Imagine a feminist idyll. What would it look like? A piece of land, perhaps, bowl-shaped with forested hillsides that slope into a large, beautiful meadow? A place where only women roam? In 1976, the Oregon Women’s Land Trust (OWLT) acquired just such a spot, a vast 147 acres in size; and with that purchase, a radical feminist movement was born. Here, the trust established a ‘womyn’-only community – open to any woman, no matter her means –…
At Balenciaga A/W18, Demna Gvasalia posed an important question: why simply wear one coat or jacket when you can style 1,000 on top of one another at once? Okay, so 1,000 might be an over-exaggeration. Nevertheless, through a faux-piling of outerwear on top of outerwear to create a mille-feuille of nylon, Gvasalia produced some clever, structured garments that artfully referenced the sculptural codes of the French fashion house.
In addition to a pleasingly bulbous…
“It’s not automatic, no!”
Singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull is sitting in her Paris apartment as she exclaims this into the microphone of her mobile. She’s talking on speaker as her arms are very painful, she explains. “I just have to wait, until it happens really,” she continues; she’s talking about writing her 21st solo album, Negative Capability, which hits stores today. “I write about my life and what’s happening – it is quite…
Artists’ studios make for great stages. They possess myriad functions: lab, playground, therapist’s office. And some of the greatest photographers have used their studios to explore queerness, safely: Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Duane Michals. It’s understandable then Paul Mpagi Sepuya is continuing this tradition by setting his portraits squarely in his LA studio. As a queer black male, it’s one of the few safe spaces he has.
When British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor enrolled in college in the United States, she was confronted with the subject of race and identity in a manner she had never considered prior to coming to America. “I realised what it meant to be Black in the US, and experienced the cultural realities that came with it,” Viktor tells AnOther.
Charged with the desire to examine her roots and explore her heritage, Viktor discovered an…
As curator Ann Coxon explains, it is somewhat unconventional to place a loom at the entrance of a major Tate retrospective. “It’s very surprising to have a show that is predominantly textiles at Tate Modern,” says Coxon. “We’ve shown work by Sonia Delaunay, for example, but you start with paintings and progress through to later see that she did something with fashion, but to actually start with a loom, and for it to be all about weaving, is quite unusual for us.”
Born in Berlin in…
Textile art is having a bit of a ‘moment’. This week a major exhibition on the work of radical Modern weaver Anni Albers opens at Tate Modern, while author Katie Treggidden has just released a new book profiling some of the most exciting global talent. The timing could not be better for SOFT? Tactile Dialogues, a new exhibition on textile and fibre art in Belgium organised by Antwerp’s fashion museum, MoMu.
Textile artists – particularly women – have fought a…
Through her light-dappled portraiture and sensual still lifes, photographer Lina Scheynius offers viewers fragmented glimpses into her world and the curiosity-piquing moments it presents her with. Her work is fleshy, tactile, enticing; she hones in on texture – crumpled cotton bed sheets covering a smooth torso, fluffy white shampoo suds coating sleek wet hair – and embraces unusual crops and (usually natural) lighting to put a dreamy, almost otherworldly spin on the…
Nowadays, with iPhone cameras and Instagram stories a mere tap away, creating a visual diary of your day to day existence has never been easier, lazier or (arguably) less artful. Which is what makes Taschen’s new three-part publication of French artist Françoise Gilot’s travel sketchbooks – made during visits to Venice, India and Senegal with her second husband, the American medical researcher Jonas Salk – so particularly enticing. Gilot is perhaps best known as the lover…
