In recent weeks, a small art exhibition in New York has raised thorny questions about the link between art and propaganda, creative ownership, and the possibility of judging a work of art irrespective of its creator. Ode to the Sea opened in October 2017 in the gallery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The exhibition features 36 paintings, drawings and sculptures created in … Continue reading Prisoner Art from Guantánamo Bay
The China Institute in New York is currently shining a light on the unlikely moment when the humble mango became a symbol of revolutionary zeal. The story begins in 1968, when an ambassadorial delegation from Pakistan brought Mao Zedong a basket of fresh mangoes, their national fruit. As a symbol of his benevolence during a crucial moment in the establishment of the Cultural Revolution, the … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Mao’s Golden Mangoes
This month sees the closure of the British Museum’s chronicle of Germany, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany: Memories of a Nation is an ambitious retrospective, attempting to tell 600 years of history through objects in a single room. The country’s difficult Cold War history, divided between the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic and the Westernised Federal … Continue reading Exhibitions of the Month: From Germany to Lenin
The Saatchi Gallery in London seeks to build on its successful exhibitions of recent Russian and Chinese art – including 2008’s The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art and 2012’s Breaking the Ice: Moscow Art, 1960–80s – with a show that combines the two. While the title of Post Pop: East Meets West suggests the two sides of the former iron curtain joining in a shared … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Post Pop: East Meets West
For the rest of this month, the dreams of the Soviet space programme are alive in London. In the exhibition Beyond Zero the Calvert 22 gallery explores how Russian artists have been inspired by man’s evolving engagement with the cosmos. The works featured in the exhibition date from the 1930s to the present day, showing how artists have continued to challenge the conventions of time … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Beyond Zero
Although the most sustained and influential conflict of the twentieth century, the Cold War has no publicly-commissioned commemoration in the United States. Two years ago, one artist took that fact as inspiration for a fascinating conceptual project. In November 2012 Yevgeniy Fiks, along with curator Stamatina Gregory, formed the Committee for Tacit History. In a nod to the 1952 competition for a Monument to the … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Monument to Cold War Victory
Former US President and devoted Cold Warrior Richard Nixon is the inspiration behind a current exhibition in his home town of Yorba Linda, California. Involuntary Memories is a collection of large-scale pen and ink drawings by American artist Deborah Aschheim, woven together with text drawn from a series of oral interviews. Deborah Aschheim conducted the interviews and produced the illustrations during a 7-month residency at … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Involuntary Memories
Throughout August the Shiva Gallery at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice continues to bear witness to the political violence that blighted Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s. Its current exhibition highlights artistic responses to the brutality of Pinochet’s Chile and military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. In paintings, photographs, installations and video work artist-activists including Juan Carlos Caceres, Rodrigo Rojas … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Bearing Witness: Art and Resistance in Cold War Latin America
In 1959 Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker secretly commissioned the construction of an underground bunker in Ottawa, intended to house key members of the government and military in the event of a nuclear attack. What is now known as the Diefenbunker is today a Cold War museum and has recently hosted its first ever artist-in-residence, Gail Bourgeois. For six months from November 2013 Bourgeois was … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: To Warn Other Canadians
At London’s Somerset House Viktor Popkov: Genius of the Russian Soul is currently highlighting the work of one of the USSR’s most acclaimed artists. As one may expect of an exhibition that forms part of the UK-Russia Year of Culture, the curators are keen to present these classics of Socialist Realism as much more than propaganda. Viktor Popkov was born in 1932 and the start … Continue reading Exhibition of the Month: Viktor Popkov: Genius of the Russian Soul
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