Eliana Willis

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    in Street Art

    Types of Happiness by Yinka Ilori in London, United Kingdom

    A major installation by Yinka Ilori – Types of Happiness – has been unveiled at the Royal Docks, marking the start of The Line’s vibrant summer programme, as well as At The Docks, a brand new season of world-class arts, culture and events taking over the Royal Docks, this summer. The Line is London’s largest free public art walk connecting some of the capital’s most exciting creative quarters from Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks to East Bank.Artworks installed thoughtfully along The Line encourage the discovery of intriguing spaces in the natural landscape of East London’s waterways. Types of Happiness features two 10ft high sculptural chairs, featuring bold colours and a Dutch wax print-like pattern. Designed by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Ilori, the installation references his early career up-cycling chairs and his fascination with furniture as a vehicle for storytelling.They are part of a collection of six chairs, where the artist explores different types of happiness, which include pride, strength, excitement, happiness, calmness and determination. Each of the chairs is ascribed a different type, using the same colours, but in different combinations, to impact experience. The two chairs on The Line represent happiness and pride. They are located between the entrance to the Cable Car and the Good Hotel, in the Royal Docks. Ilori’s work explores art as a narrative and colour as a language through which to spread stories. His practice is underpinned by the belief that art and design should be accessible to all. Humorous, provocative and playful, his projects demonstrate how design can bring together communities and have a positive impact on society, evoking a sense of joy and optimism.Following the waterways and the line of the Greenwich Meridian, visitors to The Line can trace a path through the Royal Docks and Three Mills to discover works by artists including Alberta Whittle and Mahtab Hussain as part of this summer’s ambitious programme.As London’s longest public art trail, The Line is accessible to local residents, Londoners, tourists, families, bird-watchers, dog-walkers, runners, ramblers and anyone else who enjoys an adventure, 365 days a year. The route takes in the Thames, the Royal Docks, River Lea and canals. Winding its way from The O2 in Greenwich to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, The Line creates a drop-in walking route alongside waterways and green spaces for visitors to experience and explore some of London’s most striking hidden routes, brought to life by artists including Larry Achiampong, Rana Begum, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Eva Rothschild and Richard Wilson and among many others.*** FREE FOR EDITORIAL USE ***A major installation by Yinka Ilori – Types of Happiness – has been unveiled at the Royal Docks, marking the start of The Line’s vibrant summer programme, as well as At-The-Docks, a brand new season of world-class arts, culture and events taking over the Royal Docks, this summer.www.the-line.orgwww.royaldocks.londonYinka Ilori commented:“I am incredibly excited to have my installation, Types of Happiness, included as part of The Line’s vibrant summer programme. The installation explores how we can have personal connections with objects through the use of colour and storytelling. I hope that visitors will be immersed in the joy and optimism that my work aims to evoke, and that they will find a sense of connection and community as they explore this public art trail. I am excited to contribute to an experience that can be enjoyed by Londoners, tourists, and anyone seeking inspiration along the waterways and green spaces of East London.”Megan Piper, Co-Founder and Director of The Line commented:“This installation has been in the pipeline for a very long time and I’m delighted that Types of Happiness is finally on The Line! Representing happiness and pride, I hope that these are the emotions that they will instill in the residents of the Royal Docks and its visitors.”Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, Justine Simons OBE, said: “Typesof Happiness is a brilliant addition to The Line – London’s longest public art trail. Yinka’s trademark bold colours and intricate patterns tell a powerful story along East London’s waterways. It’s a great day out for Londoners and visitors, showcasing the Royal Docks as a new cultural destination as we build a better London for everyone.”Take a look below for more photos of Yinka’s latest installation. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Bernie Krause’s Revelatory Touring Sound Exhibition ‘The Great Animal Orchestra,’ Highlighting the Plight of Species, Touches Down in San Francisco

