Climate science has a communication problem. Abstract data, figures, and projections into the distant future can be tough to comprehend. Without effective storytelling tools to convey the severity of the crisis and what’s at stake if we don’t act, it can be difficult to motivate the broader public to advocate for change.

The team at Open Planet wants to bridge that gap. A collaboration between Studio Silverback and  Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab, the new digital library contains a growing collection of climate and nature footage available for free use. Open Planet currently boasts some 4,500 clips that travel around the globe, from Bird Island off the Georgian coast to Brazil’s Jamari River to Pangti Village in western India. Documenting animals, plants, landscapes, and more, the footage is diverse in subject matter and captures visual evidence of some of the most pressing issues facing the world today. Director Colin Butfield shares:

As filmmakers, we know stories can be powerful agents of change, and with the window for action rapidly closing to address the planetary emergency, there’s never been a greater need for compelling, authentic storytelling. Open Planet will not only present the causes and impacts of climate change and nature loss but also the incredible ingenuity of those driving innovation to keep crucial sustainability targets within reach.

While some videos were created specifically for the platform, others are submitted by filmmakers, broadcasters, and production companies, and new footage is added daily. “Our immediate focus is to significantly grow the Open Planet footage library to cover a wider range of issues and regions globally so that more stories can be told to more audiences,” says Bethany Hutchings, who leads communications and content. “Crucially, our content needs to then reach changemakers around the world to deliver impact on a greater scale.”

Open Planet recently released its first collection focused on India, which has already reached more than 400 million viewers, and the full library is set to launch early next year.

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Since launching five years ago, Tbilisi Mural Fest has transformed the streets of Georgia’s capital into a vivid, outdoor gallery featuring dozens of large-scale works in myriad styles. The 2023 event—which expanded to the city of Kurasisi, as well— wrapped up this month with a similarly eclectic collection of works, including Thiago Mazza’s vividly painted botanicals (previously), a realistic rendering of a grandmother pressing dough by Sasha Korban, and Milu Correch’s touching portrait of a mother grasping her two young children. Find a selection of the 2023 murals below and check out the festival’s Instagram for more.

“Grandma” by Sasha Korban

Thiago Mazza

Telmo & Miel

Chertova Tina

“Mokhevian” by Gera 1

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Aurora Downtown will sell Cocoa Crawl mugs and buttons at the Art & Market Aurora on Saturday, Nov. 11.

The curated, indoor market hosts two dozen local makers from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Society 57, 100 S. River St.

The market, which features artisan gifts, candles, cookies, plants, jewelry, baked goods, body oils and more, continues on two more Saturdays: Dec. 2 and 16.

Visiting vendors include Biscocho’s, The Perch, 1819 Madera Designs, The Wood Crafters, Nuna Ceramics, S Designs, and several local artisans.

Admission is free. To find out more, visit Aurora Downtown on Facebook or auroradowntown.org.

The days are getting shorter here in the Northern Hemisphere, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the cheery colors of a summertime rainbow. From the studio of artist Ken Kelleher, a trio of rugs weaves bright, bold hues into organically shaped floor coverings. Hand-dyed, carved, and tufted, the vibrant designs are made with New Zealand wool and evoke rain, drips, and puffy clouds, all rich with kaleidoscopic color.

Shop the collection on Ken Kelleher Sculpture. (via swissmiss)

The Cloud Rainbow Carpet

The Drip Rainbow Carpet

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For millennia, cultures across the globe have venerated mother goddesses who embody maternal roles and symbolize fertility and cosmological creation. For the Inuit, Nerrivik is known as the sea mother and provider, and another deity associated with the sky, Pinga, watches over the hunt. In the Odinani tradition of the Igbo people in southeast Nigeria, Ala presides over the underworld and observes morality, fertility, and creativity. And in Greek mythology, Gaia is poetically portrayed as the personification of the Earth and the ancestor of all living beings.

