Arts
fromwww.theguardian.com
4 days agoThis scene is alive': Abidjan art week showcases city as growing cultural hub
Abidjan art week features extended gallery hours, promoting art engagement and cultural immersion in the city.
"I'd definitely consider it as the biggest game in my football career," Burnley defender Axel Tuanzebe told Sportsworld on BBC World Service, while former captain Gabriel Zakuani labelled it "the biggest game in our history."
The inaugural edition is organized around the central theme "Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience," reclaiming African architecture's place as a site of spatial intelligence and cultural memory.
After a long stay away from this land, it is returning to its own people and it is an honour for us and a relief to welcome it. This is the missing piece of the puzzle that is returning today. Receiving this sacred instrument is a relief, but it is also another form of connection with our ancestors who were very close to this instrument.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the painter and multimedia artist's birth, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is presenting a one-time award of $100,000 to four artists. Senga Nengudi won the Rauschenberg Centennial Award for visual art, David Thomson for performance, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun for photography, and Patricia Spears Jones for writing.
Across Georgia, a series of stunning frescoes traces the country's fractious history, from its early Christian origins to the Soviet-era socialist utopianism. It was through these murals that Nina Kintsurashvili first encountered art-traveling with her father, Lasha, as he journeyed to remote mountain regions to restore medieval murals and re-learn the art of fresco painting. Here, she discovered the importance of perspective, space and line work through the logic of Byzantine and Georgian iconography, absorbing a semiotic system she has adapted and distorted,
Stars under the border began with a simple image of people resting together in an open field, but that idea quickly expanded into something more complex, both visually and formally. I kept thinking about aspiration: how it persists beneath systems that try to define or limit us. The title suggests this tension. Stars suggest hope or possibilities existing in an endless veil of darkness, while a border implies a sense of limitation and separation.
The privilege of belonging and being seen as a part of a place, without needing explanations, is not available to my characters, who are finding ways to navigate and battle that out-of-place-ness. If the environment is meant to assuage, then the character's bodysuit is chaotic distress. Similarly, if the bodysuit is meant to pacify the narrative of the character's purpose, then the environment is lurking with dangers and chaotic, unsafe possibilities nearby.
THE TITLE OF THE KW SHOW is "RATIO." The term comes from economics, this idea of balance. But I'm applying it to the conflict here in the DRC, which is based around our strategic rare minerals. I'm talking about customs, electronics, space, minerals. In my country, we only ever talk about making phones, about buying a new phone. I advise young people who are looking at the front of their phone-at the screen-to keep the back of their phone in mind;
Each artist functions almost as a musical key signature of their own, which together 'refuse the orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches and come alive in the quiet tones, the lower frequencies.' That description comes from Rasha Salti, one of the exhibition advisors who spoke at yesterday's announcement of the roster. It's an apt invitation to think of curation as an act of composition, with Kouoh's vision singing at every turn.
Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.
While taking a break from her musical career, Tifrere founded the nonprofit organisations ArtLeadHER and Art Genesis in 2016. ArtLeadHER provides visual-arts education and exhibition opportunities to women and teenage girls, while Art Genesis helps organise shows for emerging and underrepresented artists.
Redolent of African basketry, hairstyles, headwear, and pottery, Donté K. Hayes ' abstract ceramic sculptures may be interpreted as poetic vessels, even though they lack traditional openings. While we easily associate clay pots and round woven forms with ideas related to storage, protection, and even spiritual significance, they also nod to the human head as a holder-a kind of receptacle for culture, language, personal expression, and dreams.
Driskell started collecting in 1955 after taking a position as an art professor at Talladega College. As he explained in a 2017 lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he put aside a small budget for art each year from his beginning salary of $3,000.
The exhibition centers the visibility, agency, and radical joy of Black women, celebrating love as a generative force-of liberation, self-definition, and community. Through richly textured compositions and her iconic rhinestone-studded surfaces, Thomas depicts her subjects-friends, family, lovers, and cultural figures-with a confidence and sensuality that reclaims spaces where Black women have been historically overlooked or misrepresented. With this exhibition, she becomes the first African-American artist to receive a major solo presentation at the Grand Palais.
Amid the savagery of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration - culminating in the killing of Renee Nicole MacklinGood - everyday Americans have shown incredible courage in pushing back against ICE's takeover of their cities. Joining them today are several Minnesotaart institutions that will close their doors to protest against the cruel treatment of their neighbors. You can read all about that today, plus a moving personal essay by Ifrah Mansour, a Somali-American artist based in Minnesota.
As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.