    “A picture may be worth a thousand words,” Bernie Krause is fond of saying, “but a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.” The sound artist and bioacoustician has been tirelessly researching and recording the soundscapes of the natural world for the last 50 years. Trekking around the planet, he’s captured every wild sound imaginable, from charging elephants and clicking whales to chattering monkeys and trilling birds. Lots of birds. 
    Krause has coined a scientific term for these wildlife concerts: biophony. Krause’s recorded biophonies—more than 5,000 hours from 15,000 species in 2,000 habitats, terrestrial and marine—are now part of a new art and sound exhibition in San Francisco called “The Great Animal Orchestra.” It’s a stirring show to see in person, not only for its life-affirming aural environments and dazzling data-driven displays, but also for the emotionally charged—if inconvenient—truth that animal numbers are in steep decline in every ecosystem around the globe. 
    Bernie Krause. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
    Named after Krause’s book of 2012, the powerful show runs through October 15 at the Exploratorium on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. (The science and technology museum was the first of its kind when it was founded in 1969 by physicist Frank Oppenheimer, who studied museums in the U.S. and abroad on a Guggenheim fellowship before conceiving it.)
    The brainchild of Hervé Chandès, artistic managing director of Fondation Cartier, “The Great Animal Orchestra” began its world tour in 2016, becoming part of the foundation’s collection. For its Paris debut, Cartier commissioned an original work by the New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, as well as photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Manabu Miyazaki. The exhibition has since traveled to Seoul, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Sydney, and New York.
    “This moment is very touching for all of us, and especially me,” said Chandès at the San Francisco opening, via video from Paris. He explained that it was through reading Krause’s book that he was inspired to create the immersive exhibition and support it through Cartier. “Aesthetics are the gateway to knowledge and ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’ is a meeting point of art, science, beauty, knowledge—and, of course, a warning about the decline of the wild world, biodiversity, and the beauty of life itself.”
    The San Francisco stop is the West Coast premiere and the nearest to Krause’s home in Sonoma, northern California. That’s where Chandès visited Krause and his wife Katherine in 2014, auditioning samples from the couple’s vast archive of animal sounds and first imagining the format for “The Great Animal Orchestra”—which, he mused, amounts to “the art of paying attention.”
    View of the exhibition “The Great Animal Orchestra” by Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
    The show’s centerpiece is a stunning immersive installation by United Visual Artists. The London-based collective worked closely with Krause to convert his field recordings into life-size visualizations, or spectrograms, in effect creating a three-dimensional environment that envelops the viewer. In a darkened room at the center of the exhibition, these spectrograms flicker on as an animal chorus becomes audible, lighting up the walls of the space with detailed visual representations of sound—the upper registers populated by birds and insects, while mammals and natural elements such as wind or water occupy the middle and lower registers, respectively. The spectrograms are reflected in a pool of water to complete the meditative sensation of communing with nature.
    For Krause, the moment he equated assorted animal calls to an orchestral arrangement was profound, hence the title of the show. “The idea that these are proto-symphonies, proto-orchestrations has been revelatory to me,” he told Artnet News. “If you look at a score by [classical musician Pierre] Boulez, for instance, it doesn’t look a lot different from the streaming spectrograms in the exhibition, particularly where the habitat is healthy.”
    However, as the exhibition illuminates over and over, the world’s habitats are not all healthy. The reason for that has to do with another term Krause has coined: anthrophony. Human encroachment has led to a dramatic loss of animals in the wild, and therefore a steep drop in their corresponding sounds on Krause’s recordings.
    A display showing the biophonies in various parts of the world. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
    Naturally, that has been disturbing for Krause, who interprets the few remaining animal sounds on his recordings as a cry for help. “We’re doing our best to help them,” he explained. “One of the reasons I’m working with the art world is because if I write a scientific paper and it gets published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, where I had one published last month, six people are going to read it. In the seven or eight venues that ‘The Great Animal Orchestra’ has been exhibited so far, a million and a half people have seen it.”
    Krause has always been interested in sound; early on, it was in music that he heard his calling. In the 1960s, he performed with the Weavers, alongside folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger, and later formed a group called Beaver and Krause. The duo helped introduce the Moog synthesizer to pop music at the time, contributing the machine’s whirs and whizzes to songs by the Doors and the Monkees. Then even they came out with an album, In a Wild Sanctuary, that incorporated Krause’s earliest efforts at recording soundscapes. 
    But, Krause lamented, “When I was working in the music world, I was always in enclosed rooms without any windows. I never saw the outside, and that made me really depressed, and also quite sick.” So he pivoted to Hollywood, producing the soundtrack for major films like 1979’s Apocalypse Now. This, too, proved to be a letdown. He said he and others were hired and fired by the director, Francis Ford Coppola, multiple times, leading to low morale on the set.
    Disenchanted with Hollywood, Krause went back to school, earned his Ph.D. in creative sound arts and entered the realm of soundscape ecology, with the aim of conserving species. “It’s a struggle to be good animals,” he said, “but life demands that of us.”
    “The Great Animal Orchestra” by Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists. Courtesy of the Exploratorium.
    At the crux of Krause’s work is a holistic approach to recording animal vocalizations. That is to say, in unison rather than isolation. “One of the things that Bernie does when he’s building an archive of sound,” said his wife, Katherine, on hand for the Exploratorium opening, “is to try to viscerally connect with the world that those creatures live in—a world we really will never be fully privy to.”
    “We need a Rosetta Stone to make that leap,” interjected Krause. “And we’re looking for that. I think we’re probably very close.” Turning philosophical, he continued, “You know, I’m reminded of a discussion I had with [experimental musician] John Cage in 1989. We were talking about animal sounds, which he likened to found art, and he said, ‘Transformation is the key to life and its expression through art. That is the real mystery of the creative nature.’”
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    in Street Art

