Shonibare’s ‘Wind Sculpture VIII’ Installed in D.C.
Yinka Shonibare MBE, Wind Sculpture VII (detail), 2016, steel armature with hand-painted fiberglass resin cast and gold leaf (Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, purchased with funds from Amelia Quist-Ogunlesi and Adebayo Ogunlesi and the Sakana Foundation, 2016-11-1).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Press release (via Art Daily) from the National Museum of African Art:
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art announced the acquisition and permanent installation of sculpture Wind Sculpture VII by celebrated contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare MBE. Wind Sculpture VII made its Smithsonian debut Saturday, December 3; it has been installed in front of the National Museum of African Art.
A rendering of Shonibare’s sculpture as envisioned outside the National Museum of African Art (James Cohan Gallery).
Part of a series of seven individually designed sculptures, Wind Sculpture VII is the first artwork installed permanently in front of the museum. Constructed from fiberglass, this unique, gold-leaf version of Shonibare’s Wind Sculptures series evokes the sails of ships that have crossed the Atlantic and other oceans, connecting nations through the exchange of ideas, products, and people. In its form, it captures histories that can be inspiring or brutal but always complex. It suggests that the opening of the seas led not only to the slave trade and colonization but also to the dynamic contributions of Africans and African heritage worldwide. Using yellow, blue, rose, and gold, Shonibare celebrates the African men, women, and children who have shaped the United States, Great Britain, and other nations of today and for the future.
“The museum is proud to present this stunning and monumental public sculpture at the museum,” said Karen Milbourne, curator and project lead. “This work of art will transform the façade of our museum and pay tribute to the connections between Africa and America. The patterns emblazoned on this sculpture replicate so-called ‘African print cloth,’ which are in fact based on Indonesian batiks manufactured in the Netherlands and United Kingdom and then exported to West Africa where they have become synonymous with African identity. Shonibare draws on this entangled history to direct attention to the global connections that unite individuals and communities worldwide. Africa’s global connections and the vision of its artists are the focus of this national museum; this sculpture will inspire visitors and spark conversation.”
Facts about Wind Sculpture VII:
• The work weighs 899 pounds
• It took seven people one month to paint and gild the sculpture
• The structure is 20 feet tall and 10 feet, 6 inches wide
• Only about a 7-inch-diameter point of the sculpture touches the ground
Throughout the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film, and performance, Shonibare’s work examines race, class, and the construction of cultural identity. Through sharp political commentary of the interrelationships between Africa and Europe’s economic and political histories and wry citations of Western art history and literature, Shonibare questions the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities.
Shonibare was born in the United Kingdom in 1962 and moved to Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of 3. He returned to London to receive his MFA from Goldsmiths College, a part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He gained notoriety on the international stage via his commission for Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 10 and was a Turner Prize nominee in 2004. In 2005 he was awarded the decoration of Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a title that he officially added on his professional name. His works were featured in the 52nd Venice Biennale and a major mid-career survey toured 2008–09. In 2011, the artist’s sculpture Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was selected for Trafalgar Square’s prestigious commission series. Shonibare’s works are included in many prestigious public collections spanning the globe. He currently lives and works in London’s East End.
Exhibition | Senses of Time: Video and Film-based Works of Africa
Yinka Shonibare MBE, still from Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004, high-definition digital video, 32 minutes
(Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Now on view at LACMA and the National Museum of African Art:
Senses of Time: Video and Film-based Works of Africa
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 20 December 2015 — 2 January 2017
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., 18 May 2016 — 2 January 2017
Our hearts beat to the rhythms of biological time and continents drift in geological time, while we set our watches to the precision of naval time. Time may seem easy to measure, but it can be challenging to understand. The six African artists featured in Senses of Time explore how time is experienced—and produced—by the body. Bodies stand, climb, dance, and dissolve in seven works of video and film—or ‘time-based’—art. Characters and the actions they depict repeat, resist, and reverse the expectation that time must move relentlessly forward. Senses of Time invites viewers to consider tensions between personal and political time, ritual and technological time, bodily and mechanical time. Through pacing, sequencing, looping, layering, and mirroring, diverse perceptions of time are embodied and expressed.
