Performance | Handel: Made in America
Image (clockwise from top-left): Latonia Moore, Terrance McKnight (photo by Julie Yarbrough Photography), J’Nai Bridges (photo by Dario Acosta), Davóne Tines (photo by Noah Morrison), Malcolm J. Merriweather, and Noah Stewart.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Two performances, next week at The Met:
Handel: Made in America
Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 15 and 16 February 2024
Friday, February 16 at 6pm, join us for a pre-concert discussion with Juilliard ethnomusicology professor Fredara Hadley and Handel scholar (and Handel: Made in America co-creator) Ellen Harris, moderated by journalist Eric V. Copage (The New York Times)—free with ticketed admission to the performance
George Frideric Handel was the it-boy of 18th-century England. His music spread across boundaries of genre and social class, making his operas, oratorios, and instrumental works wildly popular with the British masses. But Handel rose to fame atop the burgeoning British Empire, history’s most influential global superpower, and in Georgian England, the same trading companies that underwrote arts and culture turned their profits from sinister activities: the trade of exotic goods and, most notably, enslaved people.
Through the lens of Handel’s life and works, musician and storyteller Terrance McKnight (WQXR) leads an intimate and revealing journey about art, power, history, and family, weaving his own history as a young African American man inspired by classical music with the story of Handel’s world and the money, power, and people that moved and were moved by it. Director Pat Eakin Young (La Celestina at The Met), conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather (The Ballad of the Brown King at The Met), and famed Handel scholar Ellen Harris complement a cast of star opera singers: soprano Latonia Moore, mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges, tenor Noah Stewart, and bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Commissioned by MetLiveArts. Tickets start at $35.
• Terrance McKnight, co-creator and performer
• Pat Eakin Young, co-creator and director
• Ellen Harris, co-creator and dramaturg
• Malcolm J. Merriweather, conductor
• Latonia Moore, soprano
• J’Nai Bridges, mezzo-soprano
• Noah Stewart, tenor
• Davóne Tines, bass-baritone
• Voices of Harlem, choir
Exhibition | Michail Michailov’s Dust to Dust at the Belvedere
Michail Michailov, Dust to Dust, as installed in the Carlone Hall of the Upper Belvedere in 2023.
(Photo by Johannes Stoll)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:
Michail Michailov: Dust to Dust
Upper Belvedere, Vienna, 19 October 2023 — 14 April 2024
Curated by Stella Rollig with Johanna Hofer
As part of the Belvedere’s Carlone Contemporary series, Michail Michailov presents Dust to Dust, an 18-part trompe l’oeil drawing, previously exhibited at the Bulgarian Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale. The modular work captures incidental, often overlooked vestiges of time, such as dust, hair, imprints, and stains, calling into question the value and existence of things.
Michail Michailov, Dust to Dust, detail, colored pencil on paper, 2022 (Photograph by Lisa Rastl).
Upon first glance, Dust to Dust may seem like a minimalist installation amid the baroque ambiance of the Carlone Hall. However, upon closer inspection, the display’s space-consuming surface reveals profound poetry. Michailov has meticulously crafted an 18-part series of colored pencil drawings that capture the often unnoticed and incidental vestiges of time. The work is a microcosm touching on fundamental questions of value, transience, and existence with striking simplicity. The realism of Michailov’s trompe l’oeil technique can also be observed above the installation, in the Triumph of Aurora ceiling fresco, which portrays the victory of light over darkness.
Michail Michailov states: “While science explores matter through its composition, I try to understand its meaning through art.”
General Director Stella Rollig states: “Michail Michailov is interested in providing his audience with an experience that only art can make possible. The old master technique of trompe l’oeil that he employs in the Carlone Hall seeks to amaze, amuse, and fascinate. Whether in a large-scale installation or a sheet of paper, Michailov’s work challenges the senses to set the mind in motion.”
Michail Michailov was born in 1978 in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, where he studied fine arts. Since 2002, he has lived and worked in Vienna, where he completed a degree in art history. His artistic practice moves fluidly between the fields of drawing, installation, film, and performance. The Carlone Contemporary Series showcases contemporary works in the Carlone Hall of the Upper Belvedere. From the frescoed ancient world of the deities Apollo and Diana to the present day, artists bridge the Baroque pictorial program with fresh artistic perspectives.
