The lighthouses will form trails in Cowes and Southampton before being auctioned off for charity.
Lighthouse sculptures to decorate Southampton and Cowes
Mavuno festival in Sewickley celebrates Black and Indigenous artists
SEWICKLEY ― Black and Indigenous artists from the region will share the spotlight at Mavuno, the annual festival and exhibition Sept. 15-16 hosted by Sweetwater Center for The Arts.
Beaver County ties this year include exhibited artist Marlon Gist from Aliquippa; an appearance by Day Bracey, founder of the Barrel & Flow beer festival named the nation’s best by USA Today readers; and a poetry tribute to the late Elizabeth Asche “Betty” Douglas, a Beaver Falls native and co-founder of Mavuno, launched 27 years ago.
Mavuno’s opening reception takes place 5-8 p.m. Sept. 15 in the community room at Sweetwater. Titled “In Life…,” the free exhibition showcases co-curators Deavron Dailey and Janet Watkins, and fellow Pittsburgh artists Alecia Dawn Young, Douglas J. Webster, Ernest Bey, Janet Watkins, Marce Nixon, Norman Brown and Gist, the Aliquippa artist whose work was highlighted recently at Pittsburgh International Airport.
The Friday evening event also will include a special recognition in remembrance of Mavuno founding member Douglas who died this past July at the age of 92. Several pieces of her artwork will be on display, along with a remembrance speech courtesy of the Women of Visions Collective.
The evening also will include a lineup of live poetry readings organized by Sweetwater board member Bonita L. Penn. Poets include Veronica Corpuz, Gwendolyn A. Mitchell, Doralee Brooks and Bonita L. Penn.
On Sept. 16, Mavuno moves to Riverfront Park in Sewickley, and will include a beer garden with a separate $20 ticketed entry to attendees 21 years of age and up ($25 at the door.)
Festivalgoers can purchase items from a diverse group of Black/Indigenous/People of Color artisans featuring a wide range of culinary delights, unique gifts and handmade crafts from Auberle, Cobblerworld, 2CPremium Coffee, ChefNABox, Bobbie Bonita Art, Babysitting Logistics LLC, Affordable Elegance International, Darnella Darling Delights, PGH Dumplingz, Nan’s Touch, and more.
Entertainers include Day Bracey, coordinator-curator of Mavuno, and live music from popular Pittsburgh rock band NASH.V.ILL. and dance music DJ Icy Pisces.
Mavuno takes place each September, launched as a program displaying Black art and culture from western Pennsylvania.
Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at stady@gannett.com.
Self-taught Worthing printmaker wins national competition with stunning reduction linocut print
A self-taught Worthing printmaker has won a national competition with a stunning reduction linocut print, impressing judges with its 3D effect.
World’s Largest Golden Tiger Sculpture: world record in Gainesville, Georgia
Gainesville, Georgia, United States– Located in a small park in Gainesville, Georgia, the massive sculpture of Brenau University’s mascot, the Golden Tiger, was created by Greg Johnson in 2013 and funded by Ike Belk, a fan of the university’s sports teams; the tiger is named Lucille after the wife of a former president of Brenau; it stands eight feet tall, 14 feet long, and weighs over a ton, thus setting the world record for being the World’s Largest Golden Tiger Sculpture, according to the WORLD RECORD ACADEMY.
Ruth Asawa: Solid Form Meets Thin Air
The sculptor of sublimely coiled wire helped erase boundaries between art, craft and the decorative arts. A long-awaited show of drawings at the Whitney explores her luminous connections.
Sculpture in the Wild to hold 10-year anniversary celebration
The Sculpture in the Wild will hold a 10-year anniversary celebration this weekend.The event takes place at Lincoln Community Hall Saturday Sept. 16 from 5 p.
Áak’w Rock expanding to three stages
Last Tuesday, Qacung Stephen Blanchett, NeilgaKoogéi Revels, Taylor Vivic and five staff members were seated around the conference room table at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council offices working on last-minute details for the second Áak’w Rock Festival.
But the meeting, which touched on everything from staging elements to travel plans for the musicians coming to town, wasn’t an unusual occurrence.
