Art Photos mixed

This club by Tongan craftsmen based in Fiji (about 1875-76) is inlaid with 74 pieces of whale ivory and bone, and was a gift to governor Sir Arthur Gordon

Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific, at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich (15 October-12 February 2017), is essentially about relationships. Gift-giving is central to Fijian culture, so UK museums house a treasure trove of Fijian objects. The lion’s share of these were assembled in the 19th century by British nationals living in the South Pacific archipelago, which became a British colony in 1874. Expats “went mad” for Fijian art and artefacts, says Karen Jacobs, who co-organised the exhibition. It presents 270 works, including barkcloth paintings, war clubs, highly prized whale-teeth jewellery and an 8m-long wooden canoe (drua) made especially for the show, which is the culmination of a three-year grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

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A video still from Do I Look Like a Lady? (2016)

Mickalene Thomas: Do I Look Like a Lady?, a show of new and recent work by the New York-based artist that opens this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is named after a two-channel video that meshes footage of African-American women performers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition also includes a new series of silk-screen portraits of the actresses Diahann Carroll and Pam Grier, among others, installed in a room styled like a 1970s domestic interior. We spoke to Thomas about how the works came about.The show is supported by the Sydney Irmas Exhibition Endowment.

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Nicholas Serota may have announced that he is moving on to Arts Council England, but this is not the first time that the outgoing director has resigned from the Tate. Back in 1971, Serota (then aged 24) was chairman of the Young Friends of the Tate, which found itself at loggerheads with the institution’s director and trustees. The Tate Gallery was shying away from cutting-edge art, so the rebellious Young Friends decided to set up their own exhibition space and began to convert a dilapidated building in a run-down area near Waterloo station—much to the annoyance of the Tate’s then director, Norman Reid, who feared that the public would assume that this was an official venture. Serota and his colleagues were ordered to stop the exhibitions and the Young Friends committee angrily resigned en masse.

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The Paris-born artist Kader Attia opens a new, three-storey exhibition and events space today (17 October) in Paris.* The space is a new kind of artistic “laboratory” for sharing ideas and showing works in the post-Brexit age, he says. The new venue, close to the Gare du Nord train station and co-founded with the restaurateur Zico Selloum, is called La Colonie.The space will host workshops, conferences, lectures and readings. “Far from a museum or institutional context, the artistic proposals are as much conceptual as they are formal, a-formal or performed,” says a project statement. Details of the exhibition programme are yet to be announced.

La Colonie launches today “in tribute to those who died demonstrating for an independent Algeria in Paris on this day in 1961”, Attia says. Around 300 members of the Algerian community are thought to have died after a crackdown by the police.

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John Sturrock "Life before the Mobile Phone"

The inaugural Hepworth Sculpture Prize exhibition, which opens tomorrow (21 October) at The Hepworth Wakefield in the north of England, highlights the malleable nature of contemporary sculpture. Works by the young London-based artist Helen Marten, who has also been nominated for the Turner Prize this year, could equally be described as paintings, prints or installations. Among her seven works on show The Hepworth Wakefield are screen-printed leather canvases decorated with a number of appendages such as cherry stones and cigarettes.“We have based the selection of the four shortlisted artists on the significance of their contribution to sculpture in its broadest definition,” says Simon Wallis, the director of The Hepworth Wakefield and also the chair of the award’s selection panel.

The other three nominees for the £30,000 prize—Phyllida Barlow, Steven Claydon, and David Medalla—may make works that are more sculptural than Marten but they are far from traditional.

Barlow, who will represent Britain at next year’s Venice Biennale and was an influential teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art, has used her customary low-cost materials such as plywood, tape, sand and PVA glue to create a huge immersive installation. Claydon is showing work from his recent show at Sadie Coles HQ, including a yellow PVC curtain—commonly used for walk-in fridges—that he has scented with citronella. The Philippine-born Medalla, who is the oldest artist on the shortlist, is exhibiting his signature foam-producing sculptures that he began making in the 1960s.



David Medalla with Cloud Canyons (1964-2016) at The Hepworth Wakefield (Photo: Danny Lawson/PA Wire)



Works by Helen Marten at The Hepworth Wakefield (Photo: Danny Lawson/PA Wire)



The Hepworth Sculpture Prize is awarded to a British or UK-based artist “who has made a significant contribution to the development of contemporary sculpture,” a press statement says. “There is no shortage of prizes in the art world, however few specifically recognise sculpture,” Wallis adds.The winner will be chosen by a panel of judges and announced on 17 November. The judges are the director of GAM and Castello di Rivoli museums in Turin, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; the architect David Chipperfield; the president of the Sharjah Art Foundation Sheikha Hoor al-Qasimi; the patron and collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; and the art critic Alastair Sooke. Members of the public will also be able to vote for their winner of the People’s Choice Award.

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The Cassel Beaker, (1496-67). (Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

The exhibition Silver: Light and Shade at the Holburne Museum in Bath brings together 500 years’ worth of silver-making, from the earliest surviving English drinking vessel, the Cassel Beaker (around 1496-97), to contemporary pieces such as a water beaker made in 2013 by the UK silversmith Rod Kelly. The survey aims to explore “what’s unique, what’s different and what people often miss” when looking at silver, says the show’s curator, Catrin Jones.Through a number of techniques such as gilding and patination, silver can often “not look like itself”, Jones says. “Different artists can bring such different approaches to the same form,” she says, and the exhibition will show the range of possibilities. As an example, Jones cites a collection of slices, used to cut fish or cakes, commissioned by the collector and chemistry professor Seymour Rabinovitch, around the turn of the 21st century. Rabinovitch gave 100 silversmiths in the UK and North America the task of making him a slice using the same amount of silver, emphasising that he was more interested in creativity than function. The result—a small selection of which will be on show at the Holburne—was “an absolutely extraordinary variety of shapes” for what is “ostensibly a functional object”, Jones says.

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Morning light by Rune Askeland

The Musée d’Orsay has received one of its largest ever donations after the US collectors Marlene and Spencer Hays announced they will give 187 turn-of-the-century masterpieces to the Paris museum. The gift includes works by Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Odilon Redon.Audrey Azoulay, the French culture secretary, told France24 TV: “This donation, which is exceptional for its size and coherence, is the largest a French museum has received from a foreign donor since 1945.” A statement from the French Ministry of Culture says that all 600 works owned by the couple will eventually be donated to the museum.

The couple has specified that the works, to be bequeathed after they die, should be exhibited in a single space rather than dispersed throughout the museum. A selection of works from the Hays’ collection was shown at the Musée d’Orsay in the 2013 exhibition A French Passion.

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Rumours abound that the queen of endurance Marina Abramovic will get a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London. According to the Guardian,*the blockbuster show is planned for 2020.*A Royal Academy spokeswoman says that “the RA is involved in conversations with Marina Abramovic and will announce further information in due course.” Earlier this year, the grande dame of performance told us that she hopes to premiere her video tribute to the opera singer Maria Callas, Seven Deaths, at the RA. Seven Deaths is “based on the idea that Maria Callas died of a broken heart”, the artist said. In a series of seven ten-minute videos, Abramovic will perform the death scenes of seven tragic heroines embodied by the soprano, including Madame Butterfly.*

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