History repeats itself as Yinka Shonibare MBE’s European ballroom dancers in sumptuous African-print fabric gowns dramatize the absurdities of political violence, while Sammy Baloji choreographs a haunting exploration of memory and forgetting in the ruins of postcolonial deindustrialization. Sue Williamson sensitively highlights the generational gaps wrought by time, while Berni Searle addresses genealogical time in one work as ancestral family portraits are tossed by the winds and focuses on the slippages and fragility of time and personal identity in another. Moataz Nasr’s work treads upon identities distorted by the march of time as Theo Eshetu draws us into a captivating kaleidoscopic space where past, present, and future converge.
Senses of Time was co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Yinka Shonibare MBE, excerpt from Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), 2004, high-definition digital video, 32 minutes (Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York). As noted by the NMAfA: “In Un Ballo in Maschera, Yinka Shonibare MBE interweaves and subverts the geographies and temporal assumptions that shape narratives of tradition and modernity. The artist draws on Giuseppe Verdi’s 1859 opera of the same name about the 18th-century Swedish king Gustav III, who was assassinated at a masked ball while his countrymen fought a war far from home. In Shonibare’s rendition, the event is an allegory for political hubris—with the artist specifically thinking of the Iraq war—and a playful attempt to reveal that the Western world has its traditions, too. . .”
Call for Papers | Visual and Material Culture Exchange across the Baltic
From H-ArtHist:
Visual and Material Culture Exchange across the Baltic Sea Region, 1772–1918
Greifswald University, 15–18 June 2017
Proposals due by 15 December 2016
Although the Baltic Sea has been one of the world’s greatest cultural crossroads, scholars often have overlooked cultural exchange in favor of exploring national and regional identities. Since the 1990s, the concept of a Baltic Sea Region encompassing the sea and its surrounding land has fostered transnational thinking about the region, transcending Cold War binaries of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in an effort to view the area more holistically. Still, common terminology such as ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘the Baltic States’, suggests these cultures are mutually exclusive, or, as the case with ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, ambiguously monolithic.
While historians have been examining the Baltic Sea Region—present-day Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden—as an important center of cross-cultural interaction, the area’s visual and material culture, one of the most important avenues of exchange, is often reduced to illustrative examples of historical phenomena. Art historical narratives continue to be tethered to national and ethnocentric approaches, a bias this conference seeks to complicate.
This project—two conferences (in Greifswald and Tallinn) and an anticipated edited volume—emerges from these twin desires: to study the Baltic Sea Region as a cultural crossroads and to depart from isolated, national/regional narratives. By foregrounding visual and material exchanges and the ideological or pragmatic factors that motivated them, we seek to establish common ground for viewing the Baltic Sea as a nexus of intertwined, fluctuating individuals and cultures always in conversation. We invite papers that engage material/visual culture as conceptual lenses through which to reevaluate the history, meaning, and significance of the Baltic Sea Region.
Proposals for this conference must include (in English):
a) an abstract of maximum 150 words summarizing your argument
b) academic resume
c) full contact information including e-mail
Papers will be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by discussion. The language of the conference is English. Contributions should be sent to Michelle Facos (mfacos@indiana.edu) and Bart Pushaw (bcpushaw@gmail.com) by 15 December 2016. Notification of acceptance will be by 15 January. This conference will be co-sponsored by the Baltic Borderlands Program of Greifswald University and the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald.
Call for Papers | Travelling Objects: Italy and the Habsburgs
From H-ArtHist:
Travelling Objects: Ambassadors of Cultural Transfer between Italy and the Habsburg Monarchy
Botschafter des Kulturtransfers zwischen Italien und dem Habsburgerreich
Ambasciatori dello scambio culturale tra l’italia e il regno asburgico
Rome, 19–20 May 2017
Proposals due by 15 January 2017
The international conference Travelling Objects will focus on the material aspects of cultural transfers: the exchange of paintings, designs/drawings, sculptures, or books. Our specific interest is in the movement of these inherently ambassadorial objects between Italy and the Habsburg Monarchy during the 17th and 18th centuries and their reception and role in the transmission of information and ideas between the North and the South. Special attention will be given to the agents who promoted, organized, or mediated the exchange.
