“This is Bob. Bob is a big fan of clubs,” the narrator opens in the trailer for the forthcoming documentary Join or Die. “And this is a film about why you should join one and how Bob discovered that the fate of America depends on it.”

Bob, or Robert D. Putnam, is an acclaimed political scientist who has deeply influenced our understanding of how society and government work. A professor at Harvard and author of fifteen books, Putnam analyzes a swath of economic, social, political, and cultural trends using loads of data, heralding the idea of social capital, or the networks within society that enable it to function effectively.

Two-and-a-half decades ago, Putman wrote the prescient book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a powerful insight into how Americans are becoming increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures. He tilts a mirror toward our own social behaviors, and Join or Die posits that its importance has only amplified since.

Directed and produced by Rebecca Davids and Pete Davis, Join or Die follows “the half-century story of America’s civic unraveling” through Putnam’s work and interviews with numerous influential figures like Hillary Clinton, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and scholar Eddie Glaude, Jr. The film explores provocative questions like, “What makes democracy work? Why is American democracy in crisis?” Then, it poses a call to action: “What can we do about it?”

The project collates striking statistics that Putnam has gathered during his career about the incredible drops in collective involvement, such as a 50 percent decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of times Americans attended a club meeting the previous year. Or a 50 percent decline from the 1970s to the 1990s in the number of Americans who took a leadership role in any local organization.

“The places that have better government are the places that have a long history of social networks and social capital,” Putnam says. He adds in another clip, “Organization—connections with other people—is the only way you get big change.”

Check out the trailer on the film’s website. (via Swiss Miss)

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 A Forthcoming Documentary Examines How Civic Life in America Is a Matter of ‘Join or Die’ appeared first on Colossal.

Whether you’re the type of person who has oodles of sewing thread tucked away for a rainy day or a fiber art enthusiast wanting to learn some new techniques, our latest class bundle in partnership with Domestika is a perfect way to reignite your practice. By unlocking all seven courses included in Colossal Fiber: Get to Embroidery, you’ll have access to more than 17 hours of valuable instructional content to work at your own pace, with more than 84 additional resources.

A multitude of talented artists from the Colossal universe are eager to guide you along the way, ready to share their personal methods and studio habits. Emillie Ferris, Chloe Giordano, and Dani Ives expertly embroider hyperrealistic flora and fauna. Olga Prinku and Hillary Waters Fayle take found organic materials such as leaves and flower buds to the next level, while Amanda McCavour explores similar themes with free-motion stitching on a machine. And of course, Nneka Jones dives into thread blending, portraiture, and storytelling.

Find more details on Domestika, and make sure to take a look at our ceramics and paper syllabi while you’re at it.

From Nneka Jones’ Realistic Embroidered Portraiture: Tell Stories with Color

From Hillary Waters Fayle’s Extraordinary Embroidery: Explore Alternative Organic Materials

From Chloe Giordano’s Freehand Needle Painting: Embroider the Beauty of Wildlife

From Dani Ives’ Needle Felting: Paint Portraits with Wool

From Amanda McCavour’s Embroidery with a Sewing Machine

From Emillie Ferris’ Realistic Embroidery Techniques

From Amanda McCavour’s Embroidery with a Sewing Machine

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 Colossal + Domestika: Learn to Embroider, Felt, and Build Portraits with Seven Fiber-Focused Courses appeared first on Colossal.

What Cafe

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This event, which started in 2021 with the theme of “see, listen, feel, enjoy, discover,” has been well received as an opportunity to hear directly from artists about their creative process and to see their work up close. This year, art gallery cafe What Cafe, will be hosting exhibitions, sales, art performances, talk shows, workshops, and more. The venue will feature works from 22 emerging artists, mainly paintings and sculptures, providing visitors with the chance to encounter unique pieces and discover their latent love for art. Additionally, following the success of the previous edition, Avi, the “Art Museum for Your Ears,” will serve as a special ambassador, and gallery tours will also be held during the exhibition period.

Online art fairs may have been consigned to memory since the post-Covid surge back to in-person events but they can still play a significant role — particularly for galleries lower down the food chain.

Data from the winter edition of Artsy’s Foundations fair, which closed on February 14, brought compelling results for some of its 135 small and emerging galleries, which offered work priced between $300 and $6,300. At these levels, “I can imagine it is more difficult to participate in major [in-person] fairs,” says Alex Forbes, Artsy’s vice-president of galleries and fairs.

