The impact of Covid-19 on artists. Part 3: building communities and finding inner resilience

09/04/20

Part 3: Building communities and finding inner resilience

In the third part of this five-part essay, comprising conversations with artists around the globe, we look at the impact the pandemic – and imposed isolation – is having on them in terms of community and inner resilience

In Italy, the first western country to be badly hit by Covid-19, Francesca Pasquali (b1980, Bologna) describes the situation vividly: “Helplessness, fear, confusion – these are just some of the sensations we’re experiencing at the moment. Some people are gone, others are waiting for a verdict, poised between life and death. Uncertainty walks beside me, beside us, hour after hour, day after day. However, I am convinced that in such a dark and sad period, we must find within us resources and motivation to make sure that everything starts again as soon as possible, with renewed enthusiasm and desire to do. DO! This is the imperative … My doing is in art, my welcoming refuge. I live in the countryside and my studio is a few steps from the house. I see it from the window as soon as I wake up. It just waits to get dirty, to be messed up! I am lucky to be able to continue working, pending receipt of new dates for the exhibitions that have been postponed. Postponed? Cancelled? Who can say with certainty? Today the phone no longer rings, no emails arrive except those that communicate that exhibitions, fairs and other events are postponed. The galleries are inactive; in Italy, culture was the first sector to be affected by closures. But we did not give up, we invented a new way of enjoying art, because the desire to know and see does not subside. Never before have social media and the internet been so vital a means of connection between the isolated self and the whole world. There is fear, it is tangible, but I don’t want to get overwhelmed by emotion. These are the moments in which a sense of community, of union, re-emerges, and the true values that keep a system up and running return. The same values that I try to convey with my work: involvement, activation, sharing, love for beauty. Culture is a common good, essential.”

Read the rest of part three here

The impact of Covid-19 on artists. Part 2: Self-isolation, moving online and financial implications

06/04/20

Part 2: Self-isolation, moving online and financial implications

In the second part of this five-part essay, comprising conversations with multiple artists around the globe, we look at the impact of self-isolation, either due to sickness or preventatively, and financial implications

Sculpture and installation artist Perdita Sinclair (b1978, Surrey, UK) was self-isolating when I spoke to her, sick with what was hopefully just “normal” flu. She was meant to be going on a three-week oceanography research trip in the mid-Atlantic in May; Armando Ara (b1972, Macedonia), artist, art theoretician and co-founder of neomodernism (an art movement that espouses spiritual and aesthetic values in art) was also sick and unable even to talk (and, a week later, he is now on day 14 of the virus, and was told by paramedics the other day that they could not take him to hospital as there were no ventilators available and he was not in a high risk category). Across the ocean in Canada, Julie Fiala (b1979, Ottawa, Canada) has also been isolating with symptoms. “But they refuse to test because we do not have enough tests”. As an artist whose work relies on international travel, she describes this as a “serious hurdle – the issue is that practices like performance art and all live arts depend on networks of individuals across borders.” Fabienne Jenny Jacquet (b1970s, Ajaccio, Corsica), likewise self-isolating after developing flu-like symptoms, is also worried about the impact of travel restrictions, not just of people, but of works. “I think this will have a big impact on art sales. A lot of my work ships into the US and I am not sure what travel restrictions and strain on the transport of goods will have in term of impact. Buyers in general might not want to buy art as much if there is an economic crisis looming,” she adds, “as this is not an ‘essential’ purchase.”

Read the rest of part two here

The impact of Covid-19 on artists. Part 1: Cancellations of exhibitions and fairs

03/04/20

The impact of Covid-19 on artists

When I began thinking about how Covid-19 was affecting artists, it was still early days in the UK; the government was simply advising self-isolation for those who had symptoms or had been in contact with others known to be ill. Galleries and museums were starting to close, but the majority of the public was still out and about – it was simply a case of uncertainty about the future. Elsewhere in the world – in Italy, for example – things were more extreme, with a government lockdown already in place. Over the fortnight in which I have been speaking to artists and collecting stories and opinions, however, things have been escalating and changing rapidly. Now, the UK is also in lockdown, and all museums and galleries are shut. Travel is banned unless “essential”. And this is becoming the status across the globe. 

I put out a call for artists who wanted to talk to me about how their work or practice, planned exhibitions, income, or general livelihood was being affected, and the result has been overwhelming. I have spent much of the last fortnight on the phone, Skype and FaceTime, but am aware that the situation is changing so fast that what someone told me a week ago may have radically altered in the meantime. So as to best cover the myriad stories people have shared, this essay is going to be ordered thematically and broken down into the following five instalments: cancellations of exhibitions and fairs; self-isolation, moving online and financial implications; community and inner resilience; artistic responses to Covid-19 and the prescient zeitgeist; and long-term outlook – moving online? Most of all, I want to let the artists speak for themselves, so the following will be largely constructed out of extracts of my various conversations in the artists’ own voices.

