What obligation does a portrait photographer have to their subject? Is it their duty to cast that person in the best light, or the most revealing light? As chief curator at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, I have worked with the images of fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon on a handful...
1 January 2023 marked the centenary of the birth of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker hailed as the “father of African cinema”. Over the course of five decades Sembène published 10 books and directed 12 films across three distinct periods. He has been celebrated for his beautifully crafted political works, which range in...
Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently dismissed Erika López Prater, an adjunct faculty member, for showing two historical Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammad in her global survey of art history. Following complaints from some Muslim students, university administrators described such images as disrespectful and Islamophobic. While many Muslims today believe it is inappropriate...
Nina Childress sits down with Thomas Chatterton Williams to discuss painting, punk, and the politics of bad taste. The French-American artist Nina Childress has built a decades-spanning career around the indefatigable interrogation of ‘bad’ art and taste. Shaped by the rebellious spirit of punk rock, her approach has always been heterodox and fluid. Since the...
As his solo exhibition opened at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the artist explains his fascination with the evolution of living species. ‘I made Error (2022) this summer, for a group exhibition at the CENTQUATRE-PARIS, focusing on the theme of seeds. As in all my work, I wanted to tell a story: the story of seeds, from...
In 2017, after a year of studying photography and fine art at Parsons School of Design in New York, Nigerian-born painter Stephanie Unaeze had a decision to make. She could choose to stay in the US and pursue a career there. After all, in just one year, she had already shown in two group exhibitions and hosted...
Located in the low-lying islands in the Bay of Bengal, the Sundarbans straddle the border between India and Bangladesh and cover more than 1 million hectares, making them the world’s largest single contiguous mangrove swamp. A Ramsar site added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1987, they are home to a wide range of...
At LVMH, fashion and leather goods are the name of the game. While soft luxury is the clear bread winner for the group – driving almost 50 percent of its $71.5 billion in revenue in 2021, the luxury giant (and similarly-situated companies) is placing increased emphasis on hard luxury, angling to bolster its Watches and Jewelry division,...
Nick Cave: ‘When I realized that I was a messenger, that liberated me from everything.’ The Chicago-based artist on working from a place of purpose In this episode of ‘Meet the artists’, Art Basel visits Nick Cave in his Chicago live-work and exhibition space. Named Facility, it serves as a cultural capsule, a place for...
The relationship between art and money has been one of the defining features of our society. From artisans decorating palazzos for the Italian aristocracy to today’s star-artists flourishing in a global art scene supported, by and large, by private collectors, the questions of who funds the producers of visual culture and why they do so...
