A new solo exhibition by Banksy, the UK’s most famous anonymous artist, has opened at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow – his first in 14 years.

The graffiti artist was drawn to exhibit in Glasgow ostensibly because of his interest in the symbolism of “Coneheid” – the red traffic cone permanently adorning the head of the Duke of Wellington statue that stands on a plinth outside GoMA. It is, Banksy says, his “favourite work of art in the UK”.

The show, Cut and Run, spans the career of the artist who has been described as “notoriously cryptic, darkly humorous … a global phenomenon, a personality without a persona, a criminal without a record, and a paradox within the world of art.”

Originally influenced by the work of Xavier Pru – AKA father of stencil graffiti Blek le Rat – Banksy has become a major player in the urban and contemporary art world, generating controversy and publicity through his distinctive and creative approach.

Popular with the public and highly valued by the art world, Banksy’s works convey powerful messages via simple but arresting images. His early transgressive artwork was seen by some as vandalism, but for many others, Banksy is an important counter voice subverting the dominant narrative of capitalism.

The Bristol-based artist is a humanitarian and peace activist, using his wealth to benefit many charitable causes. His artworks raise awareness of political iniquities and challenge social injustices, such as the war in Ukraine, refugee crises, homelessness, global warming, police violence, apartheid, misogyny and racism. These are invariably set within a satirical, witty and humorous style that often confronts those in power.

The Glasgow-Banksy connection

The red traffic cone has historically been placed on Wellington’s head by revellers to signify a great night out in the city and is now an iconic part of Glasgow’s heritage and marketing. It holds great meaning for Glaswegians in its anti-elitist and anti-establishment message, contributing to their social and cultural capital.

It’s also a reminder of the extent to which the expression of all forms of culture have been central to Glasgow’s regeneration over recent decades. First came the Burrell Collection in 1983, followed by the International Garden Festival in 1988, which built momentum towards a successful bid for the European City of Culture in 1990 – a life-changing accolade for a city notorious for its poverty, violence and the lowest life expectancy in Europe.

But the connection between Banksy and the city goes much deeper. Both have a history of actively supporting humanitarian causes. Glasgow was the first anti-apartheid city to support Nelson Mandela with a street near the South African consulate renamed to honour him while he was still in prison. It also has a proud reputation for welcoming and defending refugees, and supporting them throughout the city.

Glasgow City Council has promoted street art by commissioning and funding murals around the city which have become an urban attraction. Glasgow also hosts the annual Yardworks Festival which is an internationally renowned celebration of urban art.

Glaswegians are known for their friendliness and irreverent humour which resonates with Banksy’s works. The city has actively resourced artists as part of its cultural policy and has been named the UK’s top cultural and creative city in a landmark report by the European Commission. The Banksy exhibition will undoubtedly boost Glasgow’s reputation as a centre of creative dynamism.

What to expect

The exhibition starts with a re-creation of his studio space, featuring for the first time the stencils used to create many of his most famous works. Banksy has used these original stencils to create new versions of these works, including Kissing Coppers, which first appeared on a wall of the Prince Albert pub in Brighton in 2004.

It will also feature Banksquiat: Boy and Dog in Stop and Search, Banksy’s homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat which was displayed on a wall near the Barbican in London as an unofficial collaboration with the art centre’s 2017 Basquiat show. A critique of the often-racist nature of police stop-and-search powers, it sold in May 2023 for an astonishing $9,724,500 (£7,646,277).

The infamous shredding mechanism of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon is also showcased in the exhibition. In 2018, just after it was purchased at auction for £1 million, the canvas was passed through a secret shredder hidden inside the frame, leaving the bottom half in tatters with only the solitary red balloon untouched.

Three years later this iconic artwork was renamed Love in the Bin and auctioned at Sotheby’s for a mind-bending £18,852,000.