Part one: Cancellations of exhibitions and fairs

As a starting point in terms of cancellations, I was one of three international curators, along with Peter Harrap (UK) and Florin Ungureanu (Romania), to have put together an exhibition of works on paper by UK-based and Romanian artists, Beyond Other Horizons, at the Iași Palace of Culture in Romania. It opened on 1 March and was set to run until the end of that month. Thankfully, we were able to have the opening and the British Council Symposium, for which we and a number of the artists had flown over, before arriving home to the almost immediate news that all Romanian museums had been shut for the duration. We are currently working on gathering all images for online, as well as trying to obtain funding for a catalogue comprising all works, plus essay versions of the talks given at the symposium. The works, for the time being, remain on the walls of the indeterminately closed museum.

Read the rest of part one here

Feature: Peter Hudson: Tate St Ives in Colour

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Book Review of The Art of Looking Up by Catherine McCormack

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Preview of Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution at the British Museum, London

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Cai Guo-Qiang: Gunpowder Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Interview with Oluwole Omofemi

23/03/20
Interview: Oluwole Omofemi


Oluwole Omofemi: The Way We Were
Signature African Art, London

12 March – 16 April 2020

Oluwole Omofemi (b1988, Ibadan, Nigeria) always wanted to be an artist, despite opposition from his family. As a child, he learned about the civil rights movement and the natural hair movement of the late 60s and early 70s from his grandfather, who, at the time, sported an afro. Omofemi now uses hair in his paintings as a metaphor for freedom and power, and as a symbol of identity. Some of his series use the more muted palette of the old masters, showing how entrenched identity and culture are in a person’s belief system; others use a brighter, pop art palette, portraying energy and strength and looking to the future. Whatever the style, he considers his work to be African at heart.

One work in particular stands out from the others on display – In Her (2019), depicting a bald woman set against a bright, almost street art-style background, covered in words such as hope, love, aspiration and queen. This piece is dedicated to Omofemi’s grandmother, who died of cancer, as well as to raising awareness of the disease, and showing that a cancer diagnosis is not necessarily the end of everything: there is always hope. Other works are dedicated to his mother, through the use of floral patterns. In general, Omofemi sees women as close to God, in their ability to love, accept and forgive. This is why the majority of his subjects – and all of those in this exhibition – are female.

I spoke to Omofemi just before the opening of his first exhibition in London, at Signature African Art’s new Mayfair venue.

Watch the interview here

Review of Hedda Sterne at Victoria Miro Mayfair

02/03/20

Hedda Sterne

Victoria Miro Mayfair, London 

29 January – 21 March 2020

Hedda Sterne. “The only female at [the] birth of abstract expressionism.” Friends and neighbours with gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and in the stable of art dealer Betty Parsons. A “great-artist”. 

Born Hedwig Lindenberg on 4 August 1910, in Bucharest, Romania, Sterne lived to the grand age of 100, dying in New York City in 2011. She knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of five or six. “I always loved Leonardo,” she told Sarah Boxer, for the New York Review of Books, shortly before she died. “Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that’s what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn’t one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.” And so that is what she became. She began to make a name for herself in Romania, but it was after arriving in New York in 1941, fleeing Nazi-occupied Bucharest, that things really began to happen. Having married and separated from a man named Fritz Stern, she adopted his surname, adding an “e”, maintaining this moniker, despite her marriage to fellow Romanian artist Saul Steinberg, three years later. 

Sterne fell in love with America and painted its modernity from every angle: “The American kitchen, the American bathroom, the American street, you know, its horizontals and verticals, its points and lines. New York was a total delight, a paradise.” In 1950, she was photographed by Nina Leen, along with 14 other artist-signatories – including Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – of an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, protesting against the museum’s aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries. The photograph, of which Sterne later said, “I am known more for that darn photo than for 80 years of work,” describing herself as the “feather on top”, was subtitled “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists” and published on the cover of Time-Life magazine on 15 January 1951. Being the only female in the picture garnered Sterne much attention – positive and negative. Lumped together with the abstract expressionists, partly because of her gallerist and dealer, and largely because of this photograph, Sterne always maintained she was not one of the group. “I was not an abstract expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible,” she told Boxer, and, as critic Grace Glueck wrote in 2006: “She has maintained a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including surrealism and abstract expressionism … Although she never developed a signature style, Ms Sterne’s explorations have produced a small universe of evocative images.”

Read my full review here

Interview with Carmen Neely

01/03/20

Interview with Carmen Neely

Carmen Neely (b1987, Charlotte, North Carolina) makes abstract, expressionistic paintings that translate poignant memories and experiences into gestures on canvas. In turn, these gestures frequently take on a life of their own, being sculpted into 3D forms, photographed and catalogued, and often, like so many other objects and imagined entities in the artist’s life, taking on names and unique personalities. Neely is a collector: of memories, of objects, of paraphernalia, of phrases. All of these things make their way on to and into her canvases, pushing the boundaries of painting, exploring its sense of timeless self-reflection, and ensuring there is a pure and open honesty in her own self-reflective work. 

Studio International spoke to Neely by Skype about her practice, the role of collecting and (re)creating characters and identities, and how to be serious about one’s play.

Read the full interview here