Artsy provides an online channel for dozens of physical fairs each year, but it reports that this month’s Foundations registered the highest traffic of all, with 136,281 visitors (next in the rankings was the Chicago Expo). The Foundations galleries reported average growth in ecommerce sales of one-third compared with the equivalent two-week period last year (before the fair existed), with a dramatic rise in inquiries for some artists.

These included Savannah Marie Harris, shown by London’s Harlesden High Street; Harris was the winner of the first Artsy Foundations Prize, meaning that her work is on show on a digital billboard in New York’s Times Square until February 25.

Artsy does not charge an additional fee to its galleries to participate in Foundations — they already pay a monthly membership to the marketplace and, depending on their plan, then give Artsy a 3-19 per cent commission on ecommerce sales, Forbes confirms.

Christie’s is poised to break the auction record for American painter Brice Marden, who died last year, when his two-part “Event” (2004-07) comes up for sale in New York in May, estimated at $30mn-$50mn. Marden’s existing public record is $30.9mn, made in 2020 for a work from the same series, which has just three diptychs (the third is in Paris’s Centre Pompidou).

“Event”, which has an auction house guarantee, has been in the same private collection since it was finished and has never been seen publicly since, says Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chair. The work gets its first outing in Dubai February 26-March 8, to overlap with the Art Dubai fair.

Consignments are also still coming in for the London sales season, which opens at Sotheby’s on March 6. For this evening sale, the auction house will offer three works from a collection of 20th-century art estimated between £6.8mn and £9.4mn and dominated by Francis Bacon’s “Study of George Dyer” (1970, £5mn-£7mn, guaranteed by Sotheby’s). A further eight works from the same collection will be offered during its day sale on March 7.

Galerie Michael Werner is opening new spaces in Los Angeles and Athens in May, adding to its locations in Berlin, New York and London. The Los Angeles gallery will be in a former nail salon off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and comes with a “beautiful courtyard garden”, says gallery co-owner Gordon VeneKlasen.

Courtney Treut, most recently at Sean Kelly in LA, has been hired as director, while programming for the courtyard will be organised by LA gallerist Hannah Hoffman.

The LA gallery opens with a pairing of 19th-century French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes with recent work by German painter Markus Lüpertz. As VeneKlasen says, “It’s an unusual show for LA”, where Puvis de Chavannes in particular is not that well known.

In Athens, the gallery opens with three exhibition rooms in an apartment near the Museum of Cycladic Art. The initial plan is to be “semi-private” with two shows per year and otherwise by appointment.

Thaddaeus Ropac now represents Joan Snyder and marks its signing with a recent work for its booth at Frieze Los Angeles, “Even a Melon Field” (2020-23, $210,000).

Ropac will work alongside New York’s Canada gallery in its representation and plans a large-scale exhibition in its London space in November, with a focus on new works. The American artist incorporates materials such as flowers, straw and thread into her generally abstract work and, aged 83, has recently experienced a surge in public prices. Her auction record of $478,800 was set last year, with “The Stripper” (1973), estimated at $80,000-$120,000.

Separately, Mexico City and New York gallery Kurimanzutto will represent the estate of John Giorno (1936-2019) in the Americas, working alongside three other galleries. Kurimanzutto plans a solo exhibition of the artist, also a poet and activist, in its New York gallery from March 7. This will focus on Giorno’s lesser-known Buddhist practice and, the gallery confirms, include a guided meditation. The show is organised by Anthony Huberman, who took over as artistic director of the estate — now known as Giorno Poetry Systems — last year. 

Artists have donated to Together We Thrive, an exhibition of 26 works to raise funds for the Cultural Leaders Programme, a collaboration between Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the charity Culture&.

Their project was formed in 2022 to diversify leadership through education in an art world that can still favour nepotism and good fortune. The institute has waived its tuition fees for three UK-based students per year, for three years, to join its MA programmes in London — which cost up to £28,900 each, including a field study bursary. Alongside this, Culture& provides the much-needed living-wage assistance, set at £25,000 per student.

The exhibition, at Cromwell Place until Sunday, is to support the latter, with work by artists including Peter Liversidge, Boo Saville and Hurvin Anderson, secured by Gallery OCA. Errol Francis, chief executive and artistic director of Culture&, supplies one of his own photos, of himself posing as a security guard in a museum. Works have not been individually priced but are available as raffle prizes, with donations starting at £25. All works can be seen at galleryoca.com and the raffle is open beyond the exhibition, until March 4, via cutureand.org.

