U.S. National Deadline: February 1, 2021 – Bromfield Gallery, one of Boston’s premier galleries, is seeking art that touches on two ways of seeing things or that encourages an open mind and heart. Multiple venues…
BLOG
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on December 14, 2020
In “The importance of BIPOC voices and the unique challenges BIPOC content creators face,” Vu Le writes in his Nonprofit AF blog, about talented BIPOC folks that are “hesitant to contribute content and get their voices out there.”
“This has been going on for as long as I can remember. Let’s examine this, because the perspectives of folks who are most affected by injustice are vital to our sector. This post is meant as encouragement and advice for BIPOC content creators, but I want white allies to pay attention to this issue, as you have a lot of gatekeeping power in this area,” he says.
Le adds that “our sector needs BIPOC voices, or nothing changes.” In this blog, he offers advice for both BIPOC folks and white colleagues to advance those voices.
Image: Obi Onyeador / Unsplash
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on December 10, 2020
“We must build up people of color and Indigenous-led philanthropic and movement infrastructure organizations in order to challenge the power structures in this country and invest into the self-determination of the people on the frontlines,” said Nick Tilsen, NDN Collective president & CEO, as he recaps the past month of mobilization in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tilsen explains NDN Collective decided to keep existing programming, while building a new fund and strategy to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. “In the past 30 days we have raised over $4 million and deployed over $2.5 million to nearly 100 partners impacting over 200 Indigenous communities. This was possible because of organizers, activists, Tribal leaders, partners, philanthropic collaborators, and straight-up changemakers who were willing to step up in this historic moment.”
He added,
The past 30 days have been evidence that organizations like NDN Collective, who have grown out of movements with lived experience in doing this work, can be catalytic. We can stimulate change not only in times of crisis, but on the daily, as we strive to co-create the new world we are fighting for.
Image: NDN Collective website
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on December 9, 2020
A report from the United States Department of Arts and Culture tackles how “as natural disasters and social emergencies multiply, the need has grown for ethical, creative, and effective artistic response—arts-based work responding to disaster or other community-wide emergency, much of it created in collaboration with community members directly affected.”
The report, according to the Department of Arts and Culture, seeks to engage:
-artists who wish to use their gifts for healing, whether in the immediate aftermath of a crisis or during the months and years of healing and rebuilding resilience that follow.
-resource-providers—both public and private grantmakers and individual donors—who care about compassion and community-building and,
-disaster agencies, first responders, and service organizations on call and on duty when an emergency occurs, and those committed to helping over time to heal the damage done.
Image: Free-Photos / Pixabay
Submitted by Eddie on December 15, 2020
On behalf of GIA’s team and our membership, I am writing this blog post as a response to Quanice Floyd’s recently shared article, The Failure of Arts Organizations to Move Toward Racial Equity. First, to Quanice – Grantmakers in the Arts hears you. Your statement offered our community the opportunity and charge to reflect deeply, specifically about power.
As a membership association of grantmakers, we are a seat of power. The easiest thing to do when a colleague like Quanice critiques our field is to evade or dismiss the critique or to defend ourselves, to list the good things we’ve done. But that is the opposite of listening and learning. It is the opposite of committing to justice as a practice and a process.
To quote our senior development manager, Sylvia Jung, we at Grantmakers in the Arts know that providing racial equity content does not mean racial justice has been achieved. As a Philanthropy Serving Organization, Grantmakers in the Arts is complicit in perpetuating and upholding White supremacist, patriarchal, misogynist, ableist, and hetero-normative systems and cultures. We acknowledge our part in perpetuating these systems and acknowledge the need to be deliberate about challenging these dynamics with our choices, behaviors, and actions. We can only do this well by listening, by centering and amplifying voices like Quanice’s.
