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    in Exhibitions

    ‘You Have to Experience It in the Radical Present’: How Anicka Yi’s Ultra-Sensorial Tate Commission Resists the Age of Instagram Art

    In the aftermath of Kara Walker’s monumental fountain, Carsten Holler’s playground of slides, and Olafur Eliasson’s unforgettable indoor weather project, I had certain expectations for Tate Modern’s latest Turbine Hall commission, which opened yesterday. But the U.S. artist Anicka Yi, who has been tapped for the annual project, has a more subtle flavor than her noisier predecessors.
    A squeal of delight in the audience directed my attention upwards to the bridge across the cavernous room where a fleet of jellyfish-like balloons floated close to the ceiling. For her installation, Yi has invented these hybrid biological and technological creatures called aerobes, which are classified either as “xeno-jellies” whose forms have been inspired by ocean lifeforms or “planulae,” from different types of mushrooms.
    Filled with helium and propelled around the room by rotors, they look like they come from an alien planet but are more benign than H.G. Wells’s tripod creatures. As I drew closer, I realized that they were emitting a faintly pleasant aroma; one floated above me and performed a gentle twirl.
    Installation view of Hyundai Commission Anicka Yi at Tate Modern, October 2021. Photo by Will Burrard Lucas.
    The installation is rooted in the artist’s ongoing interest in shifting the relationship between technology, humans, and the biological world. It proposes a different kind of ecosystem: Her floating creatures imagine new ways that machines could inhabit the world alongside humans, rather than the traditional understanding that they function to serve humans, or work against us in some dystopian capacity.
    “I wanted to open up that dialectic and expand the conversation;” Yi said in a press conference at the unveiling of the work. “Machines don’t necessarily have to serve us or scare us in order to coexist with us.”
    Taking this idea as her starting point, Yi explained how she started to think about the concept of “wilding” machines; eliminating their functionality, and asking what it would look like to live with them then. Inspired by how organisms learn through their bodies and senses, as well as technological advances within the field of soft robotics, Yi endowed the aerobes with a sort of sensory intelligence. They respond to information, including the scents of the building, sources of heat, and an awareness of their place in space relative to each other. 
    Once raised in the air, they are completely autonomous, driven by this artificial life program—a software that can be likened to the mind—that simulates and seeks to understand complex biological behaviors. Their unpredictable movements imbue them with a sense of life; the squeal of delight I had heard was a child reacting to them as animals and not machines.
    Anicka Yi, “In Love With the World,” Hyundai Commission, Tate Modern. Photo by Joe Humphrys, courtesy Tate.
    The sensorial element to the installation also resists the ability to be captured on Instagram. It has an evolving scentscape that you have to physically take into your body to experience, part of a genre that Yi called “metabolic” art. 
    “You have to experience it in the radical present, in your body and mind as one,” she said. The changing odors emitted around the aerobes have been inspired by different eras of the surrounding Bankside area, from marine scents related to pre-human era to the spices thought to ward off the black death in the 14th century to smells from London’s industrial age.
    The scents are subtle and offer up no clear illustrative associations. When I was there, there was was a faintly spicy, not unpleasant, smell of patchouli. When asked what was intended to evoke, Yi informed us wryly that the inspiration was cholera. It’s intentionally a surprise as Yi aims to expand our relationship to smell. We expect to instantly recognize something and categorize it as good or bad, but these confusing scents are not straightforward; they ask you to heighten your awareness, and breathe deeply.
    “Yi has worked with smell and scent for a long time, and partly in terms of questioning the primacy of the visual, and the visual as principally male, rational, industrial, technocratic, and Western,”  the exhibition’s co-curator Achim Borchardt-Hume told Artnet News. “Whereas our experience of the world encompasses all the senses.”
    Installation view of Hyundai Commission “Anicka Yi: In Love With the World” at Tate Modern, October 2021. Photo by Will Burrard Lucas.
    The artist is also interested in the politics of air, in how scent can alter your perception of space, and make you aware of the air around you in ways that you weren’t before. Indeed, as I experience the same awareness of the odors and gasses in a room, and the potential risks they carry, I was instantly more aware that I was sharing the air with others.
    “Engaging with the air, especially in the age of Covid, it’s an especially rich material to unpack,” Yi said. She wanted to foreground the olfactive questions with the pandemic and to really underscore the air that we’re sharing. Indeed, questions of how how we inhabit the world, climate emergency, and coexistence between humans and other species, have taken on a whole new importance over the past two years. Many people who got sick actually lost their sense of smell; I was one of them, and I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how crucial it was to my experience of the world—from determining if something was burning to recalling past experiences—until I lost it.
    “Air is this charged site for social discourse, and with the pandemic and climate crisis it is this substrate that ties us all in this very symbiotic coexistence that we cannot escape,” she said. “We are all these vessels of interdependence and we have a responsibility toward each other.”
    And that’s what the Turbine Hall commission has always done: brought people together. The show places Yi in dialogue with the works before her, such as Superflex’s three-man swings that required people to work together to enjoy them. So, too, does her work underscore how we—as either biological or technological entities—are all in this together.
    “Anicka Yi: In Love With the World” is on view at Tate Modern through January 16.
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    in Exhibitions

