Museums News
Walter Van Beirendonck's Men's Fall 2023 collection. Van Beirendonck's designs, dating back to the 1980s, have been exhibited in major museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Fundamental to his artistic signature, is the use of cartoonish or childlike references belying the darker themes of sexuality, aggression, fear and darkness, which also characterize his work informed by rituals, myths, fairytales and science fiction. 🍩 Van Beirendonck’s Fall 2023 collection came as a response to today’s complex world. The designer took his main inspiration from an exoskeleton, or the external skeleton that supports and protects an animal’s body. 🍩 “It’s to protect yourself from the world, that was the starting point,” he explained. “I was really fascinated by all the machines they’re making
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The world's first action figure? A 1,500-year-old Mayan ceramic figure with removable helmet, found in El Perú-Waka, Petén, Guatemala. Currently housed at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología/Comunicación I'm Guatemala City.
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A massive statue of Yayoi Kusama has been installed over the Louis Vuitton, Paris store.
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The store has become a canvas for Yayoi Kusama, the 93-year-old Japanese artist known for her whimsical artwork that usually features, you guessed it, her signature polka dots.
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A decade ago, in 2012, Louis Vuitton tapped Kusama for their first collaboration, which included accessories such as classic LV bags, bangles, and shoes adorned with the obsessive dot art.
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Today, the brand launched its second collection with Kusama, having her put her signature dots all over men’s sneakers, trunks, and even surfboards.
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The Wallace Collection was famously Vivienne Westwood’s favourite art gallery and it’s not hard to see why; the townhouse-turned-museum in Manchester Square, London, is full of high drama and meticulous craftsmanship. The fashion designer called it ‘the greatest art school in this country’, claiming with typical bombast that ‘nobody today could make one thing that’s in there, nobody… could paint even one little flower on the Sèvres porcelain.’ Vivienne Westwood passed away just before the new year. The mother of punk was an art lover who had referred to all kinds of artists in her collections – Van Eyck, Velázquez, Rubens, Matisse, Frida Kahlo, Keith Haring – and many of her signature garments and patterns could be traced back to the paintings from which she
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An eerily life-like Yayoi Kusama animatronic—complete with hyper-realistic movements and grimaces, takes centre stage at the Louis Vuitton (New York 5th Avenue) store. 🔴 The store has become a canvas for Yayoi Kusama, the 93-year-old Japanese artist known for her whimsical artwork that usually features, you guessed it, her signature polka dots. 🔴 A decade ago, in 2012, Louis Vuitton tapped Kusama for their first collaboration, which included accessories such as classic LV bags, bangles, and shoes adorned with the obsessive dot art. 🔴 Today, the brand launched its second collection with Kusama, having her put her signature dots all over men’s sneakers, trunks, and even surfboards.
Museums News
Early evidence of Christianity in 3rd century Roman Britain. A silver ring, set with an intaglio depicting two fish hanging from an anchor was found at the Binchester Roman Fort in 2014. 🐟⚓🐟 Depictions of fish were common secret symbols used by Christians to recognize eachother when they were persecuted by the Roman Empire. This worked in part because of wordplay, as the Greek word for fish (ichthys) was meant to be an acronym for: Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Soter, meaning Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. 🐟⚓🐟 In addition the two fish and anchor when turned upside down(as shown on the ring) resembles the scene of the Crucifixion, with the shank and two fish resembling Christ and the two thieves, while the bottom of
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Many thanks for reading Museums News' posts throughout 2022! Here are our #TopNine posts from the past year, as voted by your likes.
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Many wishes for a Happy, Healthy and Creative New Year!
Museums News
'The Fall of the Rebel Angels', carved out of a single piece of marble in 1740 by Italian sculptor Agostino Fasolato. It depicts 60 fallen angels.
The sculpted masterpiece is housed in the Palazzo Leoni Montanari museum in Vicenza, Italy. It has never been presented in a temporary exhibition except for this year's Dante's 'Inferno' exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale centre.
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Love Me Loo: Beatles legend John Lennon's toilet unveiled to fans at the Liverpool Beatles Museum 🚽 A porcelain loo, which once sat at Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Tittenhurst Park home, has a blue and white floral design. The reveal of the loaned artefact was met at the museum with comments like: “It’s John’s john.” 🚽 Museum owner Roag Best, who is the brother of the Beatles’ original drummer Pete, told BBC News: “A man contacted us, told us it was just sitting in his house gathering dust, and asked would we like to put it on display in the museum? We thought, ‘Well, it’s a bit quirky, it’s not what we’d normally display but who’s to say what you should and shouldn’t display, so,
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The 'Bison Licking Insect Bite' is a carved and engraved fragment from a prehistoric spear-thrower made of reindeer antler, depicting the now extinct steppe bison.
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It was created 15,000 years ago and was found at Abri de la Madeleine, the type-site of the Magdalenian culture, which is in present-day France.
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It is now housed at the National Museum of Prehistory, Pôle d'interprétation de la Préhistoire , in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil.
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Lion-man, the oldest anthropomorphic animal carving in the world (c.38,000 BC). The Löwenmensch figurine, also called the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, is a prehistoric ivory sculpture discovered in Hohlenstein-Stadel, a German cave in 1939.
Determined by carbon dating of the layer in which it was found to be between 35,000 and 40,000 years old, it is one of the oldest-known examples of an artistic representation and the oldest confirmed statue ever discovered.
It currently is displayed in the Museum Ulm in Germany.
