Remembrance Day: How a Canadian painter broke boundaries on the First World War battlefields
“I cannot talk, I can only paint.” This is how Canadian battlefield painter Mary Riter Hamilton (1867-1954) summarized her urgent response to witnessing the large-scale destruction of the First World War. The 51-year-old artist began painting the devastated regions of…
‘Melly Shum Hates Her Job’ but Europeans love this work by Canadian artist Ken Lum
Sure, she’s smiling. But the tired eyes, cramped desk and limp hand on dated office gear tell another story: Melly Shum hates her job. Perhaps she works in what anthropologist David Graeber has in mind in his book Bullshit Jobs?…
Mary Wollstonecraft statue: a provocative tribute for a radical woman
A small naked female figure in silvered bronze emerges out of a swirling mass of organic matter. There is something excitingly unexpected about it all. Although not everyone shares this opinion of the recently unveiled memorial in north London to…
Why it’s important to see women as capable … of terrible atrocities
Born in 1593, Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi was the first woman to establish herself as a successful artist in a profession long dominated by men. One of the most striking aspects of her work is the way she paints women….
why public art should be collective, commemorative and embrace abstraction
There was much upset when the first statue tribute to the pioneering feminist and author Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled at Newington Green, north London. Created by Maggi Hambling (CBE), the silvered bronze sculpture features a small naked woman emerging from…
Armenians displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh fear their medieval churches will be destroyed
A six-week war in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in the South Caucasus, ended on Nov. 9 after Russia brokered a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Under the deal, several ethnically Armenian provinces in Nagorno-Karabakh, which Armenians call Artsakh, were…
Black Lives Matter has brought a global reckoning with history. This is why the Uluru Statement is so crucial
History has been brought to the forefront in 2020. We have witnessed not only a once-in-a-century pandemic, but also a global protest movement for racial justice following the death of a Black man, George Floyd. Such protests have happened before,…
A sculptor of wind explains how to make fiber dance far above city streets
Janet Echelman says she never set out to be a sculptor of wind. But if you have ever explored Porto, Portugal, walked the streets of Gwanggyo, South Korea, or passed through West Hollywood, you might have seen her massive iridescent…
Grayson Perry: exploring what it is to be human with humour, irreverence and excess
Smash Hits, the new Grayson Perry retrospective at Edinburgh’s National Galleries, spans the 40-year career of the recently knighted artist. It’s an exhibition packed with scrutiny of the entanglements of self and society, as Perry casts up snippets of the…
often dismissed as a timid recluse, this unique and uncompromising artist painted relentlessly on her own terms
The quiet Welsh painter Gwen John was not like any other artist, male or female – she was genuinely unique. She was neither an heiress, like most unmarried modernist women, nor a conventional academic artist, like most women who had…
