Creative Scotland confirms 2018/19 Visual Artist and Craft Maker Awards With grants ranging from £500 to £1,500, made possible by support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and 21 local authority partners across Scotland, the 2018 Visual Artist and Craft Maker Awards will support the creative and professional development of artists and craft makers at all stages in their career. Deadlines for the 2018/19 programme are Tuesday 2 October 2018 and Tuesday 5 February 2019.
Following an evaluation that recognised the significant value of the award scheme, Amanda Catto, Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland, said: “The VACMA programme has been extremely important […] increasing confidence and opportunity; the generation of new ideas and skills; the extension of professional networks and outlooks. The success of the scheme lies in the strength of the partnerships that make it possible.”
Artists threaten to pull work from Design Museum following ‘arms trade’ event In a letter addressed to the Design Museum, 30 artists have called for their works to be removed from the museum’s current exhibition Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-18 following an arms industry event that was held at the museum last week.
Published online by the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the letter states that an event was held at the museum by Italian arms firm Leonardo (the world’s ninth largest, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) in conjunction with the Farnborough Air Show.
It says that the artists “were appalled to learn” the museum hosted an arms industry trade event as part of the Farnborough International weapons fair, on Tuesday 17 July at the same time as a discussion about the role of social media and design in contemporary social justice politics took place as part of the Hope to Nope season of events at the museum.
The letter states that it “is deeply hypocritical for the museum to display and celebrate the work of radical anti-corporate artists and activists, while quietly supporting and profiting from one of the most destructive and deadly industries in the world.”
Man Booker Prize: Graphic novel nominated for the first time A graphic novel by Chicago-born Nick Drnaso has made it onto the Man Booker longlist, along with six writers from the UK, three from the US, two from Ireland and two from Canada.
Drnaso’s Sabrina, tells the story of a girl who goes missing, leaving behind a videotape with clues about her disappearance.
Eligibility rules for the prize were changed in 2013, allowing international authors to be nominated as long as their book was written in English and published in the UK. The longlist for the £50,000 prize will become a shortlist of six in September, before the winner is announced on Tuesday 16 October 2018.
“Given the changing shape of fiction, it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel was included,” the judges said.
Edmund de Waal to make architectural intervention at the Schindler House The internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his installations of porcelain vessels housed in minimal structures, makes his first architectural intervention in the US.
The culturally historic Schindler House in Los Angeles is a masterpiece of West Coast modernism, built in West Hollywood by Viennese émigré architect, Rudolph Schindler, in 1922.
De Waal’s exhibition, ‘on one way or other’, is a response to the building’s materials and modernist design, as a modular, changeable live-work building. Schindler House also became a site of forward-thinking aesthetic, cultural and political activity, frequented by architects, dancers and artists from Frank Lloyd Wright to John Cage.
As the artist notes: “The Schindler House is an idea about beginnings. It stands as an attempt to create a place for both cooperative living and cooperative practice, to reset the conditions in which a modern family could live and experiment.”
Nan Goldin and P.A.I.N. Sackler protest the Opioid Crisis at Harvard’s Sackler Museum On Friday 20 July the photographer, along with health activists and Harvard medical students, organized a die-in in the atrium outside Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Cambridge, MA.
Artists, activists, and medical professionals crowded the museum’s atrium for a protest and die-in organized by the group P.A.I.N. Sackler, an organisation spearheaded by Goldin that seeks to pressure Purdue Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Oxycontin, to take responsibility for their part in the opioid addiction epidemic.
The group targets the Sackler family’s philanthropic efforts within art institutions. A statement on their website explains their mission: “[The Sacklers] have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world. We demand that the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma use their fortune to fund addiction treatment and education.”
After heroin use during her young adulthood, in 2014 the photographer formed a three-year OxyContin addiction “overnight” after being prescribed the drug following surgery. The artist says she was not properly informed by physicians of the drug’s strong addictive quality.
House of Lords committee sound concern for arts sector if freedom of movement is restricted A report by the House of Lords’ EU home affairs sub-committee has raised concerns about the impact that restrictions on freedom of movement could have on the UK’s cultural sector, stating that this sector is “profoundly important” to the UK. The report also supports the idea of a new EU-wide short-term “touring visa”.
Images
1. Araminta Campbell, Make Works, 2013. Photo; StudioRoRo
2. P.A.I.N. Sackler, protest and die-in at Harvard Art Museums. Instagram: @sacklerpain, 21 July 2018.
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