Aak’w Rock festival organizers meet on Tuesday at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council office. Pictured are NeilgaKoogéi Revels, in red, then Reggie Schapp to her right, followed by Rob Stephenson, Taylor Vidic, Zac Pease, Qacung Blanchett, Kathleen Harper and Phil Huebschen. (Meredith Jordan/Juneau Empire)
The group, centered by Blanchett and in various configurations, has been preparing for the Sept. 21-23 festival for at least 18 months. The festival runs every other year, opposite Sealaska Heritage Institute’s biennial Celebration event.
The much-anticipated Áak’w Rock festival this year has expanded mightily from the virtual inaugural festival in November 2021. There were 14 artists that year, 11 of whom came to Juneau to record.
This year’s Áak’w Rock will feature 24 bands comprised of 70 individual performers on three stages: Centennial Hall Convention Center, Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall, and the Juneau Arts and Culture Center building, said Revels, project director for Áak’w Rock.
“It’s an amazing opportunity for Juneau, which will see big-name acts in incredibly intimate settings,” said Revels. “Áak’w Rock is bringing a full music festival experience, including an artists’ market, food trucks, beer gardens and community space to interact with the artists.”
Headliners include Snotty Nose Rez Kids, The Hallucination and Ya Tseen.
Ya Tseen, an Indigenous rock band headed by Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax̂ born in Sitka, is among the featured artists at this year’s Áak’w Rock Festival that starts Thursday, Sept. 21. (Photo courtesy of Ya Tseen).
The tribes and JAHC are equal partners in the event, said Blanchett, who works as creative director of Áak’w Rock and education director for JAHC. This year’s budget is about $500,000, with about $100,000 of it used to pay the artists.
“Payment is important because so often Indigenous artists are underpaid for the music performances,” said Revels.
The festival is a team effort, Blanchett said.
“The idea was born from a meeting between myself and President Richard Peterson in late 2019,” he said, referring to Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska President Richard Chalyee Éesh Peterson. “We discussed the possibility of the Tlingit and Haida and JAHC partnering on something significant within the arts and culture field, and we landed on creating a festival.”
The community took to the concept immediately, he said, with various people serving on the committee for the first event and volunteering in other ways. The group “included artists, culture-bearers, and community leaders from several sectors of the southeast community,” said Blanchett.
Qacung Blanchett is less forthcoming about the role he has played in the creation of the Áak’w Rock Festival.
“He is a great organizer and great at bringing people together,” said Revels. whose full-time job is special project manager for the chief operating officer of Tlingit and Haida. “Qucong has made the dream happen with the full support of President Peterson.”
The idea for an Indigenous music festival goes back a lot farther than 2019, said Philip Blanchett, his brother.
“This is Qacung’s dream, his work,” he said. The two partnered together in Pamyua, a band first formed in 1995, which is also playing at the festival.
Pamyua blends Inuit drum/dance melodies with R&B vocal styling and arrangements presented through music and dance. It was also a platform to share Indigenous knowledge and history.
By the late 1990s Pamyua was established and touring, but when the brothers were home they worked in cultural education at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, Philip Blanchett said.
“It was a great place to dream of things to have in the community, to uplift our community, to showcase our community, like what we do with Pamyua, but do it in festival format.”
But efforts to get a festival started in Anchorage didn’t get very far.
“Anchorage is a tricky town. Sometimes it’s really difficult to get different parts of the community talking with other parts of the community,” said Phillip Blanchett. “I don’t know what it is, but it didn’t work.”
It was after Qacung moved to Juneau that everything shifted with the idea, Philip Blanchett said. “He really appreciated the community. There was a go-to attitude when it came to cultural inclusion.”
But his brother also had knowledge of both elements needed for Áak’w Rock to come together. “He was in touch with the local Indigenous culture and community, and he was working with the arts and culture community.”
Watching Áak’w Rock come together has been gratifying, Philip Blanchett said. He took “a lot of residual pride” in seeing the virtual production in 2021. “It built upon the essence of Pamyua, but had spread farther with other artists and in engaging the much wider community.”
This year has been “exciting,” he said. “We all know this needs to happen, but it wasn’t until I saw the lineup with my own eyes — I know a lot of these musicians — that it really hit me.”
The momentum is huge but it isn’t because the time has come, it’s because it’s overdue, Phillip Blanchett said. The festival promotes Indigenous music and artists, but it also provides something of real value and depth to the community.