    “Giving Type” by Dreph in Stockwell, London

    To mark National Blood Week 2023, NHS Blood and Transplant has unveiled a striking new mural honouring inspirational members of the Black community from across England who donate their blood to help people living with sickle cell.Created by Black-British street artist, Dreph, the mural comes as NHS Blood and Transplant announces that record numbers of people of Black heritage are now saving lives by giving blood. However, more are urgently needed to meet the growing demand for ethnically matched blood for sickle cell patients. Sickle cell is the fastest growing genetic blood disorder in the UK, and it disproportionately affects people of African or Caribbean heritage. “Everyone in the Black community knows someone with sickle cell. It’s a very real and important issue that touches so many lives right here at home in the UK,” said Neequaye ‘Dreph’ Dsane. “I am grateful and humbled to have met these five incredible human beings who regularly give their blood to help patients with sickle cell, and I hope that this art will inspire more generous souls to come forward and save lives.”The artwork is one part of NHS Blood and Transplant’s new ‘Giving Type’ campaign, which aims to empower communities to come together to change the narrative around sickle cell through the act of giving blood – which can save up to three lives with every donation. The ‘Giving Types’ depicted within the mural tell the stories of real people who are helping sickle cell patients from the Black community by regularly donating their blood. “I know I have a rare blood type and I feel blessed to be able to make a real difference to my community so easily by giving blood,” said Samantha Awuku from London, whose image features within the mural. “My little sister has sickle cell and knowing that my blood will be used to help others like her gives me the drive to keep donating. It’s so much easier than people realise.”More than half of Black heritage blood donors have the blood type needed by sickle cell patients compared with just 3% of the general population.Naim Akhtar, Consultant Haematologist and Lead in Donor Medicine for NHS Blood and Transplant, said, “Many sickle cell patients need regular blood transfusions to prevent life-threatening complications, but currently we are only able to provide ethnically matched blood for around half of the hospital requests – leaving other sickle cell patients at risk of developing serious reactions to non-ethnically matched blood.  “While we are delighted to celebrate members of the Black community who regularly step forward to give lifesaving blood, demand is increasing rapidly and we urgently need more people of Black heritage to come forward.”The ‘Giving Type’ mural will be on display to the public in Stockwell Hall of Fame, London, for the duration of National Blood Week, 12 – 18 June. Check out below for more photos of the mural.NHS Blood and Transplant has 25 permanent donor centres in towns and cities. To find your nearest centre and become a blood donor, download the NHS Give Blood app or go to www.blood.co.uk. Blood donation is safe, easy and fast – donation takes around ten minutes and donors are usually in and out of the donation centre within the hour.‘Giving Type’ case studies that are depicted in the mural are, Jaydan Manyan, 28, Birmingham; Torkwase Holmes, Bristol; Ronald Clarke, 63, Greater Manchester; Samantha Awuku, 32, London; and  Lloyd Simmonds, 64, London. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Takashi Murakami Channels His Love for NFTs in a New Show of Pixelated Portraits and Anime Avatars. See Them Here