I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to learn from my team members and board members. It is thanks to these colleagues – such as our vice president, Nadia Elokdah and program manager Sherylynn Sealy– that we have had successes centering the voices of BIPOC colleagues and organizations in our programming, encouraging the field to increase funding to BIPOC artists and organizations, hosting Racial Equity in Arts Funding workshops, as well as other successes. And, these successes are not excuses to avoid constant and continuous self-examination and correction. If the process of hegemony is constant and continuous, the process of counter-hegemony must be constant and continuous.
Even when we are well-intended, we make mistakes. As we establish at the start of each and every workshop we facilitate, we can honor intent while acknowledging and attending to impact. In fact, we must. Often in our desire to center the voices of folks who are harmed by our actions, we risk burning them out by piling work on them, asking them to execute the education and labor to fix our mistakes, and to place these increased responsibilities on top of their already considerable emotional labor. In our desire to share the work of BIPOC organizations and communities, we open them up to others’ copying their work without crediting them as the innovators they are. As we center marginalized groups, we risk tokenizing them. I’ve certainly made these mistakes, as well as so many other mistakes, and am working to correct them.
Grantmakers in the Arts, as a member organization, and I, as a person, commit to remain humble enough to listen, recognize mistakes made, and to continuously try again. This listening and self-correcting is the process. When it comes to executing its work equitably, Grantmakers in the Arts is in process. We will never be done. We invite our peers to join us in reflecting and evolving.
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on December 15, 2020
In a recent Artsy article, Kemi Ilesanmi, executive director of The Laundromat Project (The LP), discussed the mission and the work of this New York–based, POC-centered organization “that aims to meet the concerns of local communities of color and enact change through public engagements with the arts by actualizing spaces like community gardens, plazas, and, yes, laundromats.”
The goal is to enact that change through these hubs, as Artsy writes, “where people come together, share ideas, and work out creative solutions to the problems affecting them and their neighbors.”
“What we really do,” she says, “is we build, we nourish, and we equip people to be community leaders and use their full creative arsenal to envision and make the world that they deserve and want to live in.”
With the approval of the US Senate, a National Museum of the American Latino and a national museum of women’s history have gotten the green light to proceed in Washington, DC. Both of the museums have been in the works for years and will become part of Smithsonian museums after Congress included them in a $2.3 trillion year-end spending bill.
Campaigns for the museums aren’t new at all; in 1994, following a report that found the Smithsonian to have displayed “a pattern of willful neglect” towards Latinos, the fight for a museum dedicated to Latinos and their contributions to the US began. A 2008 study recommended to Congress that a museum honouring the Latino people of America be constructed. Similarly, the campaign for a women’s museum has been in the works since 2003, although it wasn’t until 2014 that a congressional commission recommended the museum. Congressional approval was needed for both as they will become part of the Smithsonian, which is a government funded series of museums, particularly found in the US’s capital.
In February and then July, the bill for the women’s museum and American Latino museum were passed by the House of Representatives respectively. They then headed to the senate where they were expected to pass without any objection. For that reason, the bill’s sponsors were looking for a unanimous vote, which is a measure taken to expedite the process for bills that are expected to pass with ease. However, that was not the case when one senator rejected the bill.
In early December, when the bills first hit the senate floor, Utah Senator Mike Lee blocked the museums’ progress. Citing “hyphenated Americanism,” a term coined by Theodore Roosevelt, Lee’s rejection of the bills temporarily halted their progress.
“My objection to the creation of a new Smithsonian museum or series of museums based on group identity… is not a matter of budgetary or legislative technicalities,” said Lee of his opposition. “It’s a matter of national unity and cultural inclusion.” He continued saying “at this moment in the history of our diverse nation, we need our federal government and the Smithsonian Institution itself to pull us closer together, and not further apart,”
After the museums were paused, debates over their purpose began, hearing both Republicans and Democrats speak in their favour. Ultimately, the senators came to an agreement, passing the museum bills just before Christmas.
Support of Congress was a critical hurdle, and one that took many years to reach, but it will likely be another 10 years before each museum is completed. Among other obstacles will be the locations for both museums. A prized spot along the National Mall, where a number of other Smithsonian museums are found as well as the Capitol Building and Washington Monument, however, due to crowding, that might not be an option.