A more recent work from his Borodyanka Ukraine series, a stencil of a young female gymnast performing a handstand, balancing on a damaged building in Ukraine, is also on show. While creating this work on a bombed-out building, a local resident remonstrated with Banksy and threatened to call the police.

Banksy has been in the vanguard a new art form that was birthed in street art but has matured to include a strategic use of different kinds of media – graffiti, film, performance, digital and social media – all of which have the capacity to maximise the impact of his message in real time with a global reach.

It feels significant that Banksy has chosen a once-blighted Scottish city that redeemed itself through the arts for his first show in more than a decade. A shared sense of humour, humanitarian values and a disregard for the establishment mean Banksy’s show will be well-received in Glasgow.

During the lead-up to Pride Month, the news cycle has been dominated by an uproar against consumer brands’ supposed championing of queer causes. This cultural upheaval seems inevitable given the corporatization of Pride along with hollow marketing gestures and misdirected virtue signalling. At least we have great art shining a light at the end of the tunnel of bad beer and big box stores.

Here is a selected round-up of cool queer-centric shows currently on view in New York City. They’re all devoid of rainbows—most just happen to be up during Pride Month and represent a broad spectrum from high art to low brow.

For a varied gallery crawl that takes you from downtown to Brooklyn, be industrious and see them all in one day!

“Purple Prose” at Marianne Boesky Gallery

John Burtle, High Tide or/and There is Sooooooooo Much, (2023) Copyright: © John Burtle. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.

There’s more than meets the eye in most of the pieces on view in the group show “Purple Prose.” In Felix Beaudry’s The Glob Mother and Lazy Boy, two knit grotesqueries recline in a state of sloth on a hideous Archie Bunker 1970s couch—it is a work that is amusing at first, before it becomes unsettling. Elsewhere, Borna Sammak’s Gluck is an entrancing still-life of a chalice overflowing with vines and flora on black canvas, deftly made by combining beach towel remnants and embroidery. Upon closer inspection, Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s turgid oil abstraction has a hopeful glimmer of an embedded shiny swath of glass beads. John Burtle’s intricate red ink fantasia is crammed with narrative.

Organized by Kory Trolio, the exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery is queer in the modern sense: transgressions lean more towards psychological reveries than flagrant sexuality, and the definition of queer is really whatever one makes it. The show veers from ruminative at one turn to brutal at the next. Its title, “Purple Prose,” was derived from a term describing an overly embellished writing style. In that sense, high-drama is what links the artworks on view.

The gallery also deserves a special Bud Light toast and props for serving “wieners and fudgsicles” at the opening!

The group show “Purple Prose” is on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, New York.

Juan Pablo Echeverri’s “Identidad Perdida” at James Fuentes

Juan Pablo Echeverri, detail from the series miss fotojapón, 1998-2022. © The estate of Juan Pablo Echeverri, courtesy of James Fuentes, New York and Between Bridges, Berlin.

The show’s apt title translates as “Lost Identity,” and the Colombian artist specialized in consciously losing his, gleefully hopscotching between personas. The centerpiece is a portion of miss fotojapon, Echeverri’s 24-years-in-the-making opus, a daily self-portrait series that began in a photo booth and later segued to digital camera documentation. The project was prematurely halted upon the artist’s death in 2022 due to malaria at age 43.

But like Echeverri’s art practice, the exhibition isn’t so much a requiem as a celebration. His wry video work—an assortment of these play in the gallery’s lower level—is particularly exuberant. In the 2009 gem holiGay, the viewer encounters a gay beach proliferated with archetypes (all played by Echeverri, of course) frolicking in the surf, lip-synching to Madonna’s “Holiday.”

The exhibition (held jointly with an offshoot at Wolfgang Tillmans’s project space Between Bridges in Berlin, Germany) solidifies that Echeverri wasn’t just a distinct voice but a one-man chorus.

Juan Pablo Echeverri’s “Identidad Perdida” is on view until July 28 at James Fuentes, 55 Delancey Street, NY.