Exhibition | Raphaël Barontini: We Could Be Heroes
From the English summary (via ArtFacts) of the exhibition opening this week at the Panthéon (Jessica Fripp’s review of Barontini’s Blue Lewoz appeared in J18 last October) . . .
Raphaël Barontini: We Could Be Heroes
Panthéon, Paris, 19 October 2023 — 11 February 2024
In October, Raphaël Barontini will unveil a major presentation at the Panthéon in Paris, focusing on the history and the memory of anti-slavery struggle. With this monument of national memory, which honors numerous and important figures in the abolitionist movement (i.e. Condorcet, abbé Grégoire, Toussaint Louverture, Louis Delgrès, Schoelcher, Félix Éboué), Raphaël Barontini aims to shine a spotlight on heroic figures of the fight against slavery. Whether well-known or not, each played critical roles in achieving abolition.
The artist has designed a monumental, on-site installation composed of flags and banners in a guard of honor. The north and south transepts will host two panoramic textile installations, Barontini is planning a live performance during the opening: a West Indian carnival procession. The collaborative creation will involve musicians and dancers. In bringing to life the memory of these struggles, they will be interacting with the textile and graphic works installed within the artist’s creation.
New Installation | Joana Vasconcelos’s Wedding Cake at Waddesdon
Joana Vasconcelos, Wedding Cake, at Waddesdon Manor in Aylesbury, installed 2023.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release for the new installation at Waddesdon:
Joana Vasconcelos: Wedding Cake at Waddesdon
The Dairy at Waddesdon Manor, open from 8 June 2023, with tours available until 26 October
Wedding Cake—a 12-metre-high sculptural pavilion in the form of a three-tiered wedding cake, clad entirely in ceramic tiles—is a major new work at Waddesdon by celebrated Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos (b. 1971). Almost five years in the making, Wedding Cake was commissioned by the Rothschild Foundation for Waddesdon, prompted by the relationship between visionary collector Lord Rothschild and Vasconcelos.
Part sculpture, part architectural garden folly, Wedding Cake is an extraordinary, enormous, fully immersive sculpture that combines pâtisserie and architecture. Gleaming and icing-like outside and in, it offers an intricate and richly sensory experience—glazed in pale pinks, greens, and blues, beset with sculptural ornament, and complete with the sounds of trickling water and a site-specific lighting scheme. Wedding Cake is Vasconcelos’s most ambitious commission to date, described by the artist as “a temple to love” celebrating festivity and marriage.
Joana Vasconcelos, Wedding Cake, at Waddesdon, detail of the ground level.
The history of the wedding cake is long and varied, full of symbolism and tradition—from ancient Rome where bread was broken over the bride’s head to bring good fortune to the couple, to contemporary confections that embody celebration and social status. Vasconcelos’s Wedding Cake is a playful addition to this rich history. Inspired by the exuberant Baroque buildings and highly decorative ceramic traditions of Lisbon—where Vasconcelos lives and works—the work is also a contemporary response to the great Rothschild traditions of hospitality with echoes of 18th-century garden pavilions.
At Waddesdon Wedding Cake will stand in a grove of trees alongside the 19th-century Dairy, built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to entertain and charm guests at his famous house parties, and described by contemporaries as “a treasure house of what is beautiful, curious, or ancient.” It reminds us of the long European history of placing fanciful buildings in gardens and landscapes and forms part of a growing collection of significant contemporary and historic sculpture, brought together by Lord Rothschild. Today, the Dairy is still a much sought-after entertaining space, and the presence of the Wedding Cake, a symbol of love and happiness, is a perfect complement.
Wedding Cake is emblematic of Vasconcelos’s practice. She is deeply influenced by the artistic traditions of her home country, and the way in which she combines her materials reflects international influences on Portuguese culture over centuries—born from a history of exploring and seafaring, from Chinese and Japanese ceramics to Brazilian carnival, incorporating colour and light. Her work is often playful, manipulating scale to dramatic effect and using familiar daily objects in surprising, charming, and inventive ways. On a deeper level, her work explores notions of domesticity, femininity, empowerment, and the tension between private and public realms.