    In the late 1980s, Mike Kelley unsettled audiences from Chicago to Los Angeles with his provocative site-specific work Pay for Your Pleasure. Kelley funneled visitors through a colorful corridor of 42 cultural icons each affixed with a quote celebrating rebelliousness. The work mocked society’s assumptions that artists were pure, their work liberating.
    For his new show at Gagosian, Takashi Murakami openly riffs off Kelley’s work exchanging creatives for economic figures and poster art aesthetics for pixelated computer graphics. On a technicolor timeline, we meet the likes of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
    The images began as pixelated portraits for Murakami’s OpenSea account, but now, with the quotes attached it’s hard to tell the meaning, particularly given Murakami’s ongoing market dominance and engagement with NFTs.
    Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
    “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” which is presented at Gagosian’s Le Bourget location on the outskirts of Paris, duly stages some of Murakami’s blockchain-related ventures, even if his large-scale paintings dominate the gallery. Most hyped is “Flower Jet Coin NFT,” a pixelated version of Murakami’s classic smiling flower, minted and gifted free of charge to visitors on the opening day of the show.
    “I think NFTs can be a token for people to enter my world and feel closer to my art,” Murakami told Artnet News, noting he’d done something similar with miniature sculptures in gum machines. “To me, it is really important for people to experience my worldview, and not just through my paintings and sculptures. I need different forms for people to experience my work.”
    Gallery view of Murakami’s NFT paintings. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
    The Tokyo-based artist also presents his inversions: physical versions of works he originally created digitally as NFTs. Murakami entered the NFT market a matter of weeks after the $69 million Beeple sale at Christie’s, though the artist equally credits the influence of watching his children enter the world of the metaverse through gaming.
    His superflat aesthetics and cutesy characters have been a hit with the Web3 crowd. Among his most popular drops was 2021’s Clone X NFTs, a collection of 20,000 algorithmically generated characters built for the metaverse. At Le Bourget, Murakami presents two of the anime-esque avatars in offline works on mirror plates.
    Despite these ongoing forays into the realm of NFTs, most of the show stands firmly on long-established ground—in one instance quite literally with Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue, a 12-foot-long work from 2010. Dwarfing the indigo dragon in scale is a new work based off the stage curtain Murakami created for Tokyo’s main Kabuki theatre. Commissioned by director Takashi Miike, the 75-foot-long acrylic on canvas is something of a celebration of giants from Japan’s art, film, and theatre worlds.
    Takashi Murakami, Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue (2010). Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano, courtesy Gagosian.
    There’s something of everything at Murakami’s latest Gagosian show (or should we call it a drop) and this aligns with an artist who sees the worlds of crypto, NFTs, and art merging.
    “One of the goals of NFT art is really to expand the cognitive dimensions of value,” Murakami said. “To challenge the concept of value and what it is. This is understanding the new cognitive domain.”
    See more images from Murakami’s show below.
    Takashi Murakami, The Name Succession of Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen, Kabuki Jūhachiban (detail) (2023). Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
    Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
    Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
    Installation view of “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain,” 2023. Photo: Thomas Lannes, courtesy Gagosian.
    “Understanding the New Cognitive Domain” is on view at Gagosian Paris, 26 avenue de l’Europe, Le Bourget, through December 22.

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    in Exhibitions

    Artist Jim Hodges on Why He Wants to Keep the Secret of His Powerful New Public Memorial