For artist Yulia Brodskaya, the unequivocal power of Mother Earth encompasses a vibrant series of quilled paper portraits (previously) that celebrate cultural diversity and women around the world. She says:

I create from the place of honoring history and the past—drawing lots of inspiration from various cultures existing on the planet, but at the same time, making a conscious choice to bring forward a new vision of the future: a future when we, as a collective, have healed our past, released the pain, and integrated all the lessons that brought us all here to this moment in time: unified humanity—people of Gaia.

In her new pieces, Brodskaya continues to explore resilience and hope through dreamlike portraiture. She meticulously cuts, creases, and curls thin pieces of paper to build up a relief one strip at a time, adding mystical elements like swirls and geometric shapes. In “Envisage,” a human profile merges with that of a horse, while in “Mother Energy,” leaping dolphins reflect the strength, connection, and joy of motherhood.

Brodskaya portrays a future she desires, one of brightness, openness, and compassion. She says that “this is a personal exploration of how this new reality would feel like. How would it feel to interact with a human being from this version of the future?”

Find more on the artist’s website, and follow on Instagram and TikTok, where she often shares insights into her process.Yulia

“Mother Energy”

Detail of “Mother Energy”

“Envisage”

Detail of “Envisage”

“Light as a Feather”

Detail of “Light as a Feather”

Detail of “Light as a Feather”

“Starseed”

Detail of “Starseed”

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The Lamar Dodd School of Art will present its third annual Dodd Market on Friday, Nov. 17 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.. Guests can view and purchase student artwork on the first floor of Lamar Dodd, in the atrium and courtyard. The art sale will feature work from more than 140 student artists.

The event seeks to provide student artists with the opportunity to showcase and sell their work. It also provides an opportunity for the University of Georgia and Athens community to engage with local student artists.

Traditional markets usually request high fees for promoting opportunities and traveling, in addition to taking high percentages of the artists’ earnings, according to the Lamar Dodd Website. The Dodd Market allows young artists to gain experience in marketing and selling for free and keep the total amount of their proceeds.

The event is made possible by the UGA Parents Leadership Council. Because all sales go directly to the student, the Dodd Ambassadors will host a raffle of miscellaneous and UGA-affiliated art pieces to raise funds to host next year’s market.

How do you measure the success of an ‘art week’? This was the question hovering over the vibrant third edition of Art Week Tokyo (AWT), which took place 2-5 November in balmy sunshine. City art weekends, art weeks and international fairs are now an integral part of the crowded art world calendar; many collectors and curators had hot-footed it from Art Collaboration Kyoto (until 3 November) to visit AWT’s 50 participating galleries and museums. As in previous Tokyo editions, free shuttle buses for VIPs and public alike facilitated the hopping between small commercial galleries (with clusters, for instance, in the Roppongi district) and established art institutions, with watering-holes like the specially commissioned AWT Bar along the way.

Revealing the depth and creativity of Tokyo’s contemporary art scene is one of AWT’s overarching objectives, and the spotlight this year fell on 64 artists who have shaped its expression from post-war to today. Veterans like Nobuya Hitsuda (b 1941), a legendary teacher as well as painter of seemingly bare, neglected landscapes, were featured (Kayokoyuki gallery), alongside younger artists like Saori Miyake, whose uses AI-generated images to aid her lyrical reflections on the fragility of nature (Waiting Room gallery). Prices overall are still remarkably reasonable and, combined with the low value of the yen, there were many bargains to be had, especially in the $2,000 to $5,000 dollar bracket.

Generating sales is, of course, one major goal of the exercise. New to the party this year was a curated sales platform, AWT Focus, designed not only to facilitate purchases from contributing galleries but also to educate visiting international clientele and inspire a new generation of Japanese collectors. Guest curated by Kenjiro Hosaka, director of the Shiga Museum of Art, Otsu, the debut show was installed over the three floors of the private Okura Museum of Art, located within the grounds of AWT’s partner hotel The Okura Tokyo.