Vasconcelos’s work often challenges the assumptions of traditional hierarchies of ‘noble’ materials, such as marble, used frequently to embellish grand structures and often set above more everyday substances like ceramics and textiles. Her practice champions traditional, hand-made objects and techniques, and the ceramics for Wedding Cake have been made by the Viúva Lamego manufactory, which has been operating in Sintra for 170 years. The company’s standard 14×14cm tiles determined the size of the overall structure of Wedding Cake, whose 11m diameter is the smallest circle that can be made with whole tiles.
At Waddesdon, this combination of materials and the exploration of scale and technique is a perfect fit. The house is famous for its ceramics, particularly Sèvres and Meissen porcelain. The fashions and traditions of 18th- and 19th-century dining, entertaining, and festivity are also deeply embedded in the collections, whether a silver dinner service made for King George III, an 18th-century book recording the festivities laid on to mark a royal wedding, or a manual illustrating sugar sculpture. The sumptuous decoration of the Wedding Cake also speaks to the architecture of the house, itself covered in ornament and designed to complement the collections inside and the carefully laid out garden and landscape. These include the fanciful buildings in Waddesdon’s grounds like the Dairy, Flint House, and the Aviary, all intended to surprise and delight visitors.
According to Joana Vasconcelos, “An enormous project such as this one could only happen with the vision and encouragement provided by a generous and extraordinary patron such as Lord Rothschild. He could see its dreamlike potential, believe in it, and provide the means to make it come true. I have been addressing the subject of love through my career for almost 30 years now, but this is my biggest challenge so far. Many artists have the ‘impossible project’ and this is mine. I wanted people to have three different approaches to it: looking from the outside, enjoying the surroundings from the different levels or balconies, and rising to the top, finally completing the artwork with their presence. Above all, I always thought of it as a temple to love.”
Lord Rothschild says, “We are delighted to be collaborating again with Joana Vasconcelos, whose work is already magnificently represented at Waddesdon by her giant candlesticks, Lafite. The vision, imagination, and ambition exemplified in the Wedding Cake is a perfect match for the passion which drove Baron Ferdinand, the creator of Waddesdon, to build the Manor and the Dairy, where he intended that his many friends would be surprised and delighted at every turn. I am sure that the Wedding Cake will have just as great an impact on visitors and wedding guests today.”
Pippa Shirley, Director of Waddesdon says, “Waddesdon was built to entertain; so, what better way to mark the continuity today of that spirit of hospitality, artistic creativity, and Rothschild family patronage than through the commission of this magical object, an emblem of love and celebration. Projects like this require a leap of faith from both artist and patron, and we are proud to have been a partner in this innovative work.”
Recipe for Wedding Cake
• 1 creative artist
• 1 visionary patron
• 2 international teams
• Pinch of experts
• 3500 wrought iron parts
• 21,815kg iron sheet
• Approximately 25,150 Viúva Lamego ceramic tiles (99 different types) and 1,238 Viúva Lamego ceramic pieces (52 different types). Ceramic tile area: 365 m2
• Plethora of ornaments — mermaids, dolphins, candles, globes, etc
• Indoor and outdoor lights — 350 glass flames receiving optical fiber (about 3,000 meters)
• 592 light points
• Rivers of glaze
• Sprinklings of water
• Hope, belief, and effort
Blend the circa 50 tons with generous amounts of creativity and patience. Bind into different panels; raise tier by tier to height of 12 meters. Assemble at Waddesdon. Serve with love.
Joana Vasconcelos’s Lafite, two giant candlesticks made of illuminated Chateau Lafite Rothschild magnums (commissioned in 2015 by the Rothschild Foundation in celebration of the family associations with the world of great Bordeaux wine), will be moving to the Dairy. In 2012, her Pavillon de Thé, a giant wrought-iron tea pot, was the focal point of House of Cards, a contemporary sculpture exhibition in the gardens, and in 2016 her Cup Cake (2011) was exhibited on the North Front.