Sure, we’re living through nightmarish times and next year doesn’t look to be entirely different, but in London, museum’s managed to put on some incredible exhibitions throughout the year, proving that art helps us in the darkest times. Here are the best 2020 exhibitions, along with a few still open through 2021.
5. Titian: Love, Desire, Death
National Gallery, London, until 17 January
This dreamlike show reunited Titian’s erotic oil works painted for Philip II of Spain, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The sheer lush majesty of Titian’s paint breathes life into trees, water, sky and light – and that’s before you even look at the floating, imploring bodies. This is Titian at his best.
4. Zanele Muholi
Tate Modern, London, until 31 May
Muholi has spent the past twenty or so years documenting and celebrating black queer lives in post-apartheid South Africa. Their pictures exist as an archive devoted to a marginalised group that, despite the 1996 post-apartheid Constitution of South Africa being one of the first to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, still routinely suffers prejudice and hate crimes. The work celebrates everything from the extravagance of trans beauty pageants to the beauty in individual defiance, resistance, and strength in vulnerability.
3. Picasso and Paper
Royal Academy, London, now closed
Torn up papers, papers with eyes and screaming mouths burned with the tip of a cigarette, expensive paper and old packing papers, doodled papers, paper as a support and paper as the medium itself for the creation of a face or a guitar. Picasso had a magical, almost devilish touch and feel for materials, an unerring eye for their transformation.
2. Bruce Nauman
Tate Modern, London, until 21 February
A pared-down survey of over 5 decades of work that continues to equally thrill and disturb. Conjuring visual tricks, walking around the studio, performing repetitive tasks, and working with clowns to create upsetting reels, Nauman sets the world spinning. Whenever I return to his work, I always find something new. This time in 2020, it was the image of the artist in the perpetual lockdown of studio life, creating works from the whatever he had access to (even his own hands). Particularly during a COVID-induced lockdown, his art felt both laugh-out-loud funny and as grim as torture.
1. Artemisia
National Gallery, London, until 24 January
2020 exhibitions, particularly the blockbuster international type, suffered from reduced footfall, sporadic closures and occasional delay. This highly-anticipated, twice-postponed, and long-overdue exhibition miraculously reunited all the major known works by a woman who painted her way to fame 400 years ago. In the best exhibition of 2020, Artemisia Gentileschi proves to be greater than her admirers hoped. The show starts with Susanna and the Elders, painted when she was only 17, proof of her early genius. From then on, it’s an exhilarating ride of suffering, rage and brilliance culminating in her great Allegory of Painting in which she and her brush become one.
2020 was a year no one is soon to forget, although many of us would prefer to never think of it again. Of course, the world continued on as it tends to do. So, as we head into the new year, we’re looking back at 2020 and focusing on some COVID-free art moments.
Botched restorations… Need we say more?
Two botched restorations made headlines this year in Spain, where there has been a string of heart-breaking attempts to restore works. Recalling the infamous “Monkey Christ,” a sculpture on a Palencia building now resembles something out of Star Wars and a portrait of the Virgin Mary in València was rendered nearly unrecognisable after cleaning. Both incidents have left many calling for stricter rules regarding restoration.
Penguins on parade
Bubbles, Maggie, and Berkley, three Humboldt penguins from the Kansas City Zoo took advantage of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art while it was void of people during the pandemic. Touring the museum, the penguins’ visit was captured and it was nothing short of adorable.
A reckoning for statues
This year the question of what to do with statues glorifying people with problematic pasts hit its limits and the decision to bring down and move monuments was made around the world. From various monuments of Robert E. Lee in the US to statues across Europe, public memorials are under review.
But while we’re on the topic…
This year also saw the installation of two major statues of women. One, by Thomas J. Price, was unveiled in London and is meant to embody the Black “everywoman.” The artwork is a bold monument to the ordinary woman who is often overlooked. Then, across London, another statue was unveiled honouring Mary Wollstonecraft. This statue, by Maggi Hambling, was met with controversy and its likely to continue to divide opinions.