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“Most of my work begins from an extremely personal place,” says Amir H. Fallah. “When I speak on politics or the environment, I start with my own experiences and try to create something that has a broader reach. It’s the only way I know to make work that feels sincere.”

Based in Los Angeles, Fallah was born in Tehran in 1979, a year of revolution and political upheaval that ultimately brought his family to the U.S. His works in the last few years reflect this early encounter with war, migration, and the ways identities are obscured, mutable, and multifaceted.

Lavish with patterns and textures evocative of ribbed, woven fabrics, the artist’s works are unabashedly maximalist and comprise dozens of allusions to biological specimens, Persian miniature paintings, architectural arabesques, cartoons, material culture, and more within a single frame. Each painting and sculpture begins with a personal narrative that Fallah widens to a broader context, ultimately translating the idea visually by scouring an enormous archive amassed during the last five years. He explains:

I go through the database and pull 25 to 30 images that generally fit the narrative of the work. From there, I move the images around, shift scale, manipulate color, and combine images until the work comes to life. The best way to describe my sketching process is to compare it to a puzzle where you have all the pieces but have to spend days assembling them to get them to fit. For some works, I make 10 to 20 variations and spend months making small adjustments before finalizing the sketch. From there, the work gets drawn on canvas, and the rest of the process is intuitive, with decisions made on the fly.

Sometimes scaling six feet, Fallah’s canvases layer bold motifs, figures, and objects in a way that has an inundating effect, both drawing the eye in several directions and confronting the viewer through their unignorable size. His subjects appear cloaked in patterned fabrics that mask their exact identities, prompting a fundamental question: what do we actually learn about someone by simply looking at their face? Just as Fallah pieces together imagery from a multitude of sources, he asks us to do the same, to search the multitude of visual information and histories tucked into his works and begin to create a rich, entwined tapestry of human life.

If you’re in Los Angeles, you can see one of Fallah’s paintings from February 24 to March 14 at Phillips for a collaborative exhibition with Art for Change. Find more on his site and Instagram.

“Holiday” (2023), acrylic on canvas, 6 x 6 feet. Photo by Ed Mumford, courtesy of artist and Shulamit/Curcio, Los Angeles

Detail of “Holiday” (2023), acrylic on canvas, 6 x 6 feet. Photo by Ed Mumford, courtesy of artist and Shulamit/Curcio, Los Angeles

“Look At The Sky Tonight All Of The Stars Have A Reason” (2023), acrylic on canvas, 3 x 4 feet. Photo by Ed Mumford, courtesy of artist and Gallery All, Shanghai, China

Detail of “Evolution Is Painful” (2023), acrylic on canvas, 3 x 3 feet. Photo by Ed Mumford, courtesy of the artist and Shulamit/Curcio, Los Angeles

“Perpetual Life” (2023), bronze, steel, and marble, 191.4 x 83.2 x 74.9 centimeters. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery All, Shanghai, China

Left: “Lost And Found” (2022), aluminum, hardware, acrylic paint, 72 x 36.62 x 25.30 inches. Photo by Alan Shaffer, courtesy of the artist and Shulamit/Curcio, Los Angeles. Right: “Empire” (2023), acrylic, aluminum, hardware 72 1/2 x 35 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches. Photo by Alan Shaffer, courtesy of the artist and Shulamit/Curcio, Los Angeles

“Unlock” (2021), acrylic on canvas, 32 x 18 inches. Photo by Alan Shaffer, courtesy of the artist and Dio Horia Gallery, Athens, Greece

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Kenyan photographer Osborne Macharia traverses the realms of Afrofuturism and Eastern African geography through his newest series, Daughters of the Rift.

Macharia’s work references the Great Rift Valley, which spans Eritrea to Mozambique. Over thousands of years, major tectonic activity has shaped the geographic marvel, as the Somali plate pulls away from the Nubian plate. The divergent boundary continues to actively separate today, resulting in dramatic landscapes, frontiers, and divisions.

Exploring the nuances of beauty and tradition that perambulate within and across borders touched by the valley, Macharia’s subjects don expressive beadwork referencing tribal communities, signifying varying concepts of beauty unique to each region.

Now based in Canada, the photographer explains how growing up in Kenya has significantly impacted his work and how he experiences the world. Committed to world-building and creating characters who uplift African culture, Macharia shares with Colossal, “We have so much history and tradition (both old and new), and it only takes one to ask ‘what if.’ You’ll be surprised as to how far your imagination can take you.”