Vasconcelos’s work is also represented in major collections around the world, such as those of Calouste Gulbenkian, François Pinault, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation. She has exhibited regularly since the mid-1990s. Her work became known internationally after her participation in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, with the work A Noiva [The Bride] (2001–05). She was the first woman and the youngest artist to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles, in 2012. Other highlights of her career include a solo exhibition at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2019); the project Trafaria Praia for the Pavilion of Portugal at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); the participation in the group exhibition The World Belongs to You at the Palazzo Grassi/François Pinault Foundation, Venice (2011); taking part in Un Certain Etat du Monde? A Selection of Works from the François Pinault Foundation at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow (2013); and her first retrospective Sem Rede held at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2010). Her solo show Time Machine was on view at Manchester Art Gallery in 2014; in London she exhibited at Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition in 2018; and she was given a major show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Beyond in 2021.
Visitors to Waddesdon will be able to visit Wedding Cake on a guided tour that will include the impressive collection of contemporary sculpture situated in the Water Garden at the Dairy. Wedding Cake tours will run from 8 June until 26 October on Thursdays and selected Sundays.
Installation | Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera
Installation View of Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera at Frick Madison, 2023
(Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release for the installation:
Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera
The Frick Madison, New York, 1 June 2023 — 3 March 2024
Organized by Xavier F. Salomon
The Frick Collection has unveiled a large pastel mural commissioned from the Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party at the museum’s temporary home, Frick Madison. This site-specific work was created in response to Rosalba Carriera’s Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume—one of two eighteenth-century pastels by Rosalba bequeathed to the Frick by Alexis Gregory in 2020. The installation features Rosalba’s superb portrait at the center of a three-wall mural designed by Party, as well as two new related works specially created by Party for this presentation.
On view from 1 June 2023 through the remainder of the Frick’s residency at the Breuer building (until 3 March 2024), this installation will inspire the Frick’s summer and early fall programming as well as a new publication.
Rosalba Carriera, Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume, ca. 1730. pastel on paper, glued to canvas, 59 × 48 cm (New York: The Frick Collection, Gift of Alexis Gregory, 2020.3.01).
The project, which also marks the 350th anniversary of Rosalba’s birth, is organized by Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Salomon comments, “It has been a particular pleasure to work with Nicolas Party. I met Nicolas in April 2021 and since then have enjoyed an ongoing and enlightening conversation on pastels. Nicolas’s installation at Frick Madison is the result of our exchanges, and I am delighted with the result.”
Party adds, “When I first fell in love with pastels, some ten years ago, my research quickly led me to the queen of pastel, Rosalba. Her practice and love for the powdery sticks increased the popularity of the medium and were crucial to the development of the art form. I felt a powerful attraction to her pastels. Today, I like to think our approaches might not be all that different.”
Born in Venice, Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) was celebrated throughout Europe during her lifetime for her portraiture. She was the preeminent portraitist in Venice in the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time the Venetian Carnival reached its zenith. During this period, foreign travelers flocked to Venice for the masked revelries that became synonymous with the city, and Rosalba’s studio was a popular stop for visiting foreigners, who often posed for her in their elegant Carnival costumes. Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume (ca. 1730) is most likely one such work. The sitter is possibly French, British, or German, but his identity remains unknown. With his black cape, staff, and jaunty tricorn hat, he is depicted as a pilgrim.
Installation View of Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera at Frick Madison, 2023 (Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.)
Party’s mural includes elaborate draperies that highlight the Rosalba portrait along with two additional pastel portraits he created in response to it. These ornate draperies evoke the work of two other towering figures in European pastels—Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788)—echoing the function of Venetian Carnival masks, designed to conceal and reveal the features of their wearers. Party’s installation engages devices of disguise and disclosure, from masks to draperies to makeup (often produced with the same chemical components used to make pastel sticks).
The large-scale murals created by Party, whose primary medium since 2013 has been pastel, are ephemeral, lasting only for the duration of a specific exhibition at a unique location. The historical nature of his practice aligns perfectly with the installation at Frick Madison, which has given the museum a unique opportunity to re-imagine its permanent collection display, presented for the first time outside the domestic setting of the Gilded Age mansion at 1 East 70th Street.
This project is part of a series of initiatives in recent years that invite contemporary responses to the Frick’s holdings. Party’s installation not only offers a fresh perspective on an important recent acquisition, but furthers Frick Madison’s prompting of visitors to question the impact of site and setting on their perception of historic objects in the collection.
Born in Lausanne in 1980, Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, which allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.
