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      in Elections

      This Enormous Artwork Turns a Palace Into a Pawnshop

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      Christoph Büchel’s vast installation in Venice is compelling, obsessive and sometimes hilarious. Ascending the grand marble staircase in the center of the Venetian palazzo, you encounter a selection of fake Gucci, Hermes and other luxury handbags laid out on a blanket. A street hawker seems to have been disturbed, leaving their knockoff wares behind.Then, turning right on the mezzanine level, you climb another staircase into a control room. A bank of live CCTV monitors flicker above an empty office chair and espresso-stained plastic coffee cup.Next, a room for cryptocurrency traders with whirring servers, and a fridge, quarter-filled with tins of Red Bull; followed by the recording studio of a grandmother-aged TikTok influencer; a washroom with a print of Leonardo’s $450.3 million “Salvator Mundi” pasted to the wall; a 1950s-style cocktail bar; a pole dancing den; a kitchen filled with untouched trash. Room after room looks recently abandoned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Artist Faces Climate Disaster With Hard Data and Ancient Wisdom

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      Research meets poetry in Imani Jacqueline Brown’s exploration of oil extraction and its consequences for her native New Orleans — and for the planet.Every Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the members of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang emerge onto the streets of the Tremé neighborhood in a dawn ritual that dates back more than 200 years. Clad in black-and-white skeleton suits and ornamented papier-mâché masks, they wake the city to the sound of drums and bells summoning the ancestors.Their ritual carries deep significance, even lessons for the whole planet, said the artist and activist Imani Jacqueline Brown, who filmed the procession this year. “They’re breaching the divide between the world of the spirits and the world of the living,” she said. “They are singing to us that we’ve got to live today because tomorrow we might die.”Brown, 36, grew up in New Orleans; she now lives in London, a member of the research and visual investigations group Forensic Architecture. An exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in Manhattan through Aug. 31 combines her research chops with the poetry and spirituality that she sees in the grass-roots culture in her hometown.Les Cenelles, a contemporary string ensemble from New Orleans, performed at the opening of Brown’s show, in late June.via Imani Jacqueline Brown, Storefront for Art and Architecture; Hatnim LeeThe show, titled “Gulf,” is written with a strike-through and pronounced “Strike Gulf.” Its central focus is the impact of the oil and gas industry on South Louisiana. But the more sources Brown mines — including core samples of deep-sea drilling by geologists in the Gulf of Mexico and archives of oil boycott campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, along with her own footage from New Orleans — the broader the scope of her project becomes. It reaches back into geological time while linking to the climate emergency today.The resulting works bring some welcome lyricism to the field of “research art.” The exhibition includes a video installation in which the Skull and Bone Gang procession, bathed in bluish light, is overlaid on footage she made at the city’s aquarium, where sharks and rays float around a model of an offshore rig in a display about the Gulf of Mexico that is sponsored by oil corporations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘We invest in artists as changemakers’: using art to help increase US voter participation