Showcasing 100 works by Japanese or Japanese-based artists under the theme of Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Post-war to the Present, the museum show provided a central axis and grounding for many visitors. For Hosaka, one of his curatorial objectives was “to use the format of the sales platform to explore the possibilities for a new mode of curation at a time of increasing privatisation, on the one hand, and the rise of artist-curators and collectives, for whom exhibition-making is an extension of artistic practice”.

Art Week Tokyo’s Director and co-founder, Atsuko Ninagawa, explains that the week is driven by this dual purpose: to activate the market in Tokyo while still promoting a genuine art-focused, non-profit ethos (with talks and video programmes on the menu as well). Her gallery featured an emphatically dark show by British artist Derek Jarman, reflecting on another significant theme: Japan’s long history of productive international discourse and exchange.

For Ninagawa, however, measuring AWT’s success has become ever more challenging. How do you evaluate a non-profit art project that brings together so many stakeholders: from commercial galleries, institutions, and government [Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Agency for Cultural Affairs]; from corporate partners and the multiple publics that the event hopes to serve; from fellow art professionals and collectors “all the way through to individuals who may be actively engaging with contemporary art for the very first time”? Most prominently, AWT is organised in collaboration with Art Basel (Ninagawa declines to comment on the price paid for this partnership), which brings it the expertise and the connections of the mega-fair brand. For Art Basel, AWT provides a key strategic convening point, particularly given the importance of its Hong Kong fair, and the potential for Japan to play an ever-increasing role in a sophisticated Asian art ecosystem.

“My team and I have done our best to take all these stakeholders into account in building up the structure of Art Week Tokyo” Ninagawa tells The Art Newspaper, “and I’m confident our event provides something of value to each of them. But different stakeholders have different measures of success. For the government, it’s about numbers. I don’t set the numbers myself, so I ask the government to give me the numbers beforehand [fortunately, she says, their expectations are very reasonable; last year’s event attracted more than 32,000 visitors]. For Art Basel, it’s about delivering world-class quality. For museums, it’s about promotion and bringing people to their exhibitions [ the latter included the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s vast survey of David Hockney, the artist’s first large-scale exhibition in Japan in 27 years]. Raising the public profile of galleries is also important, but of course we want to stimulate sales, and that’s the most uncertain part, because it has to be done by the galleries themselves.”

Art Basel’s Vincenzo de Bellis, a year into his new directorial role overseeing the four Art Basel fairs and exhibitions platforms, agrees that the quality and diversity of AWT’s offering is all important, but at the same time his organisation has set itself its own overarching objective: to guarantee that all Art Basel’s collaborations “have their own soul” and provide space for new discoveries. Speaking to The Art Newspaper at the Okura Hotel, he explains that while Art Basel is a major global enterprise, “in the 2020s context has become very important, and to think only through a global lens doesn’t do justice to the specialities of every place”. More and more, he says, “we and the public look for the unexpected, something that can only be found in a particular location”.

De Bellis’s initial task was to shape the leadership of Art Basel’s four fairs (Switzerland, Hong Kong, Miami Beach, and Paris) so that each fair has its own vertical leaders, allowing for even more nuanced curatorial ideas and selections. “This”, he says, ” fits exactly with our art week philosophy too. The art week model has become very popular—S.E.A. Focus and Singapore Art Week, Berlin Art Week, Art Basel Cities Week in Buenos Aires—where we highlight the local area and create a moment besides the fairs”. He describes Tokyo’s AWT Focus show as “a great discovery” in terms of a new format, allowing Toyo’s ‘week’ to combine strong city-wide gallery presentations with “A mini-Japanese art history course in one go; it is where the museum and the market blend”. Vital to the realisation of this model, he acknowledges, was Japan’s governmental support.

Such an AWT Focus-style innovation, he believes, will become more important with a generational shift in potential art collectors and the way that new technologies are used: “The more we can support understanding and learning beyond the ‘most known things’ the better,” he says, “then we can help people to become more nuanced in their collecting habits. “I personally believe that we have an important responsibility to connect collecting habits and education.” In AWT this process has begun in a private museum, and he sees no reason why it couldn’t happen in a public museum too. The fact that everything is for sale—if something resonates you can contact the contributing gallery (there are no price tags)—he finds” discreet; elegant”.

