Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago will host “Reckless Rolodex,” a group exhibition from Jan. 13 until March 18 that celebrates the influence of the Chicago-based performance artist Lawrence Steger. Steger, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1961 and died in Chicago in 1999, will be honored by the work of...
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...
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...
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...
Sando Botticelli’s Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, painted in the late fifteenth century, is one of the most admired, yet controversial, paintings in the world. A perennial celebration of the most vibrant season, it evokes the spirit of spring through its depictions of figures from classical mythology. Standing in a grove, from left to right, we can see...
Museums don’t usually need seventeen curators to mount one exhibit, but that’s how many worked on an eclectic new show at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA). Exclusively curated by museum guards, Guarding the Art features nearly thirty works of art handpicked from the BMA’s collection. “Our security officers spend more time in our galleries and living among our...
Spellbinding views – both indoors and out – will grace the future home of the Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art at the University of California, Irvine when it opens along Campus Drive near Jamboree Road – a location UCI officials announced today. The North Campus site – which is near...
In the summer of 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. introduced the keynote speaker for the 10th-anniversary convention banquet of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their guest, he said, was his “soul brother.” “He has carved for himself an imperishable niche in the annals of our nation’s history,” King told the audience of 2,000 delegates. “I...
After years of pressure, Germany recently announced that an agreement had been reached to return hundreds of priceless artefacts and artworks that had been looted from Nigeria in colonial times and were on display in German museums. Commonly called the Benin Bronzes, these beautiful and technically remarkable artworks have come to symbolise the broader restitution...