Collecting without Borders
The extensive art collections of the nobility in the Habsburg lands—Liechtenstein, for instance, or Czernin, or Savoyen—as well as the imperial picture gallery were products of a massive importation of artworks from Italy during the 17th and 18th centuries. Diplomatic missions and the Grand Tour gave collectors direct access to the Italian art market. At the same time, ambassadors and envoys from Italy took advantage of their sojourns at the Imperial court to acquire and mediate works of art for their home courts.
The Art of Gift-Giving
The exchange of representative gifts was a fundamental aspect of early modern diplomacy. The act of gift-giving was a form of symbolic communication that articulated political interests, claims, or demonstrations of fidelity. Furthermore, certain gifts—notably portraits, medals, or paintings—served as signs of friendship as well as devices for the self-promotion of artists. Transnational gift-giving is also a testament of cultural exchange: regional luxury goods not only conveyed prestige and fashion trends but also transmitted technical know-how.
Traveling Objects is organized by Silvia Tammaro and Gernot Mayer (University of Vienna) and aims to link established scholars with young researchers. Scheduled to take place in Rome, 19–20 May 2017, this event is a cooperation between the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome (ÖHI) and the University of Vienna. The conference languages are Italian, German, and English. Please send your proposal (1–2 pages) and a short CV to silvia.tammaro@univie.ac.at and gernot.mayer@univie.ac.at by 15 January 2017. A partial reimbursement of travel costs will be offered.
Brian Sewell Bequeaths a Painting by Lagrenée to the National Gallery
Press release (17 November 2016) from the National Gallery in London:
Louis Jean François Lagrenée, Maternal Affection, 1773, oil on copper, 43.5 × 34.5 cm (London: The National Gallery, gift from the estate of Brian Sewell, 2016).
“As a child, there was not a major museum or art gallery in London I didn’t know, and the National Gallery was my favourite.” –Brian Sewell, interview for The Daily Telegraph (June 2012)
The legendary Evening Standard art critic would often talk about the weekly visits he made to the National Gallery as a child imbuing him with his love of art; indeed, he once quipped, “I’m leaving my body to science, and if there’s anything left, they can burn it, mix the ashes with bird food and scatter them on the steps of the National Gallery” (Mail on Sunday, April 2014). Therefore, it is fitting that a much-loved work from his private art collection will go on display in the National Gallery, presented as a gift to the Gallery following his death in September 2015.
Maternal Affection is a small oil on copper work from 1773 by the French artist Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. The subject cannot be precisely identified. It takes place in a loggia and shows a woman nursing a child, with another infant held towards her by one of her female companions. Another woman is placing (or removing) bedding in the form of a pillow in or from a wooden crib. In this picture of quiet contentment, Lagrenee has sought balance—balance in the colours of the costumes both of, and between, the individual figures and balance in composition. Maternal Affection is highly typical of the small-scale paintings that the artist made for private collectors.
There are currently eleven paintings by Lagrenée in Great Britain: seven at Stourhead (National Trust) and four at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. Maternal Affection is, therefore, the only one by the artist on public display in a national collection. Eighteenth-century French paintings are sparsely represented in Trafalgar Square, and this generous gift helps to extend the National Gallery’s collection in this area. Maternal Affection also adds to our understanding of the reception of 17th-century Bolognese painting in 18th-century Europe: Lagrenée’s style was greatly influenced by his admiration of the great Bolognese painters of the previous century, in particular the work of Guido Reni.
Christopher Riopelle, National Gallery Curator of Post-1800 Paintings said: “The painting is a beautifully preserved oil on copper of exquisite refinement which allows the National Gallery for the first time to show the work of an artist who was hugely admired by the most discriminating connoisseurs and collectors of contemporary French art, both French and foreign, in the final decades of the 18th century.”
National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi said: “Brian Sewell had a profound love for the National Gallery as well as a connoisseur’s passion for lesser known masters; so it is especially pleasing that Lagrenée’s beautiful and refined Maternal Affection, which he owned, has come to the Gallery as a gift from his estate.”
Maternal Affection can now be seen in Room 33 of the National Gallery hanging alongside other French 18th-century paintings by artists such as Boucher, Vigée Le Brun, Boilly, Nattier, Detroy, and Vernet.
