of the art market; plus the latest columns from Emma Crichton-Miller and Samuel Reilly
 
PLUS | Hettie Judah asks if artists are getting screwed over by galleries and museumsRosamund Bartlett on how Sydney Modern is rethinking Australian artDiane Smyth focuses on photography collections in the UKWilliam Aslet on the chequered history of St Mary-le-StrandThomas Marks watches La Grande BouffeChristina Makris drinks rosé at a sculpture park in PiedmontSophie Barling on the potter who turned back timeHelen Stoilas on what not to miss at TEFAF New York; plus our pick of the best exhibitions to see this month

What’s the point of studying fine art?

Enrolment in the humanities is tumbling across the United States, but the numbers for fine art are still holding up

Will Edward Bawden’s lost masterpiece ever be tracked down?

The hunt is on for an epic mural depicting ‘Country Life in Britain’ – but chances are it’s a wild goose chase

Finnish lines – a new look for the Ateneum in Helsinki

Ateneum Art Museum

Finland’s most important art museum has been completely rehung just as questions of culture and national identity are on everyone’s mind

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Art Newspaper April 20, 2023: This week features a tour of Tate Modern’s exhibition that brings together the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian | Artists | Tate Shop | Tate

We hear about the two artists’ distinctive contributions to abstraction, their shared interest in esoteric belief systems and their deep engagement with the natural world, from one of the show’s curators, Bryony Fer. Our editor, Americas, Ben Sutton visited the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to talk to the Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, as her retrospective opens at the museum.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a reconstruction of a Roman gateway that has just opened at Richborough Roman Fort in Kent, southern England. Andrew J. Roberts, a properties historian with English Heritage, the charity that looks after the historic site, explains what the gateway tells us about the Romans’ arrival in Britain in 43 CE.Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life, Tate Modern, London, until 3 September.

Additionally: Kunstmuseum den Haag, The Hague, 7 October-25 February 2024Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 13 August; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 15 October -7 January 2024; Seattle Art Museum, 15 February–12 May next year. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 24 September-15 January 2024; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut, 18 April 2024-15 September 2024.The Roman gateway and rampart, Richborough Roman Fort and Amphitheatre, Kent, now open.

The Arts: Insights Of The ‘Louvre Looks’ Film Series

The twelfth film was conceived by artist Bianca Bondi. In her video, she undertook to convey the sense of timelessness and existence beyond time that is the very fabric of the Louvre.

Musée du Louvre (April 20, 2023) – As part of its contemporary programs, the Louvre has invited twenty young creative figures to present their take on the museum in the form of a 3:30 min film.

The “Louvre Looks” initiative brings together creatives under forty – whether they come from the visual arts, poetry, film, experimental music, or fashion. They created new films in the palace itself and thus reconnect with the past of the Louvre – which hosted artist studios even before it became a museum.

These films go live every Thursday on YouTube. Over the course of twenty weeks, you will be given the opportunity to discover many fresh insights into the Louvre.

The tenth film was conceived by painter, performer, and musician Eliza Douglas. She assembled images released by visitors on their Instagram feed to give a polyphonic image of the museum’s lives through its audiences – your Louvre.

Design: ‘Re-Enchanting Villa Medici’ In Rome, Italy

india mahdavi's vivid play of geometries & colors takes over the historic rooms of villa medici

Villa Medicis, Rome (April 18, 2023) – The piano nobile of Villa Medici consists of the former rooms of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici with three rooms in a row – the Room of the Elements, the Room of the Muses and the Room of the Lovers of Jupiter – with 16th century frescoes by the Mannerist painter Jacopo Zucchi. These rooms, which are open to the public on guided tours throughout the year, are located next to two private rooms from the same period which complete the complex.

As part of the project Reenchanting Villa Medici, the interior refurbishment of these emblematic spaces of Villa Medici has been entrusted to India Mahdavi, an internationally renowned French architect, designer and scenographer, who will be responsible for the artistic direction of the project in association with craftsmen (more information to come). This transformation is being carried out with respect for the period décor and previous architectural interventions, in order to revisit the premises by adding a touch of colour and modernity. The rooms will be equipped by Maison Tréca, a French manufacturer of high quality bedding.