Silvia Prada’s “Obsessions,” featuring Coco Capitán, at Viso Project

Silvia Prada, Cahier d’Ombres, set of three (2022). Courtesy of the artist.

The Spanish artists Silvia Prada and Coco Capitán teamed up for a sexy interlude of 1990s pop culture that isn’t so much a campy hodgepodge as it is an encapsulation of the gay male mindset of that era.

It’s also autobiographical. “I never consumed lesbian culture the way other lesbians did,” Prada says, her aesthetic perennially a laser-guided missile of what gay men want. “My identity culturally is more of a gay man. I grew up in my father’s hair salon for men and around men’s beauty. I socialized around gay men.”

The show consists of collages and illustrations, punctuated with Capitán’s photo embellishments. The specter of Calvin Klein looms large. There is bootleg Obsession merchandise and a porcelain replica of the iconic bar soap of the quintessential 1990s scent—the latter, an edition of 30, was Prada’s first foray into sculpture. There are also 12 delicate drawings of Princess Diana. How does she fit in to all of these sultry goings-on?

“In the 90s she was dressing so gay and she was rebellious,” Prada explains. “She was reacting to society. I was so into her looks with the big sweaters, jeans, and biker shorts. She made me feel gay. She was so queer and ladylike at the same time. It connected to Madonna’s Sex book and other things I was consuming at the time and I said, ‘Ok this makes me horny.’”

Silvia Prada’s “Obsessions” is on view at Viso Project, 46 Pearl Street Brooklyn, NY 11201.

Brontez Purnell’s “Anti-Alter Ego” at Trotter & Sholer

An installation view of Bronze Purnell’s “Anti-Alter Ego.” Courtesy of Trotter & Sholer.

“Cancel Me?!?!?!?!? LOL – HOW BITCH!?!?!?” captions one of the tamer works in Purnell’s debut art show, which is like stepping into an immersive version of a black-and-white Xeroxed punk zine. Purnell, an accomplished musician, choreographer, and writer, brings his riotous DIY sensibility to whatever medium he indulges in. “I try to claim femme but really I’m just horny and violent and often misunderstood” is scrawled in lipstick across a mirror in a color photograph self-portrait. There’s no nihilism in his anarchy.

Purnell combined his diverse creative talents for a performance on the opening night, which featured the artist writhing nude in a pile of paper. On July 6, a film component, 100 Boyfriends Mixtape (a companion to his transgressively hysterical 2022 novel 100 Boyfriends) will screen at Performance Space New York and is, expectedly, not for the feint of heart.

Brontez Purnell’s “Anti-Alter Ego” is on view until July 8 at Trotter & Sholer, 168 Suffolk Street, NY.

“A District Defined: Streets, Sex, and Survival” at 401

Lynsey Addario, untitled (1999). Courtesy of A District Defined: Streets, Sex, and Survival.

Before the High Line, the Standard, and gentrification in New York, Manhattan’s Meatpacking District was the nexus of the city’s transsexual sex trade and queer nightlife scenes in the 1980s and ’90s. It was a time when heading to the wild west meant going past 9^th Avenue and West 14^th Street. The show “A District Defined” is a poignant visual document of this moment in history, culled from the photographs of Lynsey Addario, Lola Flash, Jill Freedman, Efrain Gonzalez, T.L. Litt, Catherine McGann, Katsu Anita, and Joseph Rodriguez.

This particular era of the neighborhood is trending at the moment. (It’s a character unto itself in HBO’s new The Stroll documentary.) The once-maligned last red light district of downtown and its after hours denizens (many of whom had no choice but to be there during that era’s dismal job climate for trans people) are now being viewed with a more empathetic mindset. We’re lucky that the photographers on-hand were there to not only capture the decadence, but also the grace.

“A District Defined: Streets, Sex, and Survival” is on view until July 9 at 401, West 14th Street, NY.