Exhibition | The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted
Now on view in Brugge:
The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted
De kunst van het recht: Drie eeuwen gerechtigheid in beeld
Groeningemuseum, Brugge, 28 October 2016 — 5 February 2017
Curated by Vanessa Paumen
In the fifteenth century, it was customary to decorate courtrooms with works of art that were intended to ‘encourage’ the aldermen and judges to perform their duties in an honest and conscientious manner. These works often depicted the supreme moment of divine justice: the Last Judgement. But other scenes from the Bible were also used, as were images from more profane sources. Together, these are known as the exempla iustitiae (‘examples of fair justice’). In 1498, Gerard David was commissioned by the city council of Bruges to paint just such a work: The Judgement of Cambyses. This remarkably gruesome painting once hung in the courtroom of Bruges town hall and is now one of the finest masterpieces in the Groeningemuseum.
Subjects relating to justice were also depicted outside the courtroom in paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture and stained glass windows. The Art of Law exhibition has brought together some twenty works of art from the collections of Musea Brugge, supplemented by about hundred other pieces on loan from galleries and museums both at home and abroad. They paint a fascinating picture of the way in which justice and the law were represented in art during the Ancien Régime.
Vanessa Paumen works at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges as the coordinator of the Flemish Research Center for the Arts in the Burgundian Netherlands. She earned a BA degree, cum laude and an MA degree in Art History, with a focus on European Art at the University of Texas in Austin. In her master’s thesis, “Judged, Beheaded, Burned: Dieric Bouts, The Justice of Emperor Otto III within the Context of Fifteenth-Century Punitive Practices,” she looked at how justice paintings functioned in fifteenth-century Flemish society.
Vanessa Paumen, et al., The Art of Law: Three Centuries of Justice Depicted (Tielt: Lannoo Publishers, 2016), 208 pages, ISBN: 978 9401440417, £30.
Call for Articles | Spring 2018 Issue of J18: Coordinates
From J18:
Journal18, Issue #5 (Spring 2018) — Coordinates
Digital Mapping & 18th-Century Visual, Material, and Built Cultures
Proposals due by 1 April 2017; finished articles will be due by 1 November 2017
Art history’s digital turn has been stimulated by the possibilities of spatial research. Spurred by the collection, preservation, and distribution of art historical data in digital space—practices that have both collapsed and expanded our own discursive geographies—scholars have exploited the potential of geospatial analysis for art historical study. These new methods are particularly promising for the study of the early modern world, which has been fruitfully understood through the prisms of connections and exchanges that crossed world regions and defied the boundaries drawn on static maps. Digital mapping platforms and applications like CartoDB, Neatline, ArcGIS, Leaflet, and MapBox have made it possible, for example, to visualize the movement of people, such as artists, through temporal and geographic space, thus allowing us to reimagine personal and material contacts in tangible ways. Moreover, the dynamic lives of mobile and fungible objects can be displayed in extended and often circuitous trajectories, thus encouraging the kind of nonlinear visual analysis that is foundational to the practice of art history. Georectification tools have further facilitated the reconciliation of historical figurations of space with contemporary visualizations, which allows competing spatial narratives to coexist productively in a digital realm, while also challenging the magisterial view offered by modern cartography.
In this issue of Journal18, we seek to feature current scholarship that relies on the analytical power provided by digital mapping interfaces for the study of visual, material, and built cultures during the long eighteenth century. How do digital humanities methods and tools shape our understanding of space and place in the early modern period? What impact might digital mapping have on our historical investigations of people, objects, and their environments? Submissions may take the form of an article (up to 6000 words) or a project presented through a digital platform that takes full advantage of Journal18’s online format. We also welcome proposals for shorter vignettes (around 2,500 words) that reflect on projects in progress or consider the potential for particular mapping methodologies for eighteenth-century art history.
Issue Editors
Carrie Anderson, Middlebury College
Nancy Um, Binghamton University
Proposals for issue #5 Coordinates are now being accepted. Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2017. To submit a proposal, send an abstract (200 words) and a brief CV to editor@journal18.org and carriea@middlebury.edu. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due on November 1, 2017. For further details on the submission process, see Information for Authors.
