Oct 22, 2020 • View in browser

Good morning. 🌥️ Today, climate activists take issue with the British Museum’s Arctic exhibition, LA’s art spaces are focusing on the election, and we have reviews of Claudia Hart, Diedrick Brackens, Belly of the Beast, and Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

I also suggest you check out Maria Cynkier’s op-ed about how the new commemorative installation at the National Museum in Poland is hostile towards the country’s LGBTQ community. She writes, “The situation at the National Museum in Warsaw is not a singular event or an oversight. It is a sign of gradual governmental control and creeping authoritarianism in the art ecology.”

– Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief

Climate Activists Protest British Museum's Oil Funding

Protest against Arctic drilling held at the opening of a British Museum exhibition (photo by Kristian Buus)

The activist group BP or not BP? held a protest during the press preview of the British Museum’s exhibition Arctic: culture and climate, responding to the Trump administration’s decision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development.

Sarah Horne, a member of BP or not BP?, said in a statement:

“We’ve come to the British Museum because, while its new exhibition rightly puts Indigenous people’s perspectives on climate change front and centre, it continues to partner with those that helped create the climate emergency.“

In Other News

A painting by the American modernist painter Jacob Lawrence that was thought to be lost for six decades has been found after a recent visitor to the Met’s exhibition suspected that it might be in a neighbor’s personal collection.

Latest Reviews

Making Art Against the Backdrop of Incarceration

In a year of perpetual change, Marking Time demonstrates the urgent need for a shift in culture, one where crisis need not be the charge for moving towards a better world.

Erica Cardwell

Claudia Hart Breathes Life into Static Tropes of Modernism

The Ruins at Bitforms Gallery riffs off the work of influential Modernists to create vivid digital simulations

Hrag Vartanian

Diedrick Brackens Explores the Warps and Wefts of Black and Queer Histories

In darling divined, Brackens teases out the symbolism, allegory, and parable long associated with global cosmologies of tapestry weaving.

Lydia Pyne

The Ugly History of Forced Sterilizations in Women's Prisons

The new documentary Belly of the Beast is an investigation into modern-day eugenics in the US.

Bedatri D. Choudhury

A Tribute to Sylvia Rivera and the Spirit of NYC’s Old Meatpacking District

Hyperallergic has exclusive digital access to This is an Address, Sasha Wortzel’s meditative film on displacement, erasure, and queer communities along the Hudson River piers.

Dessane Lopez Cassell

Face Masks as Artistic Self-Expression

From Plaster to Plastic, Artists Take Inventive Approaches to Face Masks

In Denver, an exhibition of artist-designed masks shows that face coverings are not only crucial to our health but can also offer unique means of self-expression.

Hakim Bishara

More from Hyperallergic

LA’s Art Spaces Are Focusing on the Election

From a voting station for those who can’t vote to a fascinating history of campaign ads in the US, artists in Los Angeles got you covered ahead of November 3.

Matt Stromberg

A New Commission at the National Museum in Warsaw Is Dangerously Homophobic

The new commemorative religious installation at the National Museum is hostile towards the LGBTQ+ community and does not uphold the values it claims to propagate.

Maria Cynkier

Black Women Performers Discuss “Unrecognized Labor”

Gabrielle Civil, mayfield brooks, and Jasmine Nyende respond to Nikita Gale’s installation PRIVATE DANCER at the California African American Museum.

Elisa Wouk Almino

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