Cathy's Art Diary

Frightening  exhibition at the Cartoon Museum of satire and cartoons of Boris Johnson and events in the UK from 2019-2022. I say frightening because, although I laughed out loud a lot in the show, the fact we actually lived through these events and live with the consequences now is frightening. The section of Covid was the most funny and poignant. The whole show was slightly dominated by the sound from an animated cartoon of Boris’s “I don’t wash my hands speech” in which he gradually turns into a skeleton. I’ve added a couple of my favourites here. The show also covered Ukraine, Brexit and his fall from office. There were examples from all the main cartoonists and newspapers and most were shown in the original drawings. It was nice to see that a lot of the work had been donated to the museum. Closes 16 April 2023  

Fascinating exhibition at the Science Museum on the development of the Covid vaccine. The show was well explained and divided into six clear sections Virus, Design, Trial, Manufacture, Vaccinate and Future. Each section looked back at what work had been done in the past that this research was building on. I discovered a new name of Onesimus, an African in America who showed his owner a technique for inoculation which he had witnessed and benefited from in his homeland. The show was full of iconic objects from recent years some of which seemed to have been donated to the museum. I loved seeing the laptop and mug used by Tess Lambe, co-designer of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, when working from home to develop the vaccine. To think so much came from such simple things. I also liked a display of items from the day the first person got the vaccine in the UK including the clothes worn by the recipient and the nurse plus the syringe used. The show made me appreciate just what an amazing ach...

Moving exhibition   at the Bowes Museum of new work by Martin Kinnear. The show had been scheduled to happen pre-Covid but became about it as he worked though the lockdowns. These were big bold paintings of Northern towns and landscapes which were mainly unnamed but were accompanied by a profound commentary. Kinnear had been disabled in an accident so the pictures were also about how life can change suddenly. There was a good video interview with him discussion the works including the Pieta in the show, a dramatic picture which should be acquired by a church. There was also a video installation inspired by local waterfalls of cascading words. We went a week before it closed when we were nearby on holiday. It was lovely that there seemed to be local people in responding to the works. I have to give a shout out to the museum too. I had not been before but was very impressed. In fact we didn’t have long enough on out first visit and ended up going back again the next day. Cl...

Thought provoking spontaneous public memorial on the South Bank opposite the Houses of Parliament to those who have died of Covid started by the Covid-19 Bereaved Families For Justice UK. T his memorial has been there for a long time but this was the first time I had been in that area of London to go and take a look. You are struck by the charming home made feel to it but more so to the sheer length of it. I’d assumed from pictures that it was just a couple of sections of the riverside wall but it goes on for 200m or more and hopes to have a heart of ever fatality. It was interesting to hear people talking about it. I heard one lady say that all the pink hearts were bright red when they were first added. I hope something will be done to preserve this and make it the official memorial before they fade completely. This is an important public initiated statement in a significant place, close to St Thomas’s and opposite Parliament.

Moving online exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery of 100 photographs of people taken during the first Covid lockdown.   The works were a result of an open call for entries on three themes helpers and heroes, your new normal and acts   of kindness. from which 100 were picked by a committee led by the Duchess of Cambridge.   The pictures are online with commentaries written by the photographer or subject and are very moving. If it’s not a cliché every picture tells a story. From the first picture “Glass Kisses” by Steph James of a baby holding a hand up to an old lady who kisses it on the other side of a window, I was hooked! A number of pictures seem to have been taken as part of   projects such as Sarah Wood’s “Ruth, Danial and Scarlet in Lockdown” where she has photographer people around Lewes in a series on furloughed friendship and Kenny Glover’s “On Your Doorstep” part of a series of family portraits to fund raid for Marie Curie Hospices.   ...

Enlightening online discussion from the Art Newspaper looking at how the Covid crisis has affected commercial galleries and asking if it has made them turn to their local markets more. This was the second session in a series on the art market "New Models for New Times: Rethinking the Art Market in a Changing World" chaired by Anny Shaw from the Art Newspaper including Rachel Lehmann, from Lehmann Maupin in New York; Sundaram Tagore, from Sundaram Tangore Gallery in Hong Kong, Singapore and New York; Rakeb Sile from Addis Fine Art in Ethiopia and Ayo Adeyinka, from Tafeta in London and Nigeria. All of them described things they had done locally during Covid from reconnecting with artists they represent to moving their galleries to more conducive spaces however they also stressed that they had continued to operate globally, albeit in different ways such as via online fairs. They all felt the art market would not return to the travelling frenzy it had been before the pandem...