Over the years, Party has created work in response to that of European painters including Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845), Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), and René Magritte (1898–1967). In 2019, Party organized the pastel exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, where he created large—and ephemeral—pastel murals inspired by French eighteenth-century artists including François Boucher (1703–1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), both of whom are represented in the Frick’s permanent collection.
Nicolas Party and Xavier Salomon, Rosalba Carriera’s Man in Pilgrim’s Costume (London: Giles, 2023), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1913875510, £20 / $25.
Funding for the installation is generously provided by The Christian Humann Foundation and the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation, with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Note (added 25 August 2023) — The posting was updated with details on the publication.
Exhibition | Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress
Opening this week at the Soane Museum:
Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 7 June — 10 September 2023
Bouke de Vries’ latest work—beautifully displayed in the Museum’s Foyle Space— responds to William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.
Inspired by Hogarth’s series of original paintings at the Soane Museum, de Vries draws on his love of storytelling, and talent for symbolism through ceramics, with eight newly created porcelain vases presented in various states of (dis)repair. Starting with an immaculate celadon vase, de Vries treats the following seven increasingly deteriorating vases with a variety of restoration processes and glazes, which parallel the moral and physical degeneration of Hogarth’s anti-hero Tom Rakewell. Cracks appear in the surface, the vessels slump and implode—with obvious and drastic methods of repair failing to save the vase or Rake from their ultimate demise.
Originally working in fashion before retraining as a restorer, Bouke de Vries began creating his works of art in 2008. He has since gained a significant following and now has work in an impressive range of international public collections, including the National Museum of Scotland; the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Oslo; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. De Vries sees an inherent value in the discarded objects he reinvents, giving a new lease of life to a broad spectrum of ceramics otherwise destined to be thrown away.
Bouke de Vries in Conversation with Louisa Buck
13 June 2023, 7pm BST
To celebrate the opening of his new exhibition Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress, ceramic artist Bouke de Vries will discuss his latest work with Louisa Buck, a contributing editor and London contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a regular reviewer and commentator on BBC radio and TV. The evening includes an exclusive out-of-hours viewing of the exhibition and the opportunity to view Hogarth’s paintings that inspired the series in the Picture Room.
Book tickets here»
British Art Studies, March 2023
West Wall of the Print Room at Woodhall Park, Hertfordshire, created in 1782 by R. Parker.
Photographed in 2023 Matthew Hollow.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of British Art Studies (lots of fascinating material; I’m especially taken by the videos that accompany Kate Retford’s article: they’re fabulous, particularly the one on ‘Making the Print Room’. –CH)
British Art Studies 24 (March 2023)
“Monuments Must Fall,” a ‘Conversation Piece’ convened by Edwin Coomasaru, with responses by Jodie Dowd and Nathan mudyi Sentance, Sasanka Perera, Wendy Bellion, Chrislyn Laurie Laurore, Stacy Boldrick, Joan Coutu, Emma Mahony, Nomusa Makhubu, Nickolas Lambrianou, and Raqs Media Collective.
‘Conversation Piece’ is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation, or question.
Monumentality is an aesthetic form of social antagonism. . . . Many monuments are erected to do controversial work, and while they may proclaim a matter resolved or a problem consolidated, the reactions to them (sometimes long after they have been placed on pedestals) actually demonstrate the opposite is often the case. Monuments are not solely statues. Monumentality is the discursive space that surrounds certain public sculptures, including demands they be pulled down or protected, which can erupt into spontaneous or managed removal. Such a discursive space is inherently unstable, which is why most monuments ultimately must fall, physically or conceptually: either by being toppled or by having their original intentions obliterated and reimagined. . . .
Monuments are not simply physical structures, nor empty symbols, but are shaped by either social support systems that erect and conserve them, or by forms of social conflict which contest and topple them. The discursive space around a public statue, from protest to press coverage, and its translation into material conditions, is the making of its monumentality. . . .
Edwin Coomasaru’s essay and the ten responses are available here»
Kate Retford, “Cutting and Pasting: The Print Room at Woodhall Park.”