    9 Gallery Shows to See in London During Frieze Week, From a Ron Mueck Retrospective to a Motley Crew of Ominous Skeletons

    It’s Frieze week in London, and ahead of the fairs opening to VIPs tomorrow, here’s our pick of what’s on view beyond The Regent’s Park across a selection of galleries in London.

    Elizabeth NeelPilar CorriasThrough October 23
    Installation view, Elizabeth Neel, “Limb after Limb,” at Pilar Corrias. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.
    In “Limb after Limb,” Elizabeth Neel presents a new body of work made in isolation on her family’s farm in rural Vermont. The large-scale paintings on canvas echo the natural environment and the physical and psychological tolls of isolation through a process of abstraction. Also on view is a short documentary about the artist by her brother, Andrew Neel, which explores her practice and fraught experience living as an artist within the legacy of her grandmother, Alice Neel.
    “Limb after Limb” is on view at 2 Savile Row, London, W1S 3PA.
    Simeon BarclayWorkplaceThrough October 29
    Installation view, Simeon Barclay, “England’s Lost Camelot,” at Workplace.Courtesy of the artist and Workplace, London.
    The U.K. artist Simeon Barclay has created new multimedia works and an installation for “England’s Lost Camelot,” on view at Workplace’s West End gallery. Taking its cue from Arthurian legends and the persistence of the figure of the gallant knight in British folklore and iconography, he follows this medieval legend through popular culture as well as his own personal biography, unpacking how these tropes play a role in determining notions of class, race, and gender.
    “Simeon Barclay: England’s Lost Camelot” is on view at 40 Margaret Street, London, W1G 0JH.
    Ösgür KarEmalinThrough November 10
    Özgür Kar, Death with flute (2021). Photo: Stephen James. © Özgür Kar, courtesy of the artist and Emalin, London.
    In “Storage Drama,” his first solo outing with Emalin, Turkish artist Özgür Kar presents three of his eerie “Death” sculptures, minimally animated drawings of musically inclined skeletons that ruminate on the nature of existence with humor and heft. There’s a timelessness to the anxiety expressed, evoking at once medieval manuscripts and plague traditions, but also the banal phrases of online exchanges and our contemporary moment of global disease. Scored by improvised woodwind riffs on an ominous tritone known as the “Devil’s Interval,” viewers might find themselves in a bit of a trance. As one of Kar’s characters puts it: “You either get the vibe or you don’t.”
    “Storage Drama” is on view at 1 Holywell Lane, London, EC2A 3ET.
    Ron MueckThaddaeus RopacThrough November 13
    Ron Mueck, Dead Dad (1996–97). © Ron Mueck, courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris, Salzburg, and Seoul.
    Spanning 25 years of Ron Mueck’s career, this historical exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac features some of the Australian sculptor’s most celebrated pieces plus never-before-exhibited works. Mueck’s famous sculpture Dead Dad (1996–97) is on view in the U.K. for the first time since it shocked in the Royal Academy’s storied 1997 “Sensation” exhibition, as is a new, as-yet-unseen cast-iron outdoor sculpture of a skull, Dead Weight (2021), which clocks in at a whopping one tonne. A moving figure of a young Black man with a stab wound, Youth (2009/2011), speaks to the urgency of addressing urban crime. From the small-scale to the monumental, the works on view evoke the gamut of human emotions and experiences.
    “Ron Mueck: 25 Years of Sculpture 1996–2021” is on view at 37 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NJ.
    “Sorry It’s a Mess, We Just Moved In!”LAMB ArtsThrough November 13
    Clara Hastrup, Untitled (Leek) (2021). Courtesy of LAMB Arts, London.
    This lively group exhibition explores everyday objects and the role they play in shaping and holding onto identity, asking whether, in a digital age, the physical carries more significance, or less. Curated by Roya Sachs, it places blue-chip names such as Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Erwin Wurm, and Isa Genzken in dialogue with works by emerging artists, such as Clara Hastrup’s photographs of “Perishable Sculptures,” to ask how we relate to objects, from throwaway items to functional commodities to treasured tokens of memory.
    “Sorry It’s a Mess, We Just Moved In!” is on view at 32 St. George Street, London, W1S 2EA.
    Noah DavisDavid ZwirnerThrough November 17
    Noah Davis, 40 Acres and a Unicorn (2007). © The Estate of Noah Davis, courtesy of the Estate of Noah Davis and David Zwirner.
    Curator Helen Molesworth has selected works by the late U.S. artist Noah Davis that span his brief but bright career for the first presentation of the artist’s dreamlike, figurative paintings in the U.K. The show is a follow-up to an acclaimed exhibition at David Zwirner in New York in January 2020, and while there are some repeats, most of the works on view will be different. Significantly, the London edition imports a version of the artist’s ambitious social-practice project, the Underground Museum, installed in the gallery’s upper level. Headquartered in an underserved Black and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles, the initiative is a Black-owned and -run art space that shows museum-quality work. Highlighting the importance to Davis of community, the show includes a sculpture by the artist’s widow, Karon Davis, and the film BLKNWS, by his brother, Kahlil Joseph, famed in his own right.
    “Noah Davis” is on view at 24 Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EZ.
    Issy Wood Carlos/IshikawaThrough November 20
    Issy Wood, The sides (2021). © Issy Wood. Courtesy of the artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and JTT, New York.
    The young painting sensation Issy Wood’s exhibition “Trilemma” at Carlos/Ishikawa will scratch your brain—and not just because all the paintings are on velvet. The artist created this series of ‘depression’ paintings during lockdown in response to her contracted surroundings, and in works based on snippets of screenshots from the films and TV shows she was watching, there is an eerie sense of nostalgia for a world that once was. The show also includes a foray into installation with a suite of painted, velvet-upholstered Carlo Scarpa furniture entitled What if you showed up (2021) installed in the middle of the gallery.
    “Issy Wood: Trilemma” is on view at Unit 4, 88 Mile End Road, London, E1 4UN.