Isaac Peifer, Caitlyn Jenner Smoking Cigarette Outside Malibu Beach House (2023). Courtesy of THNK1994 Museum.

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For more than a decade, Sophie de Oliveira Barata has been at the helm of The Alternative Limb Project, a Lewes-based studio that makes custom prosthetics for people with amputated or missing appendages. The designs range from uncannily realistic to fantastic, fairytale-like creations that fall at the intersection of art and medicine, a unique meeting point she discusses in a new interview with Colossal.

Some people have an idea that it will just be exactly the same all the time, and your body is a living organism, which is impossible to replicate. In some ways, it’s easier to go for an alternative because you haven’t got to match something that’s just changing all the time.

In this conversation, de Oliveira Barata speaks about the young girl who helped inspire the project, how cultural conceptions of physical disability have evolved, and the imaginative, empowering possibilities of alternative limbs.

Read the interview.

“Anatomical Leg”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Interview: Sophie de Oliveira Barata on The Alternative Limb Project and the Nexus of Art and Medicine appeared first on Colossal.

Ten years ago, Atlanta-based photographers Kahran and Regis Bethencourt of CreativeSoul Photography noticed a lack of diversity in the industry, and they seized the opportunity to represent and celebrate the myriad styles and stories of African heritage. In their ongoing AfroArt series, the Bethencourts embrace the versatility of Black hair by sweeping it into towering updos and beaded braids. Young models are bedecked in sequins, ruffles, and shells that are often paired with elaborate garments made of vibrant Dutch wax fabric.

As the series evolved, CreativeSoul dug deeper into fairytales and folklore—some traditional and some of their own imagining—inspiring a collaboration with Disney for a collection of dolls that reframes classic princesses as African royalty. Replete with gowns made of brightly patterned textiles, iconic characters like Snow White and Cinderella wear colorful bows in their long braids and afros.

Elaborate hairstyles, embellished costumes, and bold backgrounds characterize CreativeSoul’s portraits. “When it comes to sourcing outfits and generating ideas for each image, we work closely with parents and kids themselves in the creative decision-making,” they tell Colossal. “We typically ask each child, if they could have the shoot of their dreams, what would it be? We believe in giving them a voice and allowing their personalities to shine through in the final results.” From the initial idea, they brainstorm themes and source inspiration from literature, culture, and the children’s individual interests.

The Bethencourts also just released Crowned, published by St. Martins Press, as a followup to their first title Glory in 2020. The books are “a celebration of black beauty, featuring stunning imagery that showcases the diversity and uniqueness of black children,” the pair says, sharing that “we aim to inspire young readers and instill in them a sense of pride and self-love.”

Upcoming projects include two new books, one celebrating Black history and another focusing on Christmas. You can snag a copy of Crowned on Bookshop, and find more on CreativeSoul’s website and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Channeling African Heritage and Fairytales, CreativeSoul Photography Empowers Black Children in Captivating Portraits appeared first on Colossal.

PR Firm Saints Art Appoints Harbinder Singh as VP-Marketing & Strategy

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Saints Art Harbinder Singh VP-Marketing & Strategy

Saints Art, PR & Strategic Communication agencies, has appointed veteran advertising and marketing expert Harbinder Singh as its Vice President for Marketing and Strategy. In his new role at Saints Art, Singh will lead the agency’s marketing & outreach campaigns while strategizing process optimization for maximal profitability, supporting business partnerships, and strengthening operational efficiency.

Puneet Sharma, Co-Founder and Director, Saints Art said, “We are glad to get Harbinder on board, for he brings on the table an immensely rich experience of more than 3 decades and a deep understanding of diverse markets. We are confident that he will help us attain our growth objectives while delivering excellent results in terms of marketing strategies and positioning.”

Harbinder Singh, said, “Saints Art has over the years evolved as one of India’s most reputed PR agencies, handling PR mandates and procuring due share of voice for multiple leading brands across varied industries and domains. It gives me immense pleasure to join the team, and look forward to working with all stakeholders to position our services as a leader in the industry.”