“The greater community gets to benefit from all of this beautiful effort, all these expressions of ceremonial art and music and prayer,” he said. “This is what it means to honor the past, right now in the moment — where you can see what it means to the future.”
Know & Go
What: Áak’w Rock Music Festival
Where: Centennial Hall Convention Center, Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall, and Juneau Arts and Humanities Council
When: Sept. 21-23
Cost: Day passes are $75; three-day/weekend passes are $150. Two weekend passes are available for $250.
Tickets: https://aakwrockfest.com/tickets
Youth Jam: Sept. 20, 6-9 p.m., Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall. This event is sponsored by Goldbelt Heritage Foundation and free to the public.
• Contact Meredith Jordan at meredith.jordan@juneauempire.com or (907) 615-3190.
Royal photographer reveals the unexpected shoes the late Queen wore underneath her robes
Royal photographer Julian Calder has revealed the behind-the-scenes preparations that were involved with getting the late Queen ready to be photographed.
The portrait connoisseur told HELLO!’s A Right Royal Podcast, which you can listen to below, about the surprising footwear that the late Queen wore for the Chief of The Chiefs portrait. The monumental photograph was snapped on the grounds of Balmoral Castle back in 2010.
Bid farewell to the idea of dainty little shoes; Queen Elizabeth had replaced satin with stompers whilst treading the grounds of her beloved Scottish residence.
“She was wearing walking shoes underneath her robes,” Julian tells HELLO!.
He recalls the late Queen’s agreement to the portrait, which came under the condition that the robes stay dry. “She said, ‘Right, we’ll do this. But make sure that the robes don’t get wet.’ So with her blessing, we went off and we did it.”
© PA ImagesAnd indeed, Julian and his team went to great lengths to ensure the protection of the royal robes. Hidden from the camera’s eye is a sheet which paved an invisible platform for Her late Majesty, keeping her safely separate from the Scottish dewiness.
Julian tells HELLO! of the challenge of finding an accessible landscape for the late monarch whilst also ensuring it fulfilled its fundamental purpose.
© PA Images“When you’re doing a figure in landscape, the figure must dominate the landscape. But the landscape has got to be very sympathetic with putting the figure in there.
“And it all worked.”
Indeed it did, with Queen Elizabeth II captured in a striking vow of strength and authority whilst she radiates beneath layers of emerald green.
© Getty“She wanted to see it,” Julian says. “She looked at everything, but she didn’t quite understand why she’s standing there in the road. I think in the end she accepted it, that it was a significant portrait, and slightly different from most of the ones that she had done.”
Elsewhere, HELLO!’s royal editor Emily Nash talks about Balmoral, King Charles’ first summer there as monarch and why it’s such a special place for the young kids of the royal family.
Native species, Oregon City landmarks to grace art on public restroom
A beaver’s carpentry skills and a seal trying to capture a fish got the attention of Oregon City commissioners as the city selected two artists to design panels for the new Downtown Public Restroom.
Lucas Nickerson, an OC-based artist, designed the side panels, and Oregon resident Desarae Guyton designed an illustrated map for the restroom. Nickerson’s design will be displayed on three panels that includes a beaver using its teeth to carve a mini-Municipal Elevator.
Sotheby’s lands $400mn Emily Fisher Landau collection
Sotheby’s has announced it will be offering the $400mn-plus collection of about 120 works that belonged to the Manhattan patron of the arts Emily Fisher Landau, who died in March, aged 102. Two dedicated auctions, on November 8-9, both guaranteed, should give the art market a necessary boost after a weaker season before the summer break.
A longtime trustee of and significant donor to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fisher Landau stands out as “one of the foremost female collectors of the 20th century”, says Brooke Lampley, global head of Sotheby’s fine art division. “She bought like a museum, as if she had its benefit of hindsight.”
Fisher Landau began collecting art in earnest after a jewellery theft from her New York home in 1969 resulted in a hefty insurance payout. Her collection at Sotheby’s spans major postwar artists — including Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and Georgia O’Keeffe — and more recent success stories, such as Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin and Mark Tansey.
Sotheby’s top estimate by far is reserved for Picasso’s “Femme à la montre”, a bold painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter from the artist’s celebrated year of 1932, priced at more than $120mn. Fisher Landau bought the work in 1968 from Pace.