Green lit restitutions
Three years in the making, France’s National Assembly and Senate finally voted to return more than two dozen artefacts to their home countries of Benin and Senegal. The decision came after French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to return portions of the country’s large collection of African artworks and artefacts. These artefacts will be among the first major restitutions to occur.
NYC’s Graffiti Mecca made history, again
A long-term lawsuit against a real estate developer, G&M Realty, was held accountable for whitewashing graffiti artworks adorning a dilapidated factory in Queens, NY, known as 5Pointz. In February, an appellate court upheld a ruling that would see G&M pay artists a combined total of £5.29 million. The case was then kicked up to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case and in November, news came that the developer would be responsible for more than £1.4 million in legal fees. The case was not only huge for the artists whose works were destroyed but also for the Visual Artists Rights Act.
If you show me yours I’ll show you mine
As everyone got used to staying at home, the Yorkshire Museum sent out a tweet asking for museums to show off their creepiest objects. They kicked off the hunt with a Roman hairpiece dating back to the third of fourth century and the items that followed were downright strange. The #CreepiestObject challenge was followed up by a series of other challenges – what they dubbed a #CURATORBATTLE – that got museums around the world involved in showing off parts of their collections that don’t always get their spot in the limelight.
MUSEUMS ASSEMBLE! It’s time for #CURATORBATTLE!
Today’s theme, chosen by you, is #CreepiestObject!
We’re kicking things off with this 3rd/4th century hair bun from the burial of a #Roman lady, still with the jet pins in place…
CAN YOU BEAT IT?
pic.twitter.com/ntPiXDuM6v
— Yorkshire Museum (@YorkshireMuseum) April 17, 2020
The search continues
After burglars raided the Green Vault (Grünes Gewölbe) in Dresden at the end of 2019, making off with priceless pieces of jewelry and artefacts, police spent the year searching for the culprits. After four security guards were questioned in relation to the heist early in the year, more than 1,600 police officers were involved in raids that eventually resulted in the arrest of four men who are thought to have been involved. Unfortunately, the whereabouts of the items stolen are still unknown.
Lebanon’s capital was scarred by a massive explosion
In early August, Beirut was devastated by two explosions along the city’s port that killed more than 200, injured thousands more, and displaced around 300,000 people. The city was already dealing with the effects of the pandemic and a dwindling economy when the explosions erupted. The arts community was hit as well, but soon after, artists with and without ties to Lebanon banded together to raise funds for those affected.
The MoMA rehangs
In the autumn, the MoMA unveiled its rehanging of their collection. Originally intended to be unveiled in the spring, the rehang was postponed due to the pandemic. The rehang put artworks of various mediums alongside one another opting for a more chronological approach. The museum now also plans an ambitious feat: to rotate a third of their collection on view every six months. By doing so, the museum intends to showcase more of their collection to offer a less Western-focused art narrative.
Joining forces around the Marron collection
Pace, Gagosian, and Acquavella galleries came together to sell more than 300 artworks that belonged to the collection of Donald B. Marron. The conglomerate of galleries was able to snag the coveted collection to the dismay of auction houses who would have been happy to handle the sale of the artworks. Of the artworks that sold, casino magnate and billionaire Steve Wynn purchased a pair of Picassos from the collection reportedly bringing in more than $100 million altogether.
Altarpiece with an altered face
As the second phase of an extensive conservation project on the Ghent Altarpiece came to an end, a newly cleaned lamb shook the art world. In removing layers of paint added to the central panel of the van Eyck brothers’ masterpiece, conservators revealed that the lamb’s face was far more humanistic that originally thought. The removal of yellowing varnish and later layers of paint uncovered other original details but none caught the attention of the internet quite like the lamb’s unusual face.
U.S. National Deadline: March 1, 2021 -This annual exhibition, produced by The Studio Door, seeks to represent the many faces of the Crow in reality and fantasy. Multiple venues. Awards and other benefits…