    “Social Works II”GagosianThrough December 18
    Installation view, “Social Works II,” at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London. Courtesy Gagosian.
    This group exhibition on view at the gallery’s Grosvenor Hill location is the sequel to recently-appointed director and curator Antwaun Sargent’s inaugural show at Gagosian in New York. It places front and center artists of the African diaspora whose projects extend beyond the walls of the gallery and into social practice. From architect Sumayya Vally’s wall fragment that functions as a site for research and ritual to historical collages by Black Arts Movement pioneer (and Turner Prize–winner) Lubaina Himid, the exhibition probes the ways that geography informs identity and perception in different communities and spaces.
    “Social Works II” is on view at 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, W1K 3QD.

    A.A. MurakamiSuperblueThrough Summer 2022
    New Spring (2017). Photo: Juriaan Booij. Courtesy of COS x Studio Swine.
    The Tokyo- and London-based duo A.A. Murakami—made up of Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves from Studio Swine—has been tapped to debut Superblue in London, following the global launch of the experiential art powerhouse in Miami in May.
    For “Silent Fall”—on view at Pace’s former Burlington Gardens space—the pair is presenting a new, Instagram-friendly multi-sensory experience that immerses audiences in a seemingly infinite forest of glowing trees. Their branches emit misty bubbles, which unleash different scents of nature, from pine to moss, when they burst. It’s part of the artists’ “ephemeral tech” installations, which use sophisticated technology to recreate organic experiences, and offers a glimpse of a future world in which we are trying to recreate a sense of the sublime in a nature that is lost.
    “Silent Fall” is on view at 6 Burlington Gardens, London, W1J 0PE.
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    in Street Art

