The artists are El Anatsui, Byung Hoon Choi, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Cristina Iglesias and Ai Weiwei, and they were commissioned to create a mix of sculptures, light installations and suspended artworks for the 14-acre premises, known as the Susan and Fayez S. Sarofim Campus.
PORTLAND, Ore. — The night I went to see Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal... I found the Portland Art Museum flooded with people museums often hope to draw in: a visibly diverse, casually fashionable set of 20- and 30-somethings — a group I rarely encountered at PAM on past visits from Seattle.
Frieze Week has long been the busiest spell in the London art calendar, with Frieze London and Frieze Masters (3–6 October) joined by a host of major gallery exhibitions across the city.
I cannot remember what time of day it was that I was standing outside of Bétonsalon, a center for art and research in Paris. As I write this my memory is straining, trying to reconcile the two cities, Cairo and Paris, that I moved between that summer four years ago. What I do remember was being pensive, standing outside the art space. I was there...
What does it mean to speak? To speak in a way that not only broaches the moral ambiguities of silence, but also probes the limits of speech's capacity to make sense of the world. William Kentridge, the Johannesburg artist and theatre director, addresses this question in a 2018 essay titled 'Let Us Try for Once'. The text forms part of a dispersed...
A resplendent display of 272 fuchsia-colored paper lotus lanterns adorns the light-filled oculus on The Rubin Museum of Art's top floor. The sweeping circular installation, Lotus: Zone of Zero (2019) by Kimsooja, is among the more striking of the works by 10 international artists selected by guest curator Sara Raza for the exhibition Clapping...
ART AFRICA: So let's start from the beginning. Please tell us a bit about your childhood? Were you an only child? Misheck Masamvu: No, I was born in a family of what was meant to be six siblings, six children, but then my twin died. So there were five that survived. I'm the only boy. I grew up in a family with girls. It wasn't easy, as I was...
A Tale of Today: Yinka Shonibare CBE inaugurates the Driehaus Museum's exhibition series spotlighting the work of contemporary artists of color, an exciting new direction for this Gilded Age mansion–turned–museum, whose programming has focused largely on art and design from the home's original era.
There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries...
CHICAGO — In one story arc of The West Wing, the political drama created by Aaron Sorkin that ran on NBC television in the early 2000s, Josh Lyman, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is shot and critically wounded by white supremacists. Lyman recovers in the hospital and eventually returns to work where he begins to behave in...
As I looked through William Kentridge's That Which We Do Not Remember at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales, led by the multimedia artist himself, it became increasingly apparent to me that Kentridge, often described as a distinctive and powerful voice in the global contemporary art realm, is both erudite and generous with his ideas.
CAPE TOWN — Late last year, the artist Alfredo Jaar displayed a series of photographs and piercing neon works addressing the shared trauma and healing of Robben Island's political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, after Apartheid. It was in the midst of this exhibition, titled Men Who Cannot Cry, at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, that I...
Last week, during the Aperture Foundation's fall gala at a cavernous space in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, Marilyn Minter turned to Catherine Opie while the two artists stood onstage together, and said, "I wish you would adopt me." Opie, not missing a beat, deadpanned back, "Can I swaddle you, then?"
An American artist is being accused of stealing works by South African photographers, who captured the atrocities of apartheid. CBS News foreign correspondent Debora Patta reports one of South Africa's most revered photographers is Peter Magubane, who documented life in South Africa for six decades.
The billboards going up around the country this week will have a familiar message for this midterm election: Vote. But featuring images of protests and reminders of the 2016 election, produced by some of the country's best-known artists, the billboards—one for each of the 50 states—will look nothing like your average political...
Recently, American artist Hank Willis Thomas's work, Gravitas, in which he made use of a photograph taken by Graeme Williams, was shown by Thomas's gallery, the Goodman, at the 2018 Joburg Art Fair. The price set by the gallery for this work was $36000. Thomas similarly used photographs taken by Peter Magubane, Alf Khumalo and British...
A renowned American artist has been accused of plagiarising and profiteering from an iconic image by a South African photographer that came to symbolise the collapse of apartheid. Graeme Williams said he was astonished to walk into the Johannesburg artfair last week and see his photograph of a group of black schoolchildren taunting despondent...
MILWAUKEE—The current William Kentridge exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, More Sweetly Play the Dance, is an immersive 2015 installation: a 14-minute video loop projected on a series of eight screens, 130 feet long in total. The screens unfold like an accordion book, not quite aligning, leaving small gaps that create page breaks in...
Does art have the power to affect people’s view of war and politics? In the years during and following the first world war, art did its best to reflect the desolation and sense of waste prompted by the monstrous number of lives lost between 1914 and 1918. Art and literature portrayed a world that had fallen apart and lost its moorings to meaning:...
‘I don’t regard any dates as being momentous, unless it is the date of your death or the date of your birth,’ said David Goldblatt in 2010, shortly before his 80 th birthday, which he celebrated at a roadside dinner with friends. Age was mostly an irrelevance to the photographer, whose death on 25 June at the age of 87 brought to an end a...
Over the past two decades, Zimbabwe, a largely agrarian southern African country of 17 million inhabitants, has been buffeted by seemingly endless troubles. The carnivorous politics at the centre of these problems are hard to overlook – particularly in appraisals of art from this landlocked country – but are also easily overstated. Despite the...
On 20 January, the Iranian-born filmmaker and artist Shirin Neshat joined the Women’s March in New York to mark the anniversary of President Donald Trump’s first year in office. The week before, she was at a protest in Union Square in support of the people’s uprising in Iran.
Two years after the Armory Show's Focus section offered a cross section of African galleries (the geographic frame was abandoned thereafter), dealers and young artists from South Africa, already in the spotlight with the opening of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, have made a particularly strong showing at this year's fair (8-11...
Toledo, Ohio — Whenever I encounter a museum exhibition that frames itself as presenting exclusively female artists, I have to run through the same internal debate about emphasizing artists' gender. I recognize the necessity of making a conscious effort to include or exclusively feature female artists — or any other broad swath of the...