For more work, visit the artist’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 Osborne Macharia Spans Geologic Phenomenon and Beauty in ‘Daughters of the Rift’ appeared first on Colossal.

Prismatic pools, strings of pearls, seashells, and elemental interactions characterize the work of Alexis Trice, whose oil paintings illuminate both the beauty and the brutality of nature. Sly predators take the form a spirits or totems in a dreamlike world, their tears gushing into oyster shells or glowing bodies of water.

“(This series) is about energy: emotional and molecular. And the transference and its impact when it ripples outward,” Trice says. “The water is a source of our own universal untapped emotion. Joy, trauma, fear, ecstasy, and all the feelings that bring tears, which at times we try to keep hidden away.”

Pearls, symbols of purity and wisdom, illustrate the passing of time. The artist likens the precious material’s slow growth process to a “hardened memory,” revealed upon prying open its shell. And she visualizes the “endless, crucial dance of evaporation and condensation” in zoomorphic form, each creature’s expression treading the boundary between ecstasy and agony. She adds, “This energy releases and ultimately recycles in a continuous and painfully beautiful pattern.”

If you’re in L.A., you can see Trice’s work in Potluck at Hashimoto Contemporary through March 2. Find more on the artist’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 Alexis Trice Treads the Line Between Beauty and Brutality in Otherworldly Oil Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

It’s been a long while since I visited Nedia Were’s studio: our encounters have been sporty in the immediate post-Covid season. That’s about to change as I wait to meet with him at the tony Artcaffe Gastro in the upmarket Westlands District of Nairobi. We are here to meet New York art dealer Aeon Cummings, a former JP Morgan and GE Capital VP now building his art advisory business, focussing on African and Caribbean artists. His 11,000 km flight to see Nedia and Nairobi’s art scene is a testament to the value he places on Nedia and on the undiscovered potential available here.

Nairobi is steadily developing into an important regional arts destination with its growing number of new and emerging artists gaining international acclaim – a list that includes some exciting names such as Beatrice Wanjiku, April Kamunde, Peterson Kamwathi, Onyis Martin, Dickens Otieno, Shabu Mwangi and Boniface Maina.

They join a list of established international household names from Nairobi such as the highly acclaimed Wangechi Mutu, Michael Armitage, Kaloki Nyamai, Syowia Kyambi, Chemu Ng’ok, Thandiwe Muriu and of course the award winning Nedia Were.

Born 35 years ago to a working-class family in Langas Estate in Eldoret, a laid-back rural farming town 300 km north west of Nairobi, Nedia’s mother wanted him to follow in the footsteps of his late father and be a school teacher. She wanted to give her son an easier path with job security: but he would hear none of this, resulting in a bitter falling-out. “The die was cast,” he reflects: all he had was based on a dream and a childhood hobby. 

He had grown up with no TV, toys or amusement parks. Evenings were special for him as he looked forward to his grandfather’s return from work – but he had to endure stiff competition for full attention as the old man first had to attend to reading the Daily Nation from cover to cover. The paper became Nedia’s library. He remembers stories of people suffering; and the comics that brought him joy and captured his imagination. 

With pencil and paper he took to copying the comics; and thus his dream to be an artist was born. Thus after the falling-out he set out to prove to his mother and his family that he had a better plan. He set up a roadside freelance sign-writing business: “Dickson Signs”. Making a decent living from this was tough: he charged $0.5 per word and closed most days with less than $5.

Good fortune came when friends requested him to paint their portraits. To his delight he could make as much as $5 for a 30 cm square portrait – which, in his naivety, he painted on wood with the same emulsion paint used on walls. He moved on to the tourist art business with repetitive and generic portraits of Masai people. 

In 2015, confident that he could pivot from a commercial sign writer to a fine artist, he packed his bags and headed to Nairobi. There he met Patrick “Panye” Mukabi, who took him as his mentee at the famous Dust Depo Artists Collective. He changed his “pen name” from Dickson Were to Nedia Were to signify his transition. Later in the year he had his debut exhibitions at the exclusive and affluent Karen Country Club.

Just two years later Lady Luck smiled on him as he won the respected Manjano Art Prize on his first attempt. This resulted in more exhibitions – and one of the pieces was sold at auction in the secondary market to benefit the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi.

