Artnet reports on the famed quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, who are making face masks for every citizen in their small town.
“Because this is an elderly community, we’re trying to keep them safe,” says Mary Margaret Pettway, a leader of the initiative and chair of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which promotes and preserves the work of artists in the American South. The foundation is paying the artists to create the masks, distributing materials, and delivering the finished products.
Front-Page Femmes
Washington D.C.’s City Paper profiles muralist CHELOVE, who, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, recently completed a seven-story ode to women of color on the façade of a hotel scheduled to open this summer.
Yayoi Kusama shares a poem of hope and defiance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: “In the midst of this historic menace, a brief burst of light points to the future…”
The New Yorker discusses how to co-work in small spaces, turning to the strategies of artists including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Judy Chicago, and more.
Turkey has selected 83-year-old Füsun Onur to represent the country at the 2021 Venice Biennale.
The National profiles 83-year-old Palestinian painter Samia Halaby, who discusses her pioneering digital works, which she started making in the 1980s.
Artnet reports on director Halina Dyrschka’s new Hilma af Klint documentary, released today in virtual screening rooms.
Slate’s Working podcast interviews painter, writer, illustrator, and dancer Maira Kalman on her creative evolution.
The 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship winners have been announced; Recipients include photographer Zoe Leonard, filmmaker Stephanie Wang-Breal, poets Ada Limón and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, choreographer Gabrielle Lamb, artist Helen Mirra, and more.
Vulture reviews Mrs. America, the limited series that tells the story of the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—and the unexpected backlash.
Painter Mamie Tinkler talks to Artforum about the strange interiors of domestic life, jokes about femininity, and more.
Shows We Want to See—Online Edition
At CONNERSMITH, ACCESS | Maria Friberg: essential is viewable online. Friberg’s work “builds on the theme of Man’s ruthless exploitation of Planet Earth and can be interpreted as a criticism on superabundance. But it is also a picture that proposes the notion that Mankind has the possibility to create something beautiful from chaos,” writes curator Michelle Marie Roy.
At the Timothy Taylor Gallery, the new online exhibition Dwelling is the Light is on view. Curated by Katy Hessel, the show is inspired by the effects of the current global lockdown on our attitudes toward nature versus domestic living. Hessel writes, “Women—who for many centuries were simultaneously at home within but also confined to domestic spaces—retain a unique perspective on the interplay between interiors and the unbridled freedom of the natural world.”
Also at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, Josephine Meckseper: Pellea[s] is viewable online. The 42-minute film examines the performance of gender both in cultural production and in contemporary political terms. Set in Washington D.C., it includes footage of the 45th American Presidential Inauguration and concurrent protests filmed by the artist.