Exhibition | Creating History: Stories of Ireland in Art
Francis Wheatley, The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779, 1779–80, oil on canvas, 175 × 323 cm
(Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Now on view at the National Gallery of Ireland:
Creating History: Stories of Ireland in Art
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 8 October 2016 – 15 January 2017
Curated by Brendan Rooney
This exhibition represents the Gallery’s principal contribution to the Decade of Centenaries. It brings together over 50 paintings spanning the seventeenth century to the 1930s, depicting or inspired by episodes in Irish history from the early fifth century arrival of St. Patrick to the establishment of the Free State. A significant number of paintings in the exhibition are drawn from the Gallery’s collection, many of which have undergone extensive conservation in preparation for this show, such as Jan Wyck’s The Battle of the Boyne, Francis Wheatley’s The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779, and Joseph Patrick Haverty’s The Monster Meeting at Clifden. Other artists represented in the exhibition include James Barry, Charles Russell, John Lavery, Richard Thomas Moynan, Seán Keating, and Jack B. Yeats, complemented by loans from public and private collections in Ireland and overseas.
Brendan Rooney, ed., Creating History: Stories of Ireland in Art (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2016), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-1911024286, €25.
Brendan Rooney is Curator of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland, and author/editor of numerous works on Irish art, including Thomas Roberts: Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2009) and A Time and a Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life (2006).
A-Levels in Art History Retained in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland
As reported by Judith Burns for BBC News (1 December 2016) . . .
Campaigners for art history A-level say they are “absolutely thrilled” by a late decision to save the subject, which was set to be discontinued. Exam board Pearson has confirmed plans to develop a new history of art A-level for teaching from next September.
October’s decision by the AQA board to drop the subject provoked an outcry from experts who argued “society had never required its insights more” . . .
The full article is available here»
Call for Papers | Early Modern Satire
From H-ArtHist:
Early Modern Satire: Themes, Re-Evaluations, and Practices
University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2–4 November 2017
Proposals due by 4 January 2017
Early modern satire—broadly from around 1500 to 1800—is a vast but still under-examined field of representation. Although flourishing in certain periods and certain places, satire can be said to be integral to the European project, often challenging the limits of tolerance and evoking hostility but also associated, increasingly in this period, with notions of freedom and enlightenment. This conference, hosted by Gothenburg University, seeks to position satire as a mode of representation throughout early modern Europe and clarify its role in politics, culture, and religion. We seek proposals from scholars in all fields who work on aspects of satire in the period. Especially welcome are contributions that explore satire as a form of representation existing across boundaries—of territories, of genres, and/or periods. We also welcome proposals that situate satire in a wider aesthetic context, including cross-disciplinary work that seeks to address satire as a mode of for example visual representation.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
The mediation of satire. Described variously as a ‘genre’ and a ‘mode’, satire often transgresses medial and generic boundaries during the early modern period. Is satire more of an ‘intermedial’ phenomenon in certain periods and places?
The gendering of satire. Early modern satire in has been characterized as very much a male enterprise. Are there variations over time and between places, as regards for example female authorship, and in terms of form and theme, how does satire depict aspects of femininity and masculinity?
Satire and censorship. Always having had a complex relationship with authority, satire in the early modern period also saw the rise of the print medium and various attempts at regulating published output. How do censorship and other forms of regulative interventions shape satirical texts (in a wide sense)?
Perspectives on the classical heritage. Although a thoroughly investigated field, the relationship between early modern satire and its classical predecessors is still relevant as a field of inquiry. Just how dependent was early modern satire on its Horatian, Juvenalian and other role models?
Satire and religion. While relating to classical forms and themes, satire also has a complex relation to Christian religion as both a target and a formative system of belief. In what ways do changes in religious institutions and norms affect the production of early modern satire?
Satire and medical discourse. The frequent description of satire as ‘melancholy’, for example, suggests links to humoral theory and other aspects of physiology. To what extent can satire be understood in such terms?
Satire and the canon. While for example literary history has ascribed a central role to satire in the 18th century, scholarly discussions are often based on select examples and relegate others to the margin. What are the social and historical determinants of the ‘lasting appeal’ of certain satirical texts?
Keynote speakers: Howard Weinbrot and Ola Sigurdson
Presentations are strictly limited to 20 minutes in length. A 250-word abstract, a title, and a 50-word biographical statement should be submitted to earlymodernsatire@lir.gu.se by 4 January, 2017. Enquiries may be directed to this address, to Dr. Per Sivefors at per.sivefors@lnu.se or Dr. Rikard Wingård rikard.wingard@lir.gu.se. Additional information is available here.
leave a comment