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In his new role Singh will lead the agency’s marketing & outreach campaigns while strategizing process for maximal profitability, business partnerships & strengthening operational efficiency.

TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) – Disability EmpowHer Network and the Toledo Museum of Art are hosting the second annual Disabled Women Make History (and Art) event in celebration of the 24th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court Olmstead decision.

The event will take place on June 24 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of Art.

According to TMA, on June 22, 1999, the United States Supreme Court held in Olmstead v. L.C. that unjustified segregation of persons with disabilities constitutes discrimination in violation of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Court held that public entities must provide community-based services to persons with disabilities. The two plaintiffs were women with disabilities and one of the women, Lois Curtis, was an artist.

TMA says Disabled Women Make History (and Art) celebrates the Olmstead decision as well as all women artists with disabilities and the incredible impacts they make on the world through their art and advocacy.

As a part of the celebration, women artists with disabilities from across the country were invited to submit their artwork for consideration to be displayed at the event. 20 artists were selected and invited to showcase their work. In addition, the artists receive admission to two exclusive workshops to enhance their skills in marketing themselves and their artwork.

Last year, 17 women artists with disabilities were featured, including artists as young as 16 years old.

“I’m so honored and thrilled to be partnering with Disability EmpowHer Network on this event for the second year. Last year’s Disabled Women Make History (and Art) event was an important moment for me. It was the first time in my role at the Toledo Museum of Art that I saw so many people with varying disabilities in the Museum all at the same time,” said Katie Shelley, Conda family manager of access initiatives for the Toledo Museum of Art. “I’m looking forward to continuing this event and providing the space for these artists to share their stories.”

Stephanie Woodward, executive director of Disability EmpowHer Network, said women artists with disabilities often do not get the credit and recognition they deserve.

“There are so many talented disabled women artists in the world, and we simply do not see enough of their work,” said Woodward. “This event helps to uplift these incredible artists, not only by displaying their work in the Museum, but also by helping them to learn new skills to market themselves and their art.”

To learn more and to attend the event, contact Katie Shelley at KShelley@toledomuseum.org or Stephanie Woodward at Stephanie@DisabilityEmpowHerNetwork.org.

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Vibrant Hawaiʻi has been selected to join the second cohort of One Nation One Project, a national initiative that focuses on the transformative power of the arts to heal and strengthen communities.

The partnership of artists, local governments and community health providers contributes toward a more equitable recovery and improved well-being across America, according to the initiative.

Vibrant Hawaiʻi’s 2022 Economic Development Strategy lifted art and performing arts as a strategic area of focus to achieve community healing and wellbeing.

“So many strategic plans are developed and then sit on a shelf,” said Janice Ikeda, executive director of Vibrant Hawai’i. “To see the plan that was developed in partnership with over 300 community members come to life is really incredible.”

Hawaiʻi Island-based artists can apply for the One Nation One Project – Hawaiʻi Artist Fellowship, which will support up to 12 local artists in creating art that enhances collective well-being, celebrates diverse stories of home and culture, and builds community resilience and social cohesion.

Selected artists will become part of the national One Nation One Project cohort centered around the prompt: “No place like home.”

Hawaiʻi Island artists of all backgrounds and artistic disciplines can apply, including storytelling, visual art, music, theater and traditional arts. To ensure representation and inclusivity, the goal is to select one artist from each district. To apply, click here. The deadline to apply is July 14, 2023.

Art fellows will engage in monthly fellowship gatherings, both in-person and via Zoom to develop relationships with fellow artists and learn from industry experts in the areas of marketing, budgeting and maintaining wellness while working.

Artists will receive a quarterly stipend of $2,000 to support their participation and bring their artistic visions to life.

To learn more about the application process and join the Vibrant Hawaiʻi One Nation/One Project-Hawaiʻi Artist Fellowship, please reach out to us directly via email at [email protected].