    An open closet now stands in New York’s AIDS Memorial Park. In it are hangers and hoodies, stacked boxes and folded weekend bags. The structure looks, in other words, like a generic storage space. It is and it isn’t.  
    The piece, called Craig’s Closet (2023), was created by artist Jim Hodges as a memorial to the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who have died as part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—more than a few of whom he called friends and colleagues. It’s built to scale in granite and bronze and painted in an eerie, funereal black.  
    You needn’t know the name of Hodges’s sculpture to understand that it was based on a particular person. The specificity of the artwork, right down to the wrinkles on the shirts, reveals that the piece was an act of recreation rather than strict imagination. But despite the attention to detail, we still don’t know who Craig is. We don’t know their surname or relationship to the artist; we don’t know if they died or how.   
    Hodges, for his part, is not interested in sharing that information. He doesn’t want speculation about his relationship to the subject to distract from the universal valence of the piece. 
    “The personal is all evident within the work itself,” he said in an interview. “I think to expand on that narrative takes away the focus of the object and I would prefer not to do that.”  
    This is one of many tensions at the heart of the artwork. Craig’s Closet is intimate yet anonymous. Its material is hard but its subject matter is soft. Like most public pieces, it’s tough and heavy, built to withstand weather and crowds; but what it symbolizes is the opposite: the fragility of life.  
    Jim Hodges, Craig’s Closet (2023), detail. © Jim Hodges. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photo: Daniel Greer.
    Hodges, who lives and works in New York, moved to the city as an upstart artist back in the mid-1980s, during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He absolutely did know many who were impacted by the crisis, including his close friend Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1996.  
    But when asked about these experiences Hodges again hedged, insisting that his sculpture points outward rather than back at himself.  
    He instead directed attention to the history of the site on which his artwork stands. Nearby is St. Vincent’s Hospital, a facility once referred to as “ground zero” of the AIDS epidemic, as well as to the neighborhood haunts of Greenwich Village, home to generations of artists, activists, and performers. 
    Hodges said the goal of the piece was to “utilize that space and its proximity and context as a kind of portal of expansion for people to enter from their own points of reference.” Fittingly, the bare back of the sculpture is reflective: “One being able to catch a glimpse of themselves in the work is important to me,” he added.  
    That Hodges settled on the closet, an already loaded metaphor, for his memorial says a lot about his intentions. The sculpture subverts the site as a space in which identities are concealed. Instead, it presents the closete as a kind of stage on which we place all the little tokens of our lives.  
    “The scene is set, and narratives blossom whenever the doors swing open,” the artist wrote in a description of his piece. “This opening gives us a reminder, an understanding of who we are, where we have been, secrets, and the dreams we hold.” 
    Jim Hodges, Craig’s Closet (2023), detail. © Jim Hodges. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photo: Daniel Greer.
    The care with which Hodges crafted the sculpture hints at just how personal it is to him, even if he declines to talk about it. “An awful lot of love goes into making a work that you want people to feel,” he said. “That’s the standard: loving it.”  
    Craig’s Closet (2023) is on view now through May of 2024 in the New York City AIDS Memorial Park. 
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    in Exhibitions

    Art Merges With Nature in Los Angeles This Summer. Here’s a Guide to Four Cultural Excursions, From the Canyons to the Beach

    Angelenos, ready to get your steps in? After sharing our New York summer art guide last week, we’ve prepared another practical guide for viewing summer art exhibitions, this time in Los Angeles. We’ve compiled daily itineraries to help you navigate four art destinations around town—including the Broad, Getty Villa, and LACMA—complete with stops for refreshment before and after, because you will need your strength.

    The Broad MuseumYayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room
    The Broad museum in Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad.
    Yayoi Kusama first produced her Infinity Mirror Rooms in the 1960s, inviting viewers to step into kaleidoscopic illusions of infinite space. In recent years, variations of the mirrored rooms have been exhibited internationally, gaining new meaning—and Instagram cachet—for contemporary audiences keen on immersive spaces. The room currently installed at the Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles (221 South Grand Avenue), Infinity Mirror Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, features dazzling lights that place the visitor in a twinkling cosmos. But beware, this is a highly popular exhibition; the maximum time to enjoy it is 45 seconds. More

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    in Exhibitions

    Banksy’s First ‘Official’ Exhibition in 14 Years Opens in Glasgow, With Never-Before-Shown Stencils—and the Artist’s Toilet

