"Transforming broken skateboards into drinkable water:" Barcelona meets Africa

Video focusing on the volunteer work of John French, an Australian artist (and friend of mine) living in Barcelona. MOSS, the skating group organisation he leads is helping to create new water resources for townspeople in Swaziland/Eswatini, Africa.

"New Book Details the Lives of Vincent van Gogh’s Sisters Through Their Letters"

L to R: Anna, the eldest van Gogh sister; Elisabeth, or Lies; and Willemien, the youngest, who was better known as Wil (Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Wikimedia Commons under public domain)

  

"Much ink has been spilled about Vincent van Gogh’s relationship with his younger brother Theo, an art dealer who steadfastly supported the painter’s career even as his mental health deteriorated toward the end of his life.

Comparatively, far less has been said about the lives of the artist’s three sisters: Anna, the eldest; Elisabeth, or Lies; and Willemien, the youngest, who was better known as Wil. Now, reports Dalya Alberge for the Guardian, a new book by Dutch art historian Willem-Jan Verlinden seeks to help rectify this imbalance.

Aptly titled The Van Gogh Sisters, the upcoming release draws on hundreds of previously unpublished letters written by the three women, many of which are printed in English for the first time. (A Dutch version of the book was initially published in 2016.)

As Verlinden writes on his website, the work “provides an impression of the changing role of women in the 19th and early 20th century, of modernization, industrialization, education, feminism and the fin de siècle, of 19th-century art and literature, and—of course—of Vincent’s death and his meteoric rise to fame.”

Read more from Nora McGreevy article at The Smithsonian Mag.

For International Women's Day: TODAY -- Open doors to the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

 FREE FACE-TO-FACE ACTIVITIES

See website here.

Including The mark of women artists in Barcelona's post-war

"Both Wise and Valiant" -- Women writers in Spain's history

María de Zayas, novelist of the Spanish Golden Age

Credit:Wikimedia Commons

 "Centuries ago, Spanish writers challenged gender norms and barriers...

An exhibit at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid focuses on some of the most important — but largely ignored — women writers of Spain's 16th and 17th centuries.


Think "Spanish literature" and you might come up with "Don Quixote," by Miguel de Cervantes. But there's so much more to classic Spanish lit than "Man of La Mancha."

That’s the focus of "Both Wise and Valiant," an exhibition at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, which looks at some of the most important — but largely ignored — women writers of Spain's 16th and 17th centuries. 

The exhibit opened in March but closed due to COVID-19. Now the exhibit has reopened and will be on display through September.

“What is surprising is that we haven't known many of these female writers until very recently," said Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez, curator

“What is surprising is that we haven't known many of these female writers until very recently. They are better known now, in the academic world, but not so much for the greater public. I think that’s something we have to keep working on, and that’s the idea of this exhibition,” said curator Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez, who is also a professor at the University of Iowa..."

Read more (and listen to a podcast of the story at PRI here.

"MICRODYNAMICS 2020, Xavier G Solís" -- (Art in a time of Covid)

"The state of emergency confined me to my workshop, where I was putting the final touches on an installation that was to open in Barcelona on March 27, 2020. Coronavirus. I felt the collective pain touching my skin, clouding my heart.

Now in lockdown, I rediscovered a series of unpublished engravings I had made with a steamroller almost ten years ago, when the anti-austerity movement took over the country’s public squares.

Now, they revealed subtle meanings within the universe of the dynamics of abuse of power in which I had conceived them: predators feeding off disorder, sinister economic forces emerging, figures making invisible threats, examples of arrogance and cruelty.

But there are also many examples of creative solidarity. The anonymous bravery of unprecedented sensitivity that comes from looking after one other.

And in the light of coming together in this forced coexistence, I reanalysed the entire series and noticed that the engravings had grown."

More videos of his work here.

"Post-sentence:" My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today

["February 12, 2019," photo (by the artist) of a piece from the exhibit."]  

If art is to be meaningful it has to say something significant from the private or public world; one artist who does this is Barcelona’s Xavier G-Solis.

Having seen some publicity for his upcoming exhibitions in Barcelona and Vilafranca del Penedes, it’s clear to me that in his work he’s skillfully combining profound statements with more intimate acts of expression. 

In other words (like me), he sees the role of an artist as being someone who communicates in images where words alone don’t do the required job.

What appeals to me most about his creations is the pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian symbols in the exhibition, which has a title that is a play on words of “state”. Or maybe it’s more accurate to also say “State”.

In a piece that could be controversial to some, he uses shoes – his most popular item of choice over his career – in this case alternating red and yellow espadrilles previously worn by dancers at the Festa Major de Vilafranca.

These traditional Catalan shoes are shown with a military-style sword skewering through them. Their hanging down laces suggested running blood and puss to me. The work is entitled “February 12, 2019”, the date when the pro-independence political prisoners’ trial began.

This is what has been termed as a post-sentence installation, arranged alongside some engravings made with an open-casting machine on bare ground: a brutal and forceful technique that the artist hadn’t used since 2012, when the outraged “Indignats’’ occupied the Catalan capital’s most well known public square (as well as Xavier’s attention.)

Next to this are two pieces entitled “Europe”, including a bank safe that has a combination number lock forgotten years ago. Who knows what’s inside. As well as the promise that visitors are going to have the opportunity to manipulate one of the exhibits, the artist has also been scheduled to do some kind of performance in the gallery.

G-Solis, a former lecturer in philosophy, told me: “If you want to understand my work, you may have to start by thinking about the history of the human, the history of the power of man and how it began with the technique of making fire and continued with the gesture of getting on top of the world and other humans: the powerful high classes began to wear skins under the feet or some kind of sandals for ceremonies. Finally, footwear was globalised as a sign of socialisation: repression, distance, simulation, psychological protection, ostentation. All characteristic of the worst kinds of power.”

And that is exactly what I personally want from art, in any of its forms: substance.

We are living in an age where, sadly, the written word is carrying less weight as an important way to influence minds and actions. Increasingly, visual artistic expression is the preferred means for a younger public to get their ideas, and in the case of video, also their information and inspiration.

In private art galleries in Catalonia, there are still legal ways to make our chosen points. If that becomes dangerous or impossible in this European country, then we are no longer living in a place that can claim to be a democracy.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2020.]

Spanish group puts 10,000 books on Melbourne's streets

 

Recently a  “Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus brought “Literature versus Traffic,” an installation of 10,000 LED-lit books, to Federation Square in Melbourne for The Light In Winter festival.

The books, recently retired from area public libraries, were given a second life as a glowing river that flowed through the square and into a nearby street. On the final day of the installation, onlookers were invited to take the books home."

See and read more here.