This article explores the exemplary surviving print room at Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire, created in 1782 for Sir Thomas Rumbold. A professional named “R. Parker” pasted more than 350 prints around the walls of this interior; the results were then carefully recorded in a catalogue and set of elevation diagrams. The first section, ‘Space’, analyses the print room within the broader context of the house, in order to connect exterior and interior, explore the relative qualities of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space, and consider neoclassical style as worked out in various media. The second, ‘Display’, unpacks the pasted scheme, looking at the relationship between ‘background’ images and ‘starring’ works, and that between iconography and pattern-making. The final part explores ‘Making’, analysing the processes by which prints were selected, trimmed, given paper borders, and arranged around the walls. This discussion considers both the degree to which the intermedial object of the reproductive print was translated into a trompe l’œil painting or sculpture in such schemes, and the creative work of collaging at play. The analysis in this article weaves together textual discussion with still and moving images, film, and animation. Combining these techniques, it aims to provide full documentation and analysis of the scheme, and to engage with embodied, mobile, and temporally determined viewing experience in both the house and the print room.
Article available here»
Melissa L. Gustin, “Do Sleeping Shepherds Dream of 3D-Printed Sheep: John Gibson, Oliver Laric, and Digital Neoclassicism.”
This article considers the relationship between John Gibson’s neoclassical sculpture The Sleeping Shepherd Boy [designed 1818] and Oliver Laric’s installations for the 2016 Liverpool Biennial using 3D models and prints of the Shepherd. These bodies of work allow us to think about their similarities in attitude towards imitation, the significance of the ‘neoclassical’ across different historic moments, and the cultures of copying or reproduction. It looks at the reproductive technologies of 3D scanning, printing, CNC milling, and digital remixing alongside historical reproductions such as casts and copies. These offer new potentially disruptive—but not destructive—opportunities within the legacy of neoclassical practices. The intellectual and artistic inheritance of neoclassical sculpture as an imitative practice after Greek and Roman antiquity informs Laric’s sculptural work. I draw on Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance (2010) and George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (1968) to discuss Laric’s modular, large-scale 3D prints, which point towards issues of replacement, imitation, and wholeness. The open-source 3D models he produces as part of his practice are then used by other artists, including Zachary Eastwood-Bloom in his Divine Principles series, and the author, for making research objects.
Article available here»
Online Talk | Beckfords and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
From The Salisbury Museum and Eventbrite:
Amy Frost, The Beckfords and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Online, Thursday, 16 March 2023, 7.30pm (GMT)
Beckford’s Tower, 1826–27 (photo by Tom Burrows).
From the purchase of Fonthill in Wiltshire by William Beckford in 1744 to the death of his son in Bath 100 years later, the social advancements and retreats of the Beckford family relied upon the profits of transatlantic slavery. This talk will explore the extensive collecting and architectural creations of the Beckfords, and highlight how they were made possible by a vast fortune built from the stolen labour of thousands of enslaved Africans. This is a fundraising talk for The Salisbury Museum: £12 (£9 members).
Dr Amy Frost is an expert on the life and work of William Beckford and curator of Beckford’s Tower in Bath.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Press release (7 March 2023) from the Bath Preservation Trust:
Alex Wheatle and State of Trust Join Forces with Beckford’s Tower
As part of the ‘Our Tower’ regeneration plan, Beckford’s Tower and State of Trust join forces with author Alex Wheatle to deliver interpretive dance performance of Wheatle’s prize-winning 2020 novel Cane Warriors.
Cane Warriors tells the story of Tacky’s Rebellion, an uprising of Akan people fighting for their freedom that took place in Jamaica in 1760, and included enslaved people on a plantation owned by the Beckford family. The new project will put a spotlight on the link between the Beckford family and the rebellion and engage with a wide cross section of people in the process, particularly young people in the community and online, in order to develop an interpretive dance performance of the novel. The research and development will build a team of exceptional performers. New choreography, music, photography, and film will be created, and there will also be a virtual gallery and film archive for future use.
The resulting performances will take place in March 2024. Beckford’s Tower will host one performance, with the other two to be held in other Bath and Bristol venues. The new production has been supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to money raised by National Lottery players.
The performance, which will be filmed for posterity, will encourage attendees to engage with one of the most troubling aspects of William Beckford’s legacy: his claiming in ownership enslaved people, which funded his lifestyle and his vast collections. The aim is to build awareness around the effects of enslavement and colonialism on the culture and psyche of modern Britain and improve community relations through greater understanding of the shared history.
