How does a selective competition fit with the contemporary art world’s aspirations toward greater inclusivity?
Naomi Polonsky
Naomi Polonsky is a London-based curator, art critic, and translator. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art and has experience working at the Hermitage Museum and Tate Modern. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement and The Calvert Journal. Follow her on Twitter @NaomiPolonsky
Posted inArt
Soheila Sokhanvari Honors Iran’s Feminist Rebels
Born in Shiraz, Sokhanvari fled Iran as a child a year before the Revolution and has devoted her artistic practice to the country she left behind.
Posted inArt
What Freedom Looks Like for Incarcerated Artists
Koestler Arts works with incarcerated people and patients in secure mental health units, aiming to improve their lives through creativity.
Posted inArt
A Joyous Carnival to Celebrate David Graeber’s Lasting Legacy
Artists gathered for the launch of the new David Graeber Institute, which will oversee the scholar’s archive of unpublished texts and pursue projects around climate change, debt, labor, and war.
Posted inArt
Why Do Artists Keep Painting “The Women in the Window”?
The exhibition Reframed: The Woman in the Window explores the acts of looking and being looked at, framing, and art making.
Posted inNews
Protesters Urge British Museum to Return the Parthenon Marbles
In an action at the museum this weekend, participants made impassioned speeches calling for the return of the sculptures and sang “Happy Birthday” to the Acropolis Museum.
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Hundreds Storm British Museum to Protest Fossil Fuel Sponsorship
The daylong demonstration culminated in a mass action and occupation of the museum after hours.
Posted inBooks
The Forgotten Story of Modern Art’s Great Jewish Collectors
Charles Dellheim’s study tells the tale of a small group of Jewish art dealers and collectors who played a key role in the changing art world of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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The Restless Spirit of Lubaina Himid
Lubaina Himid’s Tate exhibition is a conversation, a rhetorical question, an experiment. Like opera, from which it draws its inspiration, it aims to be “a total work of art.”
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Jean Dubuffet’s Highs and (Controversial) Lows
Curiously, Dubuffet’s anti-hierarchical approach to art did not translate to similar views on society.
Posted inNews
Climate Activists Occupy London’s Science Museum to Protest Shell Sponsorship
During the two-day protests, activists explained that they “won’t stand by and let the Science Museum green-wash Shell’s reputation.”
Posted inArt
Jennifer Packer’s Lucid Tributes to Black Life
In Packer’s canvases, swathes of abstraction express aspects of human experience that lie beyond representation.