    “Giant Doll” and “Nature Morte” by Ludo in Paris, France

    Street artist Ludo just finished two murals in Paris, France. “Giant Doll” features the animatronic doll from Netflix hit series Squid Game with armed angels on both the doll’s sides. While “Nature Morte” features Ludo’s iconic imagery of and arrow + tulip hybrid shot through a skull.Most of Ludo’s work primarily focuses on the combination of nature and human technology. More specifically, he prefers to emphasize on the way society takes nature for granted. Often, we disrespect and over-exploit it- leading human control into a vast destruction. His work focuses on our surroundings and effects all while providing a form of humility. This is the basis of his work and is sure to leave one amaze at first sight.Ludo’s primarily forms of mediums used in street art are composed of silkscreen, acrylic, pencils, scalpel, tape, and printers. This is all used for wheat pasting or paste-ups. He also currently works on street installations and sculptures by re-using objects found within the streets. He is constantly active with works across Europe, using trademark monochromatic paste-ups with dripping green highlights.Check out below for more photos of the murals. More

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    in Exhibitions

    In London for Frieze? Don’t Miss These 7 Museum Shows, From Theaster Gates at Whitechapel to Anicka Yi’s Turbine Hall Commission

    The art fairs Frieze London and Frieze Masters have returned to Regent’s Park this week after a year’s hiatus. In that time, Londoners had ample space to reflect on what matters most to the city’s rich cultural landscape.
    While many surely missed the social energy and market momentum of the art fairs during lockdown, it was also a time to rediscover London’s stellar art institutions and how they contribute to fabric of our lives in ways that are very different from the two pop-up tents in one of London’s royal parks.
    To that end, here’s a round up of what not to miss in museums this week.

    Abbas AkhavanChisenhale GalleryThrough October 17
    Abbas Akhavan, curtain call, variations on a folly(2021). Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2021. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.
    In “curtain call, variations on a folly,” Montréal-based artist Abbas Akhavan continues to explore the potential of chroma key green screen technology, which he has paired with his fascination with an ancient building material made of subsoil, water, and straw called cob. For the Chisenhale commission, he filled the gallery with a green screen infinity wall, on top of which he placed cob sculptures replicating the forms of a colonnade that once led to the Arch of Palmyra in Syria, much of which was tragically destroyed by ISIS in 2015.
    By mixing the infinite possibilities afforded by the green screen, and the dark history of the heritage site’s destruction, the installation is somewhat of a portal through time and space, and leaves the viewer feeling transported with it.
    “Abbas Akhavan: curtain call, variations on a folly” is on view at 64 Chisenhale Road London E3 5QZ

    Alvaro Barrington South London GalleryThrough November 21
    Installation view, “Alvaro Barrington: Spider The Pig; Pig The Spider” at South London Gallery. Photo by Naomi Rea.
    Unbelievably, this is Alvaro Barrington’s first solo show in a U.K. institution. The market star—whose is represented by a full eight galleries internationally—is a prolific producer, and his bespoke installation at the South London Gallery responds to the architecture of the space in a way I’ve not seen before. Titled “Spider The Pig, Pig The Spider,” the show presents several new bodies of work that, in line with Barrington’s practice, play with historical and contemporary cultural references—including a new series of Hermès blankets smeared with concrete and hung up like cloud paintings, and mixed media paintings that smoosh the children’s TV character Peppa Pig with the pigs from Orwell’s animal farm.
    “Alvaro Barrington: Spider The Pig, Pig The Spider” is on view at 65–67 Peckham Road London SE5 8UH.

    Mixing It UpHayward GalleryThrough December 12
    Lisa Brice, Smoke and Mirrors (2020) in “Mixing It Up: Painting Today” at Hayward Gallery, 2021. ©Lisa Brice 2021. Courtesy of Hayward Gallery. Photo by Rob Harris.
    If you want an overview of the landscape of contemporary painting today, “Mixing It Up” is a necessary port of call. The show brings together the work of 31 contemporary painters, from emerging Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami, whose poetic paintings dredge up traumatic memories of military conflict and refugee life to striking recent works by Lisa Brice, which conjure up dreamlike worlds of women painters at work, who shrug off the the male gaze of art history that has so often cast them as muses and models.
    “Mixing It Up: Painting Today” is on view at Hayward Galley, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX.