Built between 1826 and 1827, Beckford’s Tower was intended to house the collections of books, furniture, and art that were owned by William Beckford, whose wealth was gained from his ownership of plantations and enslaved people in Jamaica. Beckford would ride up to the Tower from his townhouse in Bath’s Lansdown Crescent every morning before breakfast, and enjoyed its solitude and the panoramic views from the Belvedere at the top.
Today Beckford’s Tower is owned and run by Beckford Tower Trust, part of Bath Preservation Trust. The landmark is a Grade 1 listed monument and is the only museum in the world dedicated to the life and work of William Beckford. In 2019, the Tower was added to the National ‘At Risk’ Register, sparking a major project to raise the necessary funds to repair and restore the Tower, transform the museum, open up the landscape and create opportunities for volunteering, formal learning and community engagement. In 2022, thanks to a £3million grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the fundraising target of £3.9 million was reached. £480,000 of partnership funding had already been secured, with support from Historic England, Garfield Weston Foundation, The Medlock Charitable Trust, Historic Houses Foundation, Pilgrim Trust, and several other organisations, as well as £50,000 in public donations. This second grant of £100,000 will enable Beckford’s Tower to deliver the Cane Warriors project, which will compliment the wider work taking place at the Tower.
State of Trust Cane Warriors Meeting
Commenting on the new project, Director of Museums Claire Dixon said: “One of our main priorities at Beckford’s Tower is to ensure the transparent and sensitive portrayal of William Beckford’s troubling legacy; as his building and collecting was funded through his ownership of plantations it is vital that this is made clear in the regeneration of the Tower and its new exhibition. We approached State of Trust owing to their reputation for delivering powerful performances that tackle challenging social themes, and we look forward to working with them on this exciting project. It will enable us to explore more creative and artistic events, engage new and more diverse audiences, and embed this approach in the new museum programme when it opens in 2024. I would like to thank The National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery players for their support in helping us to fully contextualise and reconfigure the story of Beckford’s Tower for a modern-day audience.”
Deborah Baddoo MBE and Steve Marshall, the Directors at State of Trust and State of Emergency Limited, said: “We are delighted that Heritage Lottery has agreed to fund the R&D phase of Cane Warriors. When Alex Wheatle first approached us, nearly three years ago, with a view to our making a dance interpretation of his novel, we didn’t realise what an uphill struggle it would be to achieve funding. Thanks to Bath Preservation Trust, and the synergy between the story and the history of Beckford’s Tower, we are now able to start working on what we believe will be an important work of African contemporary dance theatre. This production will allow us to pursue a long-term artistic vision, which began with the foundation of State of Emergency Limited in 1986, and to hone our skills as directors and performers. For us Cane Warriors is the natural progression of all that has gone before. Working alongside the history of Beckford’s Tower, this project can make the connection between historic buildings in our local communities and the transatlantic slave trade, and reveal their hidden histories. We feel it is very important to reach and engage with people, particularly young people, on this subject, and through a range of activities, including workshops in schools, and online events, we know we can make a difference. Through the media of dance, music, and film, we aim to bring the story to life, to animate history in a way that is relevant and impactful to our contemporary lives, to get beyond the facts and to achieve a level of understanding and truth.”
Alex Wheatle MBE
Alex Wheatle MBE, author of Cane Warriors, said: “The real story of Chief Tacky’s rebellion has been passed down through generations of my mother’s family who resided in Richmond, St Mary’s parish in Jamaica—very close to the plantations where Chief Tacky and his Cane Warriors toiled and planned their Easter rebellion in 1760. I was simply compelled to relate this story to the wider world, and I’m very proud that State of Emergency will tell the story in the art form of dance. Indeed, the Cane Warriors will be honoured.”
Stuart McLeod, Director England – London & South at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: “Inclusive heritage is very important to us at The National Lottery Heritage Fund which is why we are proud to support projects that engage people with the complexity of our history. This project will help broaden everyone’s understanding of Beckford and tell his story and its significance to Bath. Our history can teach us a great deal about ourselves and who we want to be, and we encourage people to explore, understand, and learn from it.”