    There is a Duke of Wellington statue outside Scotland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), and for more than 40 years, Glaswegians have capped it with a traffic cone. When local authorities devised a scheme in 2013 to raise the statue higher so it couldn’t be reached by impromptu hatters, there was public outcry and a petition that rapidly gathered thousands of signatories. The cone stayed, a monument to the city’s playful sense of humor.
    Banksy has called it his favorite work of art in the UK and a major reason why his first official show in 14 years (and there have been several unofficial ones) will be staged at the Scottish institution.
    “Cut & Run”, which is on view from June 18 to August 28, takes people inside the practice and thinking of one of the world’s most famous street artists, through artworks, artefacts, and personal items—including his toilet—many of which have never been exhibited before. This intention is clear from the first room, in which visitors pass through a replica artist’s studio with a rack of spray cans and an appropriately disorganized work station.
    The opening room of Banksy’s “Cut & Run” at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. Photo: Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.
    The works on display span from 1988 to the present, with Banksy’s original stencils for some of his most famous pieces featuring prominently, ones he claims he’d long hidden for fear of being charged for criminal damages.
    There’s Kissing Coppers, the 2004 black and white work of two male police officers getting intimate that first appeared outside a pub in Brighton, the U.K.’s LGBTQ+ capital. There’s his Port Talbot stencil that highlighted the region’s poor air quality with an open-armed boy playing in snow-like ash. There’s one of a young female gymnast performing a handstand from his “Borodyanka, Ukraine” series which Banksy sprayed as a protest to the country’s invasion by Russia.
    Banksy’s Basquiat being stop and searched (2017) on show in Glasgow. Photo: Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.
    “Cut & Run” presents other provocations of the non-graffiti variety, including a riot police helmet transformed into a disco ball, and the Union Jack-patterned stab vest he made for British rapper Stomzy, ahead of his 2019 Glastonbury headline slot.
    Visitors are also treated to a detailed run through of Love is in the Bin, Banksy’s 2018 work that shredded itself moments after selling for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s (it sold fora whopping $25.4 million at the same auction house three years later).

    GoMA, which is run by the city council, is understandably delighted to have been chosen as the stage for an official Banksy exhibition. “Street art has become one of Glasgow’s signatures,” councillor Susan Aitken, the leader of Glasgow City Council, said in a statement. “There’s no one who’s done more to put street art at the heart of culture, politics and society than Banksy. We’re delighted Banksy has chosen Glasgow to host their work.”

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    in Exhibitions

    The Louvre Has Displayed Sacred Treasures Rescued From Ukraine as Part of Its Partnership With Local Museums

    Last month, the Louvre was involved in a top secret mission to evacuate 16 fragile cultural objects out of Ukraine for safekeeping. The artifacts traveled in convoy from the Bohdan and Khanenko museums in Kyiv via Poland and Germany and are now no longer at serious risk of damage or theft.
    An exhibition of five sacred icons from the group opened earlier this week in the Denon wing at the Paris museum. Four are 6th and 7th century encaustic paintings on wood that originated from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt. The fifth is a late 13th- or early 14th-century micro-mosaic from Constantinople with a highly intricate gold frame.
    Micro-mosaic icon representing Saint Nicholas. Photo: © Khanenko Museum.
    Ukraine’s culture minister attended the display’s official unveiling at the Louvre on Wednesday. “It’s a very symbolic and effective gesture of support for Ukrainian culture,” he told members of the press, according to Reuters. “[The Russians] are stealing our artifacts, they ruined our cultural heritage sites and this shows how big and huge Ukrainian culture is, which is part of world heritage.”
    The initiative to secure the icons has been in the works since December 2022, when Louvre staff first began collaborating with colleagues at the two Ukrainian museums. The unprecedented mission was developed in partnership with the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas and was kept entirely secret.
    “Like other museums, we have been concerned to see how we can support our Ukrainian colleagues. In the autumn, faced with the intensity of the conflict, we decided to carry out this rescue,” the Louvre’s president, Laurence des Cars, told the press agency AFP. “It’s not much in a sea of sadness and desolation, but it’s a symbol.”
    The Louvre’s new display “The Origins of the Sacred Image” sets out to explore early classical influences on Byzantine civilization and will be supported by new analysis and research by Ukrainian and international specialists. It has also been billed as something of a teaser for what audiences can expect from the Louvre’s forthcoming new department of Byzantine and eastern Christian art, set to open in 2027.
    The 16 objects are now being safeguarded at the Louvre, but there are also efforts to protect cultural treasures in Ukraine. Shortly after war broke out in February 2022, the Khanenko removed and hid its entire collection of 25,000 works. This limited the damage of a missile strike that hit the historic building last October. The Taras Shevchenko Museum was also targeted.
    Another museum collaboration in support of Ukraine was announced this week. The Met and the Smithsonian are partnering to help train a group of soldiers to become Monuments Men, who will better equipped to protect cultural heritage while deployed in Ukraine.
    “The Origins of the Sacred Image: Icons from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts in Kyiv” runs through November 6, 2023. 

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