    Phoebe Collings-JamesCamden Art CenterThrough December 23
    Installation views of Phoebe Collings-James, “A Scratch! A Scratch!,” at Camden Art Centre, September10–December 23, 2021. Photo: Rob Harris.
    London-based artist Phoebe Collings-James is having her first institutional solo show in the U.K. Titled “A Scratch! A Scratch!”—after Mercutio’s reaction to being slain by Tybalt in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—the wide-ranging exhibition presents a sensory environment of sound and sculpture that—invoking the traditions of mythology, folklore, and Black queer sound—explores themes of grief, heartbreak, and desire.
    New bodies of work on view include a group of torso casings resembling Roman armor plates, multi-panel clay paintings inscribed with images, words, and phrases, and an audio patchwork of sounds captured from daily journeys through the streets of London echoing out of water-filled vessels. It also includes new recordings of poetry generated in tarot circles, led by artist and poet Daniella Valz Gen over the past year.
    “Phoebe Collings-James: A Scratch! A Scratch!” is on view at Camden Art Centre Arkwright Road London NW3 6DG

    Summer ExhibitionRoyal AcademyThrough January 2
    Gallery view the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2021. Photo: ©David Parry/ Royal Academy of Arts.
    Anyone can enter their work for consideration for the Royal Academy’s annual summer exhibition, meaning it offers a true bird’s eye view of the landscape of contemporary art and architecture. Delayed until fall this year due to the pandemic, it includes work by leading artists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Rose Wylie, as well as slews of emerging talent. Hung across the RA’s main galleries, it is always a delight and full of discovery, and if you are in a buying mood, most of the work is also for sale.
    “The Summer Exhibition” is on view at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD

    Theaster GatesWhitechapel GalleryThrough January 9
    Installation view: “Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon,” Whitechapel Gallery, September 29, 2021–January 9, 2022. Image courtesy Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Theo Christelis.
    Both his practice as a potter working with clay and his deep religious belief are central to the work of Theaster Gates, who says both teach you how to “shape the world.” Fittingly then, the Chicago-based artist’s latest outing at the Whitechapel Gallery is titled “A Clay Sermon,” and includes work spanning two decades of production, from early hand-thrown pots to his large-scale Afro-Mingei sculptures. The artist has also selected historic ceramics from public and private collections to show alongside his own, and is debuting a new, musically rich film that takes the form of a sermon on clay.
    The exhibition also seeps across London to an intervention in the ceramics galleries at the V&A, and a concurrent show at White Cube Mason’s Yard. The project will culminate next summer when the artist takes on the annual Serpentine pavilion commission.
    “Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon” is on view at 77-82 Whitechapel High St London E1 7QX

    Anicka YiTate ModernJanuary 16
    Anicka Yi, Installation view 7,070, 430K of Digital Spit, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015.
    This one is a bit of a cheat as, of this writing, we don’t yet know what the Korean American conceptual artist has in store for her installation in Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. The institution is notoriously quiet about the commission until it is officially unveiled, which will be later today, but we’re confident enough to add it to this list. The artist, known for working with microbial matter and other unconventional materials, has cryptically hinted that the new work will be an “aquarium of machines,” and the institution said it will build on themes the artist has focused on throughout her career, exploring the links between art and science, and working to activate different senses. We are titillated.
    “The Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi” is on view at Turbine Hall Bankside London SE1 9TG
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    in Exhibitions

    Performa 2021 Is a Chance to Reconnect With Performance After Quarantine, But Also a Tribute to the Small Joys That Got Us Through

    Not that long ago, the prospect of gathering for a piece of live performance art seemed unthinkable. Yet even then, the organizers of Performa, New York’s scrappy performing arts biennial, knew this year’s edition would go on.   
    “We didn’t think for a minute that we weren’t going to do it,” said RoseLee Goldberg, the event’s founder and chief curator.
    To meet that goal would require some improvisation—and you’ll see evidence of that this week, as Goldberg and her team opens their ninth Performa biennial with new commissions by Sara Cwynar, Tschabalala Self, and others.
    The event is smaller in scope than in previous years, and it comes a month sooner than usual. But it won’t be unrecognizable, either. Improvisation, after all, has always been fundamental to Performa’s identity. 
    “We’ve always tried to find the most creative solution,” said Goldberg. 
    Whereas past events have featured dozens of artists from all over the world, just eight artists were commissioned to make pieces this year. All hail from the New York region. (International travel restrictions limited participant options.) Each was asked to stage their creations outside, in an effort to limit any possible exposure to COVID. 