Interesting online talk from the Victoria and Albert Museum discussing their online editorial project or blog to document objects which became important during the pandemic. Brendan Cormier, Lead Curator of Shekou Design Museum Project, and editor of the blog talked us through seven themes he had seen emerging as this project grew. I’d heard him talk briefly on Museum from Home Day back in April, so I was fascinated to see how the project had progressed. I love the way it compares current objects to those in the museum’s collections linking us to the past. He looked at how important communications had become at this time from the emergency of handwritten signs on shops to the developing government message visualised on the podiums at press conferences. He also examined how important the home had become to us and the blurring of the line between home and workplace which had only developed in the 19th century. He alluded to toilet roll hoarding in a section on how the flow of mat...

Moving outdoor exhibition around the Southbank Centre celebrating the contribution key workers and frontline staff during the pandemic. This was a mix of photographs, reproduced paintings and poems. The pictures looked striking, shown at a huge scale on the buildings. My favourite was the one shown here of Elaine, an assistant in a bakery,   by Caroline Walker but I also loved the huge picture of a nurse on the back of the Royal Festival Hall and the series on various religious groups and their responses. Most moving though were the poems. It was lovely to take a moment in the public space to stop and read them and many of them brought the reality of the pandemic into focus. I loved Jackie Kay’s poem Missing which starts “You find yourself doing the missing for them - the ones you look after as your own.” Closes in November 2020. Review Guardian

Philosophical return to the British Museum post lockdown. Don’t worry I’m not going to blog my return to every gallery individually but thought I’d post this one as it did make me think a lot about the role of museums. The museum has only opened its ground floor at the moment and has a one-way trail around the larger sections of that area. It’s all very well organised with lots of sanitiser and signage. I was a bit shocked at £3.40 for a coffee but I guess they need to make their money somehow. However, it all feels odd. It is like the museum itself has become an exhibit labelled “Before the plague we had things called museums you could walk around and look we’ve recreated that experience for you”. Also, because it’s only ground floor and nothing has been moved it feels like edited/censored history. Egyptians and Greeks are in as is North America. Assyrians are out and not much Rome. The fact that the   Enlightenment Gallery, telling the story of how museums and categorisati...

Fascinating online debate as part of the York Festival of Ideas looking at the challenges and opportunities of the current pandemic for museums and art galleries. This was a live Zoom discussion, but I watched the recording on YouTube later. It was well chaired by Jonathon Derbyshire, Deputy News Editor of The Times, and brought together four panellists from the sector. It was a imaginative range of speakers including Frances Morris, Direct or Tate Modern; Reyahn King, Chief Executive of York Museums’ Trust; Brendon Corrier, Senior Design Curator, V&A and Michael White, Head of History of Art at the University of York. The chair set each speaker three initial questions, how are they coping, how galleries help community cohesion and how will the pandemic change how they operate long term? These were answered eloquently from Corrier using the example of a blog focusing on objects which have become important during the pandemic to Morris discussing Tate Moderns work with their loc...

Interesting online offering from Hauser and Wirth with a series of online exhibitions. The most interesting and successful of these are the two showcasing new work by two artists during the Covid-19 crisis. Rashid Johnson presents a series of intense red, abstract paintings entitled “Untitled Anxious Red Drawings and George Condo a series of Picasso like figurative drawings called “Drawings for Distanced Figures”. I like the quote from Johnson that the times feel “simultaneously unsettling, urgent and radical” and the inclusion at the end of his piece of watch, reading and music play lists as well as a recipe! Both artists sum up the current zeitgeist well and makes me wonder what other art will come out of these times. Less successful but still noteworthy are the online offerings of older works. I was particularly drawn to the Louise Bourgeois drawings which had originally brought me to the site and the photographs by Zoe Leonard as I remembered her show at the gallery las...