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      Everything is politics, so the saying goes, and never more so during an election year. With its newest collection, Art for Change is taking the “everything” one step further.Since 2018, Art for Change has curated programs of online sales and exhibitions to raise money for a number of charities. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Art for Change has partnered with When We All Vote, a non-partisan non-profit founded by Michelle Obama that seeks to up voter participation.On their own, many of the pieces in this collection may not feel overtly political. An art novice would probably imagine a collaboration like this to include art similar to the red, white and blue of Shepard Fairey’s Hope and We The People posters – not Jordan Kasey’s surreal illustration of a baby and mother, Daniel Gordon’s still life of red apples and white poppies, or Aaron Johnson’s vivid auroral depiction of a couple with a bird flying from one’s heart.But interspersed with pieces like Caris Reid’s playful rendering of the word “VOTE” against a starry backdrop and Rico Gatson’s colorful celebration of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, each piece in this collection takes on new context. Especially under the mission statement of When We All Vote, which will receive a portion of all the sales of prints and original works, the artwork of this collection come together to show what’s at stake with each election – what exactly a person risks losing by choosing not to vote.“The When We All Vote collection as a whole creates a narrative that we hope evokes various nuances of America,” said Jeanne Masel, founder of Art for Change. “As a group, they convey a sense of Americana, from the image of an apple to a whimsical take on a ‘Vote’ poster, to abstractions that evoke raw emotions.”Masel added: “What I love about this collection is how varied and multivalent it is, which I think can also be read as reflecting our country’s diversity.”Johnson completed Oh My Heart in 2023 and had not originally intended for it to convey a political message. “My piece can be looked at as kind of a love story,” he said. “It’s a coming together of two figures, melded together into like a non-duality.”As part of this collection, the love story of Oh My Heart comes to represent the ties that hold us together. “In a lot of times in my work, I’m thinking about the interconnectedness of all beings, our interconnectivity with each other as humans or interconnectivity with nature,” Johnson said. “I think that all wraps back around to the idea of community and the idea of why of it’s important to vote, having empathy for others and having a sense of a shared community. I feel like that’s a message that runs kind of kind of parallel to what we’re looking for when we’re going to vote. How do we function together as good citizens? How do we take care of each other as citizens?”View image in fullscreenLike Johnson, Kenny Rivero’s body of work, which looks at architecture and outdoor street space as sentient observers of our daily lives, does not always translate into something political. But once he agreed to work with Art for Change for this collaboration, he thought of Witness Revelator, a painting he finished in 2020 of a Black individual emerging from a dark rectangular portal in a gray brick wall. The witness in Witness Revelator is “a witness to your vote”, Rivero said.“There’s a lot of things that we do alone, that we do intimately and in private and in secret, and I think voting is one of those things, especially now where everything is so polarized,” he said. “There’s this thing you’re doing that is private but you’re being tallied in something greater, something much more impactful. Witness Revelator, for me, is connected to that in the way of somebody witnessing the effort that you’re making to create progress or create change.”Since its start six years ago, Art for Change has raised more than $300,000 for nonprofit partners and has collaborated with more than 100 artists, all of whom are guaranteed 50% of the profits from sales. Masel describes Art for Change as “art for the socially conscious collector”, but also a way for artists to have a platform for social change. “We invest in artists as changemakers,” she said.View image in fullscreenThis collection is the second time Rivero has worked with Art for Change, in part because he said he believes that artists have a unique role in a democracy, no matter the subject matter or intended message of their work.“I think that artists are on the frontlines of creating new ideas on how to relate to each other,” Rivero said. “Because we’re constantly engaging with these ideas around family, community and relationships, so I think that we look to artists, not necessarily on how to rebuild society, but to tell us what’s wrong with it. Where does it hurt?”Art for Change collaborated with When We All Vote for the 2020 election, working with four artists to raise more than $30,000 for the non-profit. This year, 14 artists are participating, with Art for Change pledging to donate a guaranteed $10,000.“A visual medium has the power to drive social change and impact, and having these artists involved and spreading the word to get out and vote is so important,” Masel said. “This project really harnesses a great creativity and joy to inspire change.”

      The When We All Vote virtual exhibit is now available on the Art for Change website More