    These were practical decisions, of course, but also conceptual. New York’s streets are more than the site of this year’s artworks—they’re the inspiration, too. 
    The pandemic drastically redefined our relationship to the city’s public space, Performa’s senior curator Kathy Noble explained. “We ended up using [these sites] so much more, eating outdoors, gathering in parks.” In a time of profound isolation, she went on, “those were small joys.”
    The theme also harkens back to the tradition of “radical urbanism” from 1970s-era architectural discourse, Goldberg added, “this idea that you can change the nature of the street through action.”
    Kevin Beasley’s The Sound of Morning is perhaps the purest distillation of this. A dance piece and “sonic sculpture,” the artwork will be soundtracked by the ambient noise of the Lower East Side walkways on which it will take place.
    In other cases, the connection to New York is indirect. The great Madeline Hollander, for instance, will pay tribute to the city’s dance communities with Review, a staged compilation of gestures from performances canceled during the pandemic. 
    There are some other differences with this year’s biennial too. For the first time ever, each event will be live-streamed via Performa’s website, giving out-of-towners the chance to tune in. And for those that can make the trip, the performances will be free of charge. 
    “It has to do with offering people something they haven’t had in a year and half that feels meaningful,” said Noble. “We wanted to do something for the community here.”
    The Performa 2021 Biennial will take place from October 12-31 across various locations in New York.
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    in Street Art

    Art Activations by Filthy Luker, Gabriel Pitcher, and more in Bristol, England

    New art activations have been unveiled in Bristol as part of Vanguard x TOward 2030, What Are You Doing? – an on-street project aligning art with sustainable conversation throughout the city. Artists Richt, Peace of Art, Filthy Luker, Mau Mau, Gabriel Pitcher and Paul Harfleet are the latest artists to install works across the city, each inspired by one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and aligned with community action.Photo credit: Paul BoxEach artist has also partnered with a local community group to show how Bristol is localising global conversations on poverty eradication, environmental protection and societal equality. New activations will be popping up across the city throughout October. Artist duo Filthy Luker has taken over the rooftop of We The Curious, Bristol with an inflatable floral sculpture to amplify SDG15 Life on Land, in partnership with The Natural History Consortium. Photo credit: Paul BoxSavita Willmot is chief executive of The Natural History Consortium, a charitable collaboration of 14 organisations working together on a shared mission: to develop, test and disseminate best practice to engage everyone with the environment and natural world. Speaking on the collaboration with Filthy Luker, Savita noted how art is a powerful tool to spread environmental awareness:“This year city partners came together to create the first One City Ecological Emergency Strategy. Our challenge is to now bring these ideas to life across the streets of Bristol. Arts and culture are at the heart of our city, and harnessing the engaging power of art will be crucial to tackling our environmental emergencies.“Photo credit: Doug GillenGabriel Pitcher has partnered with community ambassador, The Global Goals Centre to paint a mural in St Werburgh’s, Bristol celebrating Bristol 17 hero Katie Cross, founder of Pledgeball. Pledgeball harnesses the power of football and its fans to accelerate the pursuit of global sustainability. Through affiliated clubs, it prompts fans into small lifestyle ‘pledges’ in support of their favourite team and their only planet and empowers fans by demonstrating the huge impact even small changes can make for the benefit of themselves and their environment.Photo credit: Doug GillenSpeaking on the collaboration Gabriel Pitcher said:“I’ve always been interested in exploring and documenting the stories behind the people I paint. This portrait celebrates Katie Cross, her sport and her effort to ignite that same curiosity and energy for engaging meaningfully with the conversation on climate action.”The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.The series of art activations is curated by Charlotte Pyatt and runs alongside the blockbuster exhibition Vanguard: Bristol Street Art running until 30 October at M Shed, Bristol. Photo credit: Peachy HannaCampus Pool Skatepark to celebrate the role of skate culture in fostering pathways into the creativity industries. Founded in 2011, Campus Skateparks is a not-for-profit organisation that uses the positive energy and influence of skateboarding to engage with children and young people. Through its work with different communities around Bristol, it focuses on promoting inclusivity in the skateboarding scene.Photo credit: Pete Metclaff for Fifth Wall TVMau Mau has teamed up with community partner Frank Water to reflect on our behaviour and attitude to water. His mural on Surrey St, St Pauls, also uses the Graphenstone paints and considers water as a global system and how our actions here affect water supplies across the world.The Vanguard team is made up of a collective of artists, specialists and collectors involved in the global street art movement. Their debut exhibition will be presented at Bristol Museums’ M Shed. The project is led by Mary McCarthy with creative direction from Charlotte Pyatt, art direction from Justin MacCarthy aka DICY, design direction from Graham Dews aka PARIS.Photo credit: PlasterVanguard’s Outreach and Art Interventions Partner TOward2030. What are you doing? is an award-winning cultural project conceived by Lavazza Group’s Sustainability and Communications Departments and executed in 2018/9 with the City of Turin. It strives to activate the dynamic energy of art on the streets to create a dialogue with the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the host city. It aims to unite and inspire creatives and communities in a positive and meaningful way, using art as an accessible bridge to the goals. The project strives to encourage relationships between sustainability and the urban art community by fostering collaborations between cities, artists, organisations and NGOs.Check out below for more photos of the project. More