In 2021 the doors to international art markets opened when the Mitochondria Gallery in Houston included him in a group exhibition titled “The Line Between” together with Lagosian painter Mamus Esiebo.

Causing a stir with paint

As Nedia developed his artistic voice he sought not just to show empathy with victims but to find subtle ways of challenging the perpetrators of social and political disenfranchisement – and, by extension, challenging representations of black bodies in media and advertising. 

Nedia’s Mumwamu series caused quite a stir. The title of this series of mixed-media figurative paintings and portraits is “black bodies” or “black person” in his local Tiriki dialect. It bears two hallmarks of his new visual vocabulary: his distinctive use of pitch-black colour on the faces and skin of his subjects; and his references to newsprint – an ode to his grandfather.

Seeing how powerful black faces and skin look on completion presented some soul-searching questions as to why some people go to great lengths to alter their true visual identity by skin bleaching. He took on a mission to restore people’s pride in their colour and identity and counter the dehumanisation of those with black skin – especially the deep black commonly found in the Nile and Lake Victoria region. 

In doing so he was also taking on the teaching of art schools that black pigment cannot be applied directly from the palette when painting skin tones; the artist should create the black hue by mixing colours, resulting in a more toned-down and subtle hue. He felt he had to “redeem” the black pigment from the “pigeon hole” to which it had been consigned.

His subjects thus have a visually dramatic appearance. They are always in sitting or resting poses, with a strong focused gaze from contrasting white eyes, draped in a flowery garment or lively colourful background foliage.

International acclaim

After his Mumwamu received instant acclaim, Nedia has gone on to develop an expansive oeuvre of work that has been exhibited in over 30 shows – from Miami with the Ross-Sutton Gallery and Cape Town with the Eclectica Gallery to art fairs such as Frieze, the Joburg Art Fair, the Investec Art Fair and the Florence Biennale last autumn.

One of his proudest moments was in March 2022 when his portrait of a young lady Barua Si Yangu (“the letter is not mine”) sold for £22,500 at the prestigious Sotheby’s auction house in London. Many of his works have found their way to the secondary market where, according to Sotheby’s, his average auction price is about £12,000.

According to Artsy.com, Nedia was the second-most-tracked emerging artist from Africa on their platform in 2022 with gallery prices ranging from $7,000 to $15,000. His journey, built on childhood dreams, personal muses, social circumstances and dogged self-determination has seen his dream hoist him from a backwater existence to a coveted place in the art world, challenging established art standards and defying stereotypes to champion identity and political discourse.

The acquisition of his Untitled work by the New Museum in Berlin from his 2022 “Fragments of Perceptions” solo exhibition in Houston was a major milestone. It was followed by him earning a coveted placement in the hallowed company of Amoako Boafo, Zanele Muholi, Rufai Zakaria, Yinka Shonibare, Sungi Mlengeya and Romuald Hazzoume in the landmark exhibition “4000+ Years of African Art” at the Wall House Museum on the island of St.Barts.

The logic of Aeon’s wager on this rising artist begins to make sense. It may perhaps make a lot of dollar cents for him.

Below a darkened, ice-coated sea off the coast of Greenland, a brave diver encounters the enormous, skeletal remains of minke whales. Illuminating a historical and cultural practice, the spectral image by Alex Dawson won the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year contest, drawing attention to humanity’s impact on marine mammals.

This year’s contest was the most competitive to date, garnering 6,500 submissions from around the globe. Additional winners include JingGong Zhang’s image of hormonal Zoarchias major eelpouts sparring over nests during breeding season and a shot of a famished Mahi Mahi chomping on a sardine by Lisa Stengel.

Find more and the stories behind the photos on the UPY site.

“Mouth to Mouth.” Photo © JingGong Zhang/UPY2024. All images courtesy of UPY, shared with permission

“Lonesome Drifter.” Photo © Dennis Corpuz/UPY2024

“Set Sail.” Photo © Fabiana Fregonesi/UPY2024

“Attack from Above.” Photo © Jon Anderson/UPY2024

“Aquatic Primate.” Photo © Suliman Alatiqi/UPY2024

“Window of Opportunity.” Photo © Lisa Stengel/UPY2024

“Encircled.” Photo © Sarah O Gorman/UPY2024

“Divebomb.” Photo © Kat Zhou/UPY2024

“Singled Out.” Photo © James Lynott/UPY2024

“Saving Goliath.” Photo © Nuno Sá/UPY2024

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