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The world's oldest mask, which was found in the Judean desert and is currently housed in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem 🎭 Painstakingly handcarved from stone, this 9,000-year-old artifact was made by the early farmers of the Judean Hills region. 🎭 There is a historical significance to these artifacts, given how the immediate ancestors of the prehistoric farmer-craftsmen in Levant were the ones (among many) to sow the ‘seeds’ of human civilizations by making the transition from hunting-and-gathering to introducing a range of founder crops like barley, lentils, chickpeas, emmer and flax. 🎭 Beyond just chronological significance, these ancient Neolithic masks also allude to the development of culture and religion, as the objects probably symbolized the spirits of dead ancestors – and thus were possibly used
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Museums News visited York Art Gallery's 'Treasures from the Stores' exhibition.
'Treasures from the Stores' showcases artworks that haven’t been on display before, or for a long time, including Andy Warhol’s ‘Marilyn Monroe’ screenprint, alongside some of the most loved jewels of the collection.
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Excavation of Mo'ai on Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island) with carvings still visible on its back at the Rapa Nui National Park.
Check the comments section to see young Rapa Nui, the descendants of the Mo'ai, in traditional clothing.
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Sacramento History Museum's announcements are brilliant as ever.
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Climate activists throw black liquid at Gustav Klimt's 1915 painting 'Death and Life' in the Leopold Museum in Vienna and glue themselves to the frame to protest against fossil fuel ‘death sentence’.
Members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) tweeted that they had targeted the 1915 painting to protest against “oil and gas drilling”, which they called “a death sentence to society”.
The Klimt work is an oil on canvas painting in the Art Nouveau style depicting death on the left side and a group of partially naked, hugging people on the right. It’s one of the latest pieces of art to be targeted by climate activists in recent months.
Source: The Guardian
Museums News is at Victoria and Albert Museum.
Museums News visited Victoria and Albert Museum's 'OSPAAAL: Solidarity and Design' exhibition (on until 31 March 2023).
The groundbreaking #graphicdesign work from OSPAAAL (the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America) based in Cuba, platformed anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements in the Global South through this display of public posters.
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Soup was thrown by activists over Vincent Van Gogh’s 'The Sower' painting at the Mostre Palazzo Bonaparte art museum in Rome, Italy. ‘The Sower’ was targeted by four women from the Ultima Generazione (Last Generation) group. Thick droplets of soup could be seen dripping from the priceless painting in footage from the incident. Protesters also glued themselves to a nearby wall after throwing the soup at the artwork. The painting, on loan from the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in the Netherlands. Today’s incident is the latest in a series of art-based protests by climate change campaign groups. It comes after another Van Gogh work, ‘Sunflowers’, was targeted in London by climate change protesters. 'The Sower', painted by Van Gogh at Arles in 1888, is widely considered to
Museums News is at Art Jakarta.
'Stretching Siamese Cat' (2021) by Seoul-based artist #LeeSangsoo
Lee Sangsoo' sculptures have been recently exhibited at Art Jakarta, Indonesia's international art fair.
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Yoann Bourgeois' performance 'Celui qui tombe (He Who Falls)' from 2016 at the Barbican Centre represents the struggle of life and the meaning of resilience.
Yoann Bourgeois is a French dancer, choreographer, and artist. He trained in circus arts at Châlons-en-Champagne. He directed the Compagnie Yoann Bourgeois touring dancing troupe.
The New Yorker described him as a "nouveau-cirque acrobat", whilst Wesley Morris, in the New York Times, called him a "dramatist of physics".
Museums News is at Leeds Art Gallery.
Museums News visited the #ShiftingPerspectives exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery - an exhibition exploring representations of people of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage in Leeds Art Gallery’s collection. Shifting Perspectives explores issues around #misrepresentation and #identity through examining mechanisms of #stereotyping and unequal power relations, connecting the past and the present. It celebrates the contributions of a wide range of Leeds communities, featuring different voices and perspectives on the issues raised by the exhibition. Shifting Perspectives brought together nearly a hundred works of art ranging from the seventeenth century to the present day. Works created by artists of the global majority are shown alongside those by white artists, exploring both parallels and divergences. Artists include Barbara Walker, Frank Brangwyn, Jacob Epstein, Ronald Moody, Jade Montserrat,
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Museums News visited the 'BECOMING THE OUROBOROS' exhibition at the University of Leeds Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies School (29 Oct - 6 Nov 2022). Becoming The Ouroboros is an exhibition of new work by artists and musicians who once studied fine art at Leeds colleges around the time of punk rock. The late 1970s and early 1980s were the crucible of today. This period was book-ended by the three-day week of 1974 and the miners' strike of 1984. Its defining characteristic was the triumph of neo-liberalism in the election of Thatcher and Reagan, which has to a large extent formed the world we now inhabit. In Leeds much of a generation of art students were searching for a more immediate, engaged
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Where were the artefacts in the British Museum sourced from?
The graph numbers artefacts in their thousands (000s), i.e. the artefacts looted from Iraq are 164,000 in total 😳
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The Victoria and Albert Museum has kindly requested that Harry Styles fans stop licking the protective glass that separates the visitors from the exhibits.
Many specially-commissioned outfits designed by Reed Harris for Harry Styles are being exhibited at the Victoria and Albert museum as part of their 'Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear' exhibition (on until 6 November 2022).
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Paintings reimagined: Some very creative superimposed responses using TikTok's Renaissance Mouth filter.