Cathy's Art Diary

Innovative exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall looking at 50 years of skate boarding in the undercroft there. The show was actually in the covered bit of the undercroft behind the skateboard area. It was slightly odd in that it was mainly videos shown on 5 or 6 screens with a timeline round the room however I found myself getting sucked in by the timeline with details of how it built up and how it’s been threatened over the years. I didn’t have very long to watch the videos, but they seemed to be the stories of users of the space over the years. The timeline had mentioned a lot of films which had been made there so boarding and film making seem to have gone hand in hand. I loved the fact you sat on benches like skateboard ramps to watch the films which were shown one by one across all the screens. Closed 21 June 2026 Review Evening Standard

Interesting exhibition at the Design Museum on the development of skateboarding. OK I admit this was a stretch for me but, I was there and as you know I’ll go to see anything. That said you can always learn something. The show looked at the technical developments in skateboards since the 1950s with an emphasis on how design was driven by skaters themselves. It also looked at the social changes in the sport culminating with its inclusion in the Olympics. I’ll be honest the technical side made me gloss over but it did show me that skateboards had changed more than this non-user had imagined. Have pictures of the earliest pieces in the show, basically a plank of wood with roller skate wheels, to one of the most recent marking the listing of the skating area on the South Bank which I walked past later in the day. Closes 19 May   2024    

Surprisingly fascinating exhibition at Somerset House looking at the culture of skateboarding. I went to this show on the grounds I’ll go to anything that is free but expected to get little from it, not being a skateboarder, or knowing anyone who is, but it was really interesting from a sociological point of view. The show looked at how skateboarding had changed the urban environment with the building of skateparks and occupation of urban space by boarders. Evidently the skating space in the lower areas of the South Bank is now listed and was described in the blurb as “a sacred space”. It is the longest continually skated space in the world. I loved the way skating had developed as a subculture albeit one which has passed me by, but I did feel the hand of corporate bodies entering the space such as a Louis Vuitton skate shoe. I wonder what effect Sky Brown's Bronze medal in Tokyo will have on this?  Closes 19 September 2021