J. Marion Sims, sometimes referred to as the 'father of modern gynecology,' was a 19th-century doctor who conducted brutal, nonconsensual experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women without using anesthesia. A monument for the surgeon stood in Central Park for 80 years, across the New York Academy of Medicine on 103rd Street, until it was...

This afternoon, a heavily trafficked isle in Times Square, Manhattan became the site of a monumental unveiling. Standing 27 feet in the air and 16 feet wide, Kehinde Wiley's bronze statue, Rumors of War (2019), made its first public appearance.

DAKAR, Senegal — The art star Kehinde Wiley is standing in the middle of his spacious bedroom with mint green walls looking like a little kid who can't wait to blurt out the surprise he's been keeping secret. Everything in his new Black Rock studio and artists' residence in Dakar is fabulous, of course. The 20-foot wooden entry door, the...

On the island idyll, the artist has immersed himself in the lives and ways of the Mahu, a centuries-old community made up of transgender women (Mahu is the traditional Polynesian classification of people of a third gender). The result is a new series of paintings and a video installation on show at Galerie Templon in Paris, focused on this...

Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated 19 th -century portrait of Napoleon on horseback will be shown alongside the US artist Kehinde Wiley’s dramatic homage to David’s painting for the first time this autumn. Both works go on show at Château de Malmaison in western Paris this autumn (9 October—6 January 2020), formerly Napoleon Bonaparte’s...

Costume trois-pièces, main droite sur la poitrine, main gauche sur un sceptre d’autorité. Sur son site Internet, Kehinde Wiley, 42 ans, prend crânement la pose, au risque du ridicule. Qu’on se rassure, le peintre américain, qui expose à Paris à partir du 18 mai, n’a pas la grosse tête. S’il mime un propriétaire terrien ou un aristocrate européen...

ST. LOUIS — 'On any body, to wear a tattoo is an act of change. It is a will being imposed. And perhaps this is why folks everywhere... have all, in some shape or form, found themselves attracted to the practice: its value is, ultimately, for the holder, not the beholder.' So argues Bryan Washington in his piece on tattoos and the Black...

When the American artist Kehinde Wiley – known by many for his presidential portrait of Barack Obama – walked into a Little Caesars restaurant in St Louis, he didn't know he'd walk out with models for his next painting. He saw a group of African American women sitting at a table and was inspired to paint them for Three Girls in A Wood, a...

In 2018, artists and curators across the United States have been crafting brilliant exhibitions across the US, exploring themes of identity and community in innovative ways. Ebony G. Patterson made a maximalist tribute to victims of violence in her home country of Jamaica, while Joel Otterson crafted work recalling his parents' professions as a...

When she was nine, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota saw the burnt-out, soundless remains of her neighbour's piano after a house fire. The image stayed with her. Now, it has inspired a haunting new work, rendered in her preferred medium, webs of twisted thread.

Many of the art spaces in early '90s Berlin were located in vacant, abandoned, often ruined buildings that artists had taken over. Artists were running studio collectives and co-ops, outfitting surprising storefronts, and creating nightclubs and music programs. One very influential artist for me was Daniel Pflumm, who was organizing the...

The provocative Belgian artist, choreographer and theatre director Jan Fabre says that a show of new works at Galerie Templon's new space in Paris is a 'carnavalesque, burlesque, surrealist critical homage' to his home country that explores the quirkier side of Belgian national identity. 'I'm celebrating Belgium, as a reaction against all the...

2017 marked the 20 th anniversary of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the museum that launched the mythical 'Bilbao effect' and dozens of hopeful regional art institutions. The museum ended the year with an exhibition departing from a 1969 exchange between one of Spain's most prominent sculptors, Eduardo Chillida, and the German philosopher Martin...

Last week, former U.S. president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama named the artists who will paint their official portraits for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Commentators who looked forward to learning how the Obamas, noted patrons of the arts, would shake up the stuffy establishment tradition of (white, male) artists...

Urs Fischer came to public prominence in 2011 when he melted a full-size wax replica of Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Woman at the 50th Venice Biennale. Giambologna's tour-de-force has stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence since 1583, and today the acclaimed Swiss artist returned to this theatre of art and...

Under The Skin is the first monograph documenting the work of Chiharu Shiota - the renowned Osaka-born artist, celebrated for her monumental maze-like installations that often look like a bloodbath has taken place in the gallery.

Memory and nostalgia. Light and color. Beauty and loss. Through her use of intricately threaded installations, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota intertwines all of these and more, imbuing both the site of her works — and the objects suspended within — with a powerful, dark and dreamlike potency. Born in Osaka in 1972, the Berlin based...

The late sculptor Anthony Caro's 30 small-scale works made out of paper display an unusual delicacy from the artist known for his large abstract sculptures in metal. Who in his right mind would readily associate the idea of Anthony Caro with the yielding fragilities of paper? Caro as a sculptor was a man wedded, life-long, to metal, and his...

In the winter of 1960, a young man appeared at the Judson Memorial Church in Lower Manhattan for a brief performance. He was wearing a stained artist’s smock; in his hands were a can of paint and a brush. First he painted the words ‘I love what I’m doing’ on the canvas behind him, then he drank some of the paint (it was actually tomato juice)...

‘A photograph brings me so much joy, they’re beautiful objects,’ says Sir Elton John, discussing a remarkable collection of 25 works by some of the world’s greatest photographers, to be offered at Christie’s in New York on 6 April 2017. Proceeds from the sale of these works will benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF), an international...

'There's belief that for every one foot you dig, literally anywhere in Kochi, you have a hundred years of history. Two feet, it's 200 years,' says Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty. 'It's part of that area; when you go to Kochi you cannot escape living that history.' Twenty-one feet, then, should get you to the ancient seaport of Muziris from which...

The first two editions of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale – in 2012 and 2014 – used art to initiate a dynamic dialogue between the Indian port town of Kochi and the ancient trading city of Muziris, which have been settled over the centuries by Arab, Chinese, Jewish, Portuguese, Dutch, English and migratory South Indian working-class communities. Under...

The focus on South Asia appears to be an enduring one for the India Art Fair (IAF). In 2016, we saw a pronounced emphasis on Bangladesh and Nepal, and this year too we are going to see more art from these regions, as well as from Sri Lanka. This of course will be in addition to a strong presence of indigenous art from around India. Neha Kirpal is...

The focus on South Asia appears to be an enduring one for the India Art Fair (IAF). In 2016, we saw a pronounced emphasis on Bangladesh and Nepal, and this year too we are going to see more art from these regions, as well as from Sri Lanka. This of course will be in addition to a strong presence of indigenous art from around India. Neha Kirpal is...