Art Photos mixed

The London-based philanthropist Valeria Napoleone is to show her all-female art collection in public for the first time in the UK regions. The Italian-born collector has exclusively acquired works by women artists for the past two decades in a bid to redress the art world’s persistent gender imbalance. An exhibition of highlights will open at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield in the north of England next week (Going Public: the Napoleone Collection, 15 July-1 October), before travelling to Touchstones Rochdale in Greater Manchester (10 December-11 March 2017).



Mai-Thu Perret with Ligia Dias, La Fée électricité (2005). Photo: Laurent Lecat. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Francesca Pia

With works by established and emerging artists including Monica Bonvicini, Tomma Abts, Shirin Neshat and Mai-Thu Perret, the show forms part of Going Public, an initiative by Museums Sheffield to foster collaboration between major international collectors and regional museums. Co-organised with the art consultants Sebastien Montabonel and Mark Doyle, the exhibition programme brought loans from the collections of Dominique and Sylvain Levy, Nicolas Cattelain, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Egidio Marzona to four venues across Sheffield last autumn, drawing 135,000 visitors. The pioneering project “shares my goals of supporting realities which are too often overlooked by the mainstream and creating a catalyst for change”, Napoleone says in a statement.

Today (7 July) also marks the publication of the report from the Going Public summit at Sheffield Hallam University last October. The report by The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck “represents the first step in a vital conversation to establish how public galleries can develop meaningful, reciprocal relationships with philanthropists”, says the chief executive of Museums Sheffield, Kim Streets.

more...

Botanical history—and, all right, Wikipedia—posits that Christopher Columbus brought back the first pineapples to Spain from their native South America, “thus making the pineapple the first bromeliad to be introduced by humans outside of the New World”. The global cultivation, and symbolic importance, of the ananas comosus*is the subject of a summer exhibition opening today at London’s Tiwani Contemporary gallery (8 July-13 August). The Pineapple Show promises to “mine, expose and invent new narratives around the pineapple. It will explore the fruit’s many histories as well as its cultural, emotional and psychic resonances, taking on issues of labour and luxury, power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, language, gender, hair, memory and otherness: all issues that have emerged from meditations on this fruit and are expressed through the bodies and practices of the artists involved.”

Most of the artists featured in the show—Jowhor Ile, Odili Donald Odita, Perrin Oglafa, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Johnson Uwadinma—hail from Nigeria, with a handful of other international names such as Elizabeth Colomba, Ian Deleón, and Ayana Evans. The show was curated by Zina Saro-Wiwa (her gallery in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—Boys' Quarters Project Space—is behind the fruity show).


more...

The Wave by Panagiotis Laoudikos

Daybreak
Photo by Jennifer Bin

Into the mountains
Photo by Victor Liu

The artist Ragnar Kjartansson spent much of his childhood backstage at the Reykjavik City Theatre, where his father directed and his mother starred in many plays. Born in 1976, he claims to have been conceived after a steamy scene between his parents in a play called Mordsaga (Murder Story).Ahead of his solo show at the Barbican Art Gallery, which opens today (14 July) he told us about why his first big exhibition in London makes perfect sense. "Ever since I was a kid we would go on trips to London and go to the Barbican and we would see the future," he said.

The exhibition (until 4 September) features the portraits Kjartannson made daily of fellow Icelandic artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson wearing black swimming trunks when Kjartansson represented Iceland a the 2009 Venice Biennale. The pair also made a point of smoking and drinking beer throughout the installation called The End (2009).

In the Barbican show are 144 paintings you made daily over six months in the Icelandic pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Is painting an important part of your practice?

more...

Lord Of The Throne
Photo by Milan Zygmunt

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has received a hefty $1m grant from the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will fund a three-and-a-half year initiative promoting the museum’s multidisciplinary programme. Performance art will be boosted under the new initiative which launches this month, culminating in nine large-scale commissioned events by artists including "jazz/visual artist Jason Moran, dance/living installation artist Maria Hassabi, and French/British video/performance artist Laure Prouvost," says a museum statement. The grant will also create two fellowships aimed at the study of such art, and build to a conference in 2019 ("a presentation of the initiative’s findings in addition to a national conversation among curators, artists, producers, and scholars"). A key exhibition dedicated to the late US choreographer Merce Cunningham, with works by Tacita Dean and Jasper Johns among others, is due to launch at the Walker next year (8 February-10 September 2017).

more...

The artist Enoc Perez is hosting an online charity auction to benefit the Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit aimed at curbing gun violence*which is named after the tragic 2012 shooting in the Connecticut elementary school. Perez asked his artist friends— Richard Dupont, Carlos Rolón/Dzine, Rashid Johnson, BP Laval, Angel Otero, Ryan McGinness, and Marcel Dzama—to donate works (nine pieces in total have been consigned).

Sandy Hook Promise’s mission is “to prevent gun-related deaths due to crime, suicide, and accidental discharge so that no other parent experiences the senseless, horrific loss of their child”. The charity was co-founded by Nicole Hockley, whose first grade son Dylan was among 20 children killed in the shooting. “This isn’t a political issue, but something completely real,” Perez says in a statement. The auction runs on Paddle8 until 1 August.

more...

Far away from the city. Far away from the dust
Photo by Oleh Slobodeniu