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    in Exhibitions

    An Exhibition in Atlanta Pays Tribute to the Late Artist Nellie Mae Rowe, a Self-Taught Visionary Whose Imagination ‘Exploded Onto Paper’

    By the end of her life, the self-taught artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) had been widely recognized for her unique artistic practice, finding both institutional and commercial success for her drawings and sculptures made from all manner of household materials. But a new exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta is the Georgia-born artist’s first major exhibition in 20 years.
    “People here know how brilliant she was,” Katherine Jentleson, the High’s curator of folk and self-taught art, told Artnet News. “I really want to make her name known and her art appreciated outside of Atlanta.”
    To that end, after it closes at the High in January, “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” will embark on a national tour with the Art Bridges Foundation through 2024 (venues have not yet been announced). The exhibition is drawn largely from the museum’s deep holdings of the artist’s work, including a 130-piece gift from the dealer Judith Alexander, who was the first in the art world to champion Rowe.
    Nellie Mae Rowe, What It Is (1978–82). Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Judith Alexander.
    Born in 1900 in the then-rural town of Fayetteville, Georgia, Rowe only dedicated herself to art-making late in life.
    “When she was a little girl growing up on a farm, she would take all the time she could find in her days to make art. She would make dolls out of scraps of dirty laundry, she would make drawings,” Jentleson said. “Like many self-taught artists, Rowe was somebody who knew from childhood that she had a gift.”
    But Rowe married young, and she worked in domestic labor, cleaning the home of a white family for 30 years. It wasn’t until her second husband died in in 1948, and her employers died in the late 1960s, that Rowe began revisiting that early passion.
    Nellie Mae Rowe, Untitled (Dandy), 1978–82. Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Harvie and Charles Abney.
    By 1971, Rowe had transformed her home in suburban Vinings into an elaborate art installation she called her “Playhouse,” decorating the outside with her multimedia works.
    “She had mulberry trees and dogwood trees and urns filled with other flowering plants, and she would embellish those natural elements with artificial flowers so she had blooms year-round,” Jentleson said. “She hung the trees and the roofline with clotheslines she turned into garlands with ornaments and plastic fruit and baby toys, creating this shimmering, moving site-scape within the yard.”
    “There were tons of chairs scattered all around the yard where people could sit, but some were decorated in ways that would impede sitting, with these thronelike installations,” Jentleson added. “Rowe would affix all types of things to the fence, like dolls’ heads and chewing-gum sculptures [that] she would embed with marbles and beads and other decorative things. She covered every surface with different decorative arrangements, laying seashells on the stumps of old trees.”
    Some people responded negatively—Rowe’s home was vandalized, and she was accused of witchcraft. But after local press caught wind of her creative endeavor, the Playhouse became something of a tourist attraction, even keeping a series of guestbooks for visitors to sign.
    Scale model of the Playhouse in “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe.” Photo: Mike Jensen. Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.
    Alexander began working with Rowe after encountering her in a 1976 folk art exhibition at the Atlanta Historical Society. Representation was a turning point for Rowe, with Alexander providing large-format acid-free paper for the artist to work on.
    “It allows her this new freedom,” Jentleson said. “With these large, flat surfaces, that’s when her imagination just exploded onto paper. Rowe starts to create these rich compositions that are much more like quilts, decentralized with all of these interlocking forms that harmonize together. There’s so much symbolism and narrative embedded in every single work.”
    Those drawings represent the bulk of Rowe’s surviving works, since the Playhouse was dismantled after her death. (The exhibition includes instead a six-by-six-foot reimagining of the home, created by New York documentary firm Open Dox for the forthcoming This World Is Not My Own.)
    Re-creation by Open Dox of the Playhouse’s interior, in “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe.” Photo: Mike Jensen. Courtesy of the High Museum of Art.
    In Rowe’s era, “Assemblage and installation art was just beginning to be understood in the art world,” Jentleson said. “It was a practice that was only starting to be acknowledged as something that was important. I think it was too soon, unfortunately. When she passed, there wasn’t a precedent [for preservation].”
    And the unique nature of the Playhouse also has complicated Rowe’s legacy.
    “Part of why Rowe hasn’t been taken as seriously as she should have been was that she framed her work as play and returning to her girlhood,” Jentleson said. “She’s been as unfairly infantilized. That’s something that has to do with her identity, with being a woman and being Black. We’re willing to let so many white male artists reclaim their childhood and embrace this state of liberated play and exploration. That’s a sophisticated thing for Picasso or Kandinsky, but with Rowe, it’s held her back, and that’s something that should change.”
    Nellie Mae Rowe, Real Girl (1980). Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Judith Alexander.
    Though much of Rowe’s work was decorative, she was also deeply engaged with the social and political issues of the day. She made a series of drawings responding to the Atlanta child murders between 1979 and 1981, which targeted Black adolescents. Another work was a tribute to Black women getting the right to vote in Atlanta in 1965.
    “Working on this show during 2020 was a very profound experience. The Black Lives Matter movement and the urgency around acknowledging racial violence in this country provided a different lens through which I started seeing Rowe’s work and her experience,” Jentleson said. “I hope the show is going recontextualize her as a very significant Black feminist artist…. She was taking a very bold stance, demanding visibility for herself and her artwork.”
    “Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe” is on view at the High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, Georgia, September 3, 2021–January 9, 2022.
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    An Exhibition of Never-Before-Seen Sketches Reveals That Van Gogh Planned a Sequel to His Famous Painting ‘The Potato Eaters’