Reception of Greenough’s Statue of George Washington
Stereo card view of the crowd at the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes, on the east front grounds of the U.S. Capitol, surrounding Horatio Greenough’s statue of George Washington, in 1877 (Brady’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C./Library of Congress). Commissioned in 1832 to mark Washington’s 100th birthday, Horatio Greenough’s sculpture of the first president was installed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in 1841. Two years later the 12-ton statue was moved outside to the building’s East Plaza, where it stood until 1908, when it was moved to the Smithsonian Institution castle on the National Mall.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
An interesting article from The Washington Post for the wider context of contested public sculpture (here presented for a large, general audience). Unfortunately, it doesn’t address this particular controversy in terms of people’s expectations of how a historic figure (in 1841, still a recent historic figure) should have been represented and thus might reinforce persistent misconceptions of nineteenth-century attitudes toward nudity in art generally. The larger question of monumentalizing the lives of real people could bring the history of Greenough’s work into conversation with the initial reception of Hank Willis Thomas’s recently installed memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, The Embrace, at Boston’s 1965 Freedom Plaza. For the latter, there has, of course, been lots of coverage, but I like this article by Jessica Shearer, “What Do Bostonians Think of the New MLK Monument?,” HyperAllergic (25 January 2023). –CH
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Horatio Greenough, President George Washington, completed in 1840, marble (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution).
Ronald G. Shafer, “The First Statue Removed from the Capitol: George Washington in a Toga,” The Washington Post (22 January 2023).
Slowly, some of the U.S. Capitol’s many statues and other artworks honoring enslavers have been slated for removal, most recently a bust of Roger B. Taney, the chief justice who wrote the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denying Black people citizenship. But the first statue Congress voted to remove from the Capitol was one of George Washington [in 1908]—not because Washington was an enslaver, but because the statue was scandalous. The first president was portrayed naked to the waist in a toga with his right finger pointing toward the sky and his left hand clasping a sheathed sword. . . .
The full article is available here»
Tallying Enslavers and Confederates Depicted at the U.S. Capitol
John Trumbull, General George Washington Resigning His Commission, 23 December 1783, installed in the Capitol in 1824, oil on canvas, 12 × 18 feet (Washington, DC: Capitol Rotunda). As noted in The Post article, 19 of the 31 people identified in the painting were enslavers.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From The Washington Post:
Gillian Brockell, “Art at Capitol Honors 141 Enslavers and 13 Confederates. Who Are They?,” The Washington Post (27 December 2022). The Post examined more than 400 statues, paintings, and other artworks in the U.S. Capitol. This is what we found.
As part of a year-long investigation into Congress’s relationship with slavery, The Washington Post analyzed more than 400 artworks in the U.S. Capitol building, from the Crypt to the ceiling of the Capitol Rotunda, and found that one-third honor enslavers or Confederates. Another six honor possible enslavers—people whose slaveholding status is in dispute. . . .
Just as governments and institutions across the country struggle with the complex and contradictory legacies of celebrated historical figures with troubling racial records, so too does any effort to catalogue the role of the Capitol artworks’ subjects in the institution of slavery. This analysis, for example, includes at least four enslavers—Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Rufus King, and Bartolomé de las Casas—who voluntarily freed the people they enslaved and publicly disavowed slavery while they were living. Other people, such as Daniel Webster and Samuel Morse, were vocal defenders of slavery but did not themselves enslave people; artworks honoring them are not counted in The Post’s tally. . . .
All 11 states that joined the Confederacy have at least one statue depicting an enslaver or Confederate. But the homages to enslavers are by no means restricted to these states: Except for New Hampshire, all of the original 13 states have statues depicting enslavers or possible enslavers.
Massachusetts, for example, is represented by John Winthrop, who is best known for proclaiming a “shining city on a hill” but who also enslaved at least three Pequot people and, as colonial governor, helped legalize the enslavement of Africans.
Both of New York’s statues honor enslavers. One is Declaration of Independence co-writer Robert R. Livingston, who came from a prominent slave-trading family and personally enslaved 15 people in 1790. He also owned brothels that housed Black women who may have been enslaved. The other is former vice president George Clinton, who served under Jefferson and Madison and enslaved at least eight people in his lifetime. . . .
The full article is available here»
Enfilade 
leave a comment