For Art Basel, the ultimate success of AWT will be measured on a longer trajectory than one of its fairs. “We are looking for more Japanese collectors, and the growth of Japanese collectors moving internationally. We saw this strategy bear fruit at the last edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, with a more significant number of Japanese collectors, and visa versa, ” he says. “And when Japanese galleries show at our fairs, like Nina’s [Atsuko Ninagawa’s] we can see if there is traction over the medium to long-term.” Cities with a strong fair presence, like London, he admits, might find it difficult to replicate the week/weekend model. “But the more organised we can all be, the better. Otherwise, we can stick with the same buyers, but the art world won’t expand.”

There are lots of other pluses to AWT’s particular model too, says Ninagawa. “One of the under-appreciated elements of Art Week Tokyo is that we don’t charge any of the galleries a participation fee, which gives them more flexibility in planning their exhibitions. A lot of our visiting curators were thrilled to discover the mid-career artist Yoko Terauchi’s simple but profound paper installation at Hagiwara projects, and I’m hearing from my international clients that they are buying works from younger galleries, which is exactly what we want to happen.”

Ninagawa also has a more personal measure of success, one that is underscored by her own experience of growing a gallery business. “Young gallerists now are under much more pressure to make money than I was when I was starting out 15 years ago, and that pressure can drive them to focus solely on saleability in building up their programs. I want to encourage them to keep doing what they believe in and to keep exploring the possibilities for art. So, through AWT we wanted to connect the established galleries with the younger galleries and have them share their resources and connections. If that enables even one gallery to keep going for another six months or so, by doing what they believe in doing, then I think that is a significant achievement.”

Why would folks want to visit the basement at Westbeth Artists Housing, which has been providing affordable places to live and work for artists and their families since 1970? The answer is bargains.

It’s the twice yearly Flea Market featuring art work and many other items from residents at the nation’s largest artists’ community, which has 384 apartments.

“The flea market started in 1984, and all of the proceeds from the flea market go to the Westbeth Beautification Committee,” Peter Madden, executive director at Westbeth, said.

The committee works to keep the entire city block Westbeth occupies, looking great on the streets and in its courtyards, which are open to the public.

Longtime resident and artist Parviz Mohassel is director of affordable art for the flea market, which is run by volunteers. He says it takes six months to collect the art works and prepare them for the sale, in many cases the work is donated by families of artists who have passed away.  

“I’m actually privileged to go to these people’s apartments after they are gone, and sometimes it brings tears to my eyes that I have to go through all of these works, and I take them, but I love it because I save them and I give it another life to another person or family to enjoy,” Mohassel said.

Mohassel says he tries to keep the pricing affordable on the artwork and doesn’t even mind if the purchaser decides to resell it.

“I have a lot of people they come here and they buy a lot of work, and then two months later I see them on eBay or I see them on the internet that they are selling them, for three, four times the price they paid, and I love it, that’s fine,” Mohassel said.

Mohassel says the market, at times, allows art to flourish beyond the life of its creator and improve Westbeth, which has provided a place for the artists themselves to live and flourish for more than a half century.

Using a vibrant array of real flowers and foliage, North Yorkshire-based artist Olga Prinku (previously) designs intricate embroideries that explode with natural colors and textures. The artist embraces experimentation at a large scale, challenging the traditionally more intimate surfaces of embroidery.

In addition to blooms and leaves, Prinku has recently focused on branches in a new series called Graft. Using primarily silver birch, she describes the works as “a reference to the horticultural process of transferring twigs from one setting to another but also a nod to the slang meaning of ‘hard work’—it takes a lot of time and patience!”

Prinku’s embroideries are currently on view in a group exhibition at Contemporary Applied Arts in London through November 18, and a piece selected for the SCAF Emerging Artist Award is on view until January at Lawrence Batley Theatre Gallery. She is currently working toward a major exhibition for Hidcote in the Cotswolds next year. Find more on her website, and follow her on Instagram for updates.

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