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      in Elections

      Anton van Dalen, Whose Art Examined an Evolving Neighborhood, Dies at 85

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      He traced the dramatic transformation of the Lower East Side from his building, where he lived for 50 years. He also assisted the cartoonist Saul Steinberg.Anton van Dalen — a socially conscious artist, dedicated pigeon keeper and longtime assistant to the illustrator Saul Steinberg — lived on the Lower East Side for more than 50 years, documenting the neighborhood’s evolution from dereliction to gentrification in paintings, drawings and sculptures.His best-known work was, perhaps, a performance piece called “Avenue A Cut-Out Theater,” a three-foot-tall cardboard model of his townhouse at 166 Avenue A. He filled it with hand-painted and photographed cutouts of police officers in riot gear, junkies, homeless people, sex workers, hawks, pigeons and dogs, as well as a burned-out car, churches, temples and community gardens.At performances, often for students at his home studio, he reached inside the model, removed the cutouts and laid them on a table and on the floor. He told the story of a neglected part of the city that reminded him of a war zone — like his native Holland during World War II — when he moved there in the late 1960s and how it turned into an enclave of wealthy residential and commercial developers.Mr. van Dalen in 1996. He was best known for “Avenue A Cut-Out Theater,” a three-foot-tall cardboard model of his townhouse at 166 Avenue A.Tom Warren, via PPOW, New York“Falling House,” 1976.Anton van Dalen, via PPOW, New YorkDescribing a performance by Mr. van Dalen in 2015, the critic David Frankel wrote in Artforum: “The box also gave him something of the quality of the old-time itinerant musician or carny with a hurdy-gurdy or box of puppets on his back — in other words, someone unfixed and mobile, making a self-contained kind of art that he can produce easily wherever he goes.”“It was magical, like seeing Calder’s Circus,” said Wendy Olsoff — a founder of the PPOW Gallery in Manhattan, referring to the troupe of miniature circus performers and animals that the sculptor Alexander Calder created and performed with. The gallery has hosted three solo exhibitions of Mr. van Dalen’s work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Heirs of Jews Who Fled the Nazis Return Art to Heirs Whose Family Could Not

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      An Egon Schiele drawing was returned on Friday at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The heirs said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do.”“Seated Nude Woman,” a drawing by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, was returned on Friday to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish art collector and Viennese cabaret performer who was killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.The drawing had been held by the heirs of a Jewish couple who fled the Nazis just before World War II and later unknowingly bought the work, which investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office say were among dozens looted from Grünbaum by the Third Reich.The return took place at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. The grandchildren of the couple, Ernst and Helene Papanek, said in a statement that relinquishing the work was “the right thing to do” in the face of evidence it had been looted.Since September, five museums and four private owners have handed back 11 works once owned by Grünbaum in what has become the largest Holocaust art restitution case in the United States.One museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, has challenged an order from investigators to turn over a 12th Schiele, “Russian War Prisoner,” that was once owned by Grünbaum, who died in a concentration camp in 1941. The museum has contested the evidence cited by investigators and a legal battle over the work is proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.A Grünbaum descendant, Timothy Reif, responded to Friday’s return in a statement that said the recovery of the work sends a message “that crime does not pay and that the law enforcement community in New York has not forgotten the dark lessons of World War II.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brazilian Art Student Switches Coin at the British Museum With a Fake

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      The artist aimed to use sleight of hand to point to what he described as the museum’s problematic legacy of colonial-era acquisitions.A Brazilian artist strolled into the British Museum last month and approached a table where visitors are allowed to interact with historic objects. After handling a 17th-century British coin for a moment, he seemingly returned it and moved on, like thousands of other visitors.Only last week did the museum discover — through the artist’s Instagram page — that he had replaced a genuine coin with his own replica and discarded the real artifact in the museum’s donation box on his way out.The act was the culmination of a more-than-yearlong project by Ilê Sartuzi, an art student at Goldsmiths, University of London. To briefly steal the coin, he used the type of sleight of hand often associated with magicians to draw parallels to what he called the “trickery” of the museum’s display of objects with contested provenance.“The gesture of stealing as a central part of the project brings back the heated discussion about the role of looting in the museum’s foundation,” Mr. Sartuzi said.The museum has long faced criticism regarding its acquisition methods. Several nations have sought the return of particular objects in the museum’s exhibits and questioned the legitimacy of its collections. This latest stunt did not seem to resonate with the museum.“It’s a tired argument,” said Connor Watson, the museum’s spokesman. “We’re quite open about what is looted and what is a contested object.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting?

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      Our attention spans may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way. In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted. Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her […] More