    Preparatory drawings for an unrealized second version of The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh’s initially reviled early masterpiece, are going on view for the first time in an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
    The show, “The Potato Eaters. Mistake or Masterpiece?” features 50 letters, drawings, and paintings related to The Potato Eaters, including never-before-seen sketches from 1890 that demonstrate that the artist planned but never completed another version of the composition.
    Visitors can also step into the painting, so to speak, posing for photographs in a life-size reconstruction of the humble cottage dining room immortalized in the work.
    The original painting, completed in 1885, portrays the De Groot family sharing a simple meal of potatoes. Van Gogh painted the work while living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, in Brabant. The family members, whom he came to know well, appear in some of his other works of the period.
    Visitors to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam pose in a reconstruction of the cottage in Vincent van Gogh’s 1885 painting The Potato Eaters in a new exhibition dedicated to the work. Photo by Tomek Dersu Aaron, courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
    The artist hoped the work would convey the hard truths of peasant life, but painting was not well received. Van Gogh’s friend, the painter Anthon van Rappard, savaged the piece in a letter, insisting “You can do better than this,” and criticizing the proportions of the figures.
    “What I’m trying to get with it is to be able to draw not a hand but the gesture, not a mathematically correct head but the overall expression,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo van Gogh. “The sniffing of the wind when a digger looks up, say, or speaking. Life, in short.”
    Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh with sketch of The Potato Eaters (recto). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
    “I really like that Van Gogh stands behind his own work,” exhibition curator Bregje Gerritse told the Guardian. “He says there is a certain life in it, writing that while, of course, there are technical mistakes but that technical perfection isn’t what he is after; it is the impression that it conveys about peasant life that is much more important, and that he is sure people will forgive him for that.”
    Vincent van Gogh, Four People Sharing a Meal (1885). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
    Despite the criticism, Van Gogh’s faith in the painting never wavered, even as his style evolved to include brighter colors.
    “In 1887 he writes to his sister that he still considered this work to be one of the best he ever made,” Gerritse said.
    And in the last months of his life, Van Gogh thought about revisiting his early painting, telling Theo, “I’m thinking of redoing the painting of the peasants eating supper, lamplight effect.”
    Vincent van Gogh, Interior with Five Figures Around a Table (1890). Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
    He asked for the original drawings he had made five years earlier and began working on new sketches in his mature style. The resulting drawings—unveiled to the public here for the first time—are a marked departure from the original work, with hatch marks instead of his previous dark shading and more naturalistic poses—a tantalizing glimpse of a Van Gogh masterpiece that never came to be.
    “The Potato Eaters. Mistake or Masterpiece?” is on view at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, October 8, 2021–February 13, 2022. 
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