There are more works in the collection, some of which are being kept by Landau Fisher’s daughter, with others expected to come to market, though Sotheby’s could not confirm.
Picasso is the star of a different sort of sale this season — that of the Dutch couple Pieter and Olga Dreesmann, who are offering 32 of the artist’s works on paper, ceramics and sculptures through Ward Moretti. The exhibition opens in London on October 9, before travelling to the gallery’s new space in Paris and then to New York, where co-founder Emma Ward has rented a gallery on the Upper East Side for the show (November 6-18).
The earliest work in the collection is a drawing of Picasso’s friend and fellow young artist, Carles Casagemas (1899-1900), used as the image alongside the sitter’s obituary after he died by suicide in 1901. A sheet-metal sculpture, “Tête d’homme barbu” (1962), is the latest work in the exhibition, with other highlights including an unusually tender drawing of Dora Maar from 1937, bought from the sitter’s estate in 1998. Such intimate works “could get lost in an auction environment”, Ward says.
The Dreesmanns say they are selling the works to “begin a new chapter in our lives as collectors”, something they have done before, with the £25.3mn sale of their Dutch Old Master paintings in 2012. Their Picasso collection is valued at more than $40mn, Ward says, with individual prices ranging from $12,500 to $3.5mn.
Christie’s has landed Paula Rego’s majestic two-part pastel “Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’” (1995), which it will offer in London next month with an estimate of £2.2mn-£3.2mn — it would mark a record public price for the Anglo-Portuguese artist. The work was originally commissioned by London’s Hayward Gallery for its 1996 Spellbound: Art and Film exhibition.
Rego used her favourite model, Lila Nunes, for the ballet dancers, who come across as “deeply human and rooted, with a real physical presence”, says Tessa Lord, Christie’s interim head of postwar and contemporary art. Rego is a relative rarity at auction, partly accounting for what Lord describes as her being “slightly undervalued” on the public market. Her record stands at £1.1mn, made in 2015 for “The Cadet and his Sister” (1988).
Stuart Shave will open the first international outpost of his Modern Art gallery in Paris, joining the incoming Hauser & Wirth and Mendes Wood in the French capital next month. Modern Art’s 2,000 sq ft, second-floor space will be in a Haussmann-designed building on Place de l’Alma in the city’s central eighth arrondissement.
Shave says that the move has been in the planning for a few years — “most of my artists don’t have representation in Paris” — but that it wasn’t a Brexit-motivated decision. The aim is for the Paris gallery to “complement” what he is doing in London, given the proximity of the two cities, he says. The UK capital, where he has two galleries, is “still the best city in the world for contemporary art”.
Each location will function very differently, Shave adds — the Paris gallery will host about three shows per year, versus more than a dozen in London, and will be by appointment only. He opens on October 16 with a group show including Eva Rothschild, Mohammed Sami and Sanya Kantarovsky. Modern Art is not joining this year’s coinciding Paris+ par Art Basel fair as, Shave says, “I am really mindful about what we take on.”
The London gallerist Jonny Tanna, founder of Harlesden High Street, is behind what he is calling a “new non-fair”. Minor Attractions groups 20 galleries across two locations in Soho and London Bridge during Frieze week (October 10-15). Tanna says that the non-fair aspects include free entry and a more informal, socially focused event. “We’ll put up the works and have a party,” he says. Tanna compares the vibe to the recently founded, and well-received, Basel Social Club.
Tanna’s inspiration came from his own experience of the art world, which he joined after battling what he describes as “a gambling problem for 10 years”. Volunteering in galleries afterwards, he initially found “a lot of snootiness in a world that was hard to navigate” and set out “to do the opposite and erase elitism”.
Tanna is, however, delighted that Harlesden High Street has been accepted into the hallowed halls of this year’s Frieze London. Here, he will present a project that replicates the set of the US programme The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Show, a long-running community TV show that used puppets and songs to spread the word to children. It will have works by recent graduates Hamed Maiye and Mattia Guarnera-MacCarthy (under £10,000), as well as the artist — and the show’s puppeteer — David Liebe Hart. Tanna will also show in the London Bridge venue of Minor Attractions (called Cornershop), with the painter Savannah Marie Harris (£6,000-£12,000).
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter
