Category Archives: Museums

Architectural Views: The Bundeswehr Museum Of Military History, Dresden

Smithsonian Channel – In 2001, Daniel Libeskind was hired to design a tasteful extension to the Bundeswehr Museum of Military History, in Dresden. His vision was an ingenious feat of architecture that managed to be both modern and respectful of the city’s tragic past.

The Military History Museum in Dresden, Saxony is one of very few museums in Germany that has German war equipment from both World Wars. Some of the most famous large items in the museum include a V2 flying bomb and Germany’s first submarine. The museum aims to explain how the military, armies and war influenced politics and society, and vice versa.

Culture: American Indian Magazine – Winter 2022-23

NMAI Magazine

American Indian Magazine (Winter 2022-2023) issue:

The Indigenous Origins of Maple Syrup

The gathering of syrup from maple trees in the woodlands of Canada and the northeastern United States is an ancient practice that had helped sustain Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Yet during the colonial era, some lost their connection to the tree and its ceremonies. Only recently have many started to reclaim it.

In the Fading Tracks of Caribou: Numbers of an Animal Central to Inuit Culture are Declining Drastically in Parts of Canada

 Robert Watt shot his first caribou when he was eight years old. A small group from his Inuit community of Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec had traveled upriver toward the confluence of the Larch and Caniapiscau Rivers to hunt the animals. The memory of that day almost four decades ago still lingers. “The air was crisp and cold,” recalled Watt. “You could see your breath.”

READ DIGITAL ONLINE EDITION

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

It’s our final podcast of 2022 and so, as ever, we’re looking back at the worlds of art and heritage over the past 12 months.

Ben Luke is joined by three members of The Art Newspaper team: Louisa Buck, contemporary art correspondent, Kabir Jhala, acting deputy art market editor, and Ben Sutton, editor in the Americas. Among much else, they discuss the effects of the war in Ukraine,

Just Stop Oil’s activism, unionisation in US museums, the restitution of African and Native American (and Greek) objects, and the NFT crash. They also look at the big art shows and, finally, choose a work of the year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Art: ‘Making Modernism’ – Royal Academy, London

Royal Academy of Art (December 14, 2022) – What would Modernism look like if you saw it through the eyes of women artists? How would it change your perception? What other stories might you find?

Watch Royal Academy curators Sarah Lea and Professor Dorothy Price discuss the pioneering work of four women making art on their own terms: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Kӓthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin.

Making Modernism is open now until 12 February 2023.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

December 8, 2022: The Parthenon Marbles; it has emerged that George Osborne, the former UK chancellor and now chair of the trustees of the British Museum, has been holding talks with the Greek government about the ancient sculptures.

So might this lead to a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over their ownership? Ben Luke speaks to Yannis Andritsopoulos, the reporter for the Greek newspaper Ta Nea who broke the story. In Afghanistan, it is more than a year since the Taliban reclaimed power—so what has become of the heritage projects and art community in the country, which is consumed by a devastating humanitarian crisis?

We hear from Sarvy Geranpayeh, who has regularly reported from Afghanistan for The Art Newspaper, about art and archeology under the Taliban. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a group of five murals by the German-born US artist Kiki Smith. The works are about to be unveiled at Grand Central Madison, the new Long Island Rail Road terminal below Grand Central on Madison Avenue, Manhattan. Smith tells us about the origin and development of her series of vast mosaics. 

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess.

December 2, 2022: Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts organisations across the country, and especially in London, are reeling. Ben Luke talks to Jenni Lomax, the former director of the Camden Art Centre—the north London non-profit gallery whose funding has been cut by more than 30%. They discuss the effect of the cuts, and why the response from the visual arts community is relatively quiet compared to the uproar in the worlds of theatre and opera.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws (1927), a work from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. The painting is among a host of works moved from the war-torn country to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid for the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. Katia Denysova, the co-curator of the show, tells us about the picture, and the extraordinary journey it took from Kyiv to the Spanish capital.Art Basel in Miami Beach until 3 December.In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, until 30 April 2023. 

International Art: Apollo Magazine – December 2022

Apollo Magazine – December 2022 issue:

  • A very proud Mary in Florence
  • The fantasies of Henry Fuseli
  • Art in the time of the AIDS crisis
  • Can contemporary art be funny?

Plus: reframing the Fitzwilliam Museum, a brief history of mulled wine, what’s next for NFTs and, in reviews: the triumph of the Tudors, ways of seeing at the Wellcome Collection and the unfashionable art of Ruskin Spear

The fetishistic side of Henry Fuseli

You enter a troubling parallel universe in Henry Fuseli’s drawings of women: a place of exaggeration and highly sexualised imagery, where his subjects engage in role-play and the theatrical and erotic and idiosyncratic collide. It’s an inventive, private realm: not one of the drawings in the Courtauld’s fascinating exhibition was displayed in public during the artist’s life. 

The Frenchman who wanted to photograph the world

In the early 20th century, Albert Kahn dispatched photographers to more than 50 countries – and the magical results can be found in the Paris museum that bears his name

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: as the exhibition Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia opens at the Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavik, Ben Luke talks to Masha Alekhina, one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, and the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, one of the co-curators of the show.

As protests continue across Iran, Aimee Dawson, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor, speaks to Shirin Neshat, the artist whose work expressing solidarity with women in Iran was recently installed outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is by the Puerto Rican artist Gabriella Torres-Ferrer. Their 2018 sculpture—called Untitled (Value Your American Lie)—is part of a major new show at the Whitney Museum in New York, exploring art in Puerto Rico in the five years since the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia, Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, until 15 January 2023. Pussy Riot: Riot Days, National Theatre of Iceland, Reykjavik, 25 November. Proceeds from the concert and the exhibition go to supporting Ukraine. You can hear an in-depth interview with Ragnar Kjartansson from 2020 on our sister podcast A brush with… on the usual podcast platforms.No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 23 Apr 2023. 

Los Angeles Architecture: Inside The Broad Museum

Dezeen – Architect Elizabeth Diller explains how The Broad Museum in Los Angeles was designed to feel “extremely welcoming” in the next instalment of Dezeen’s Concrete Icons series produced in collaboration with Holcim.

The video features The Broad in Los Angeles designed by Diller’s studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a three-storey museum that houses an expansive collection of contemporary and post-war artworks. Speaking to Dezeen in an exclusive video interview filmed at the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro office in New York City, Diller explained how the building was designed to feel inviting to visitors with a porous facade that allows light to be gently diffused into the gallery.

“It doesn’t really feel like a traditional museum,” Diller said. “There’s no sense of authority. When you step off the street, no one tells you where to go. There’s no information desk, there’s no admissions desk. You don’t pay, it’s free. It feels extremely welcoming.”

Museum Exhibits: ‘Objects Of Desire – Surrealism And Design 1924 – Today’ (2022)

Dezeen – Curator Kathryn Johnson explains the story behind surrealism and its impact on design in this video Dezeen produced for the Design Museum about its latest exhibition.

Titled Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 – Today, the exhibition features almost 350 surrealist objects spanning fashion, furniture and film. The exhibition, which was curated by Johnson, explores the conception of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and the impact it has had on the design world ever since. It features some of the most recognised surrealist paintings and sculptures, including pieces by Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington, as well as work from contemporary artists and designers such as Dior and Björk.

the Design Museum – “Surrealism was born out of the horrors of the first world war, in a period of conflict and uncertainty, and it was a creative response to that chaos,” Johnson said in the video.