Season 14 continues!! We remember the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century: KEITH HARING!!! We meet GIL VAZQUEZ, Executive Director and President at Keith Haring Foundation in New York, one of Haring’s closest friends, confidants and heir. We explore how Haring attracted an audience worldwide by expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, using a primacy of line and directness of message. Like Talk Art’s core values, Haring's work really was, and is, the embodiment of ART FOR EVERYONE!!!!! Gil Vazquez was one of Keith Haring's closest friends in the years prior to his tragic passing. As Ingrid Sischy documented in her 1997 article for Vanity Fair: "Gil Vazquez, a man Haring had fallen for, was often by his side. Haring and Vazquez were never lovers, because Vazquez is straight, but by all accounts their friendship gave Haring a kind of companionship he’d been longing for." Read the full article titled 'Kid Haring' here: https://www.haring.com/!/selected_writing/kid-haringThe mission of the Keith Haring Foundation is to sustain, expand, and protect the legacy of Keith Haring, his art, and his ideals. The Foundation supports not-for-profit organizations that assist children, as well as organizations involved in education, prevention, and care related to AIDS.Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and disadvantaged communities. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.The Keith Haring Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit groups that engage in charitable activities. In accordance with Haring’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of underprivileged children and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.Keith Haring additionally charged the Foundation with maintaining and protecting his artistic legacy after his death. The Foundation maintains a collection of art along with archives that facilitate historical research about the artist and the times and places in which he lived and worked. The Foundation supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate Haring’s work and philosophy.Visit the official website: https://www.haring.com/Follow: @KeithHaringFoundation and @_GilVazquez Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art Special LIVE EPISODE with Ruinart!!! We meet leading artist JEPPE HEIN!!! Live from London's Frieze week, this inspiring episode was recorded in South Kensington in front a live audience.Trustful that art can enlighten and connect us across time and places, Ruinart gives Carte Blanche to leading contemporary artists to pay tribute to the Maison’s legacy. Their artworks echo Ruinart’s values, raising awareness about climate change.To renew the experience of nature and bring it into our daily life, Ruinart Carte Blanche Artist Jeppe Hein uses “fragments of matter and emotion” that awaken our senses and connect us to ourselves and the world.Right Here, Right Now is a participatory installation that summons the four elements – earth/soil, water/rain, air/wind and fire/sun – essential to champagne making. It is on show now at Frieze London in the Ruinart Art Bar until 16 October. A digital extension to it can be experienced at Ruinart.comFollow @JeppeHein and @RuinartTHANKS FOR LISTENING!!! Special thanks to everyone who got a ticket and came to watch this episode recording Live in London!!!We will back very soon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art special episode!!! We meet leading artist NIKITA GALE! It's Frieze London and we explore an incredible new art installation for BMW Open Work by Frieze. Artist Nikita Gale worked with BMW i7 designers to present the site-specific installation “63/22” in the BMW Lounge at the fair from October 12-16, 2022.Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, BMW Open Work by Frieze invites an artist to develop an ambitious project utilising BMW design and technology to pursue their practice in innovative new directions. BMW Open Work offers artists the possibility of engaging in a rich dialogue with BMW engineers, designers, and experts from different fields to create unique artistic projects.Investigating the politics of sound and its surrounding, Nikita Gale’s practice enquires themes of invisibility and audibility, recasting the complicated dynamic between performer and spectator. Within the work, notions are subverted and destabilized. Nikita Gale’s interest in the history of sound continues with “63/22”, in which the artist reflects on the relationship between automotive and sound technologies, already closely associated since the 1960s. In fact, the Gibson Firebird, one of the most popular electric guitars, was designed by a car designer in 1963. Emerging from an intense dialogue with BMW i7 designers and engineers whilst reinforcing BMW’s commitment to art and music, Gale presents for Frieze London 2022 a sculptural installation comprising of five customised electric guitars. The guitars will be named historically significant and iconic Black women guitarists: Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Barbara Lynn, Big Mama Thornton, and Joan Armatrading. Activated in the lounge through a series of live acts performed by musicians invited by Gale, the guitars will play through the BMW i7, transforming the car into a sound amp, amplifying the relationship between the car, sound technologies and creativity. The guitars have been created in collaboration with BMW i7 designers and realised by a UK-based luthier, Ian Malone. View more: https://frieze.com/bmw-open-workGale's work employs objects and materials like barricades, concrete, microphone stands, and spotlights to address the ways in which space and sound are politicized. Gale’s broad-ranging installations blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. Follow: @NikitaGale on Instagram. Gale is represented by Commonwealth & Council (LA), Reyes | Finn (Detroit), and 56 Henry (NYC).Follow @BMWGroupCulture to learn more about BMW's commitment to art, more than 50 years supporting artists and culture. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 14 continues with VERY special episode with one of our all-time ART WORLD ICONS!!!! We meet the legendary gallerist MAUREEN PALEY. Inspiration to many of today's international contemporary galleries, Maureen was in fact the reason our co-host Robert Diament became inspired to change careers to work full-time in a gallery!We discover how she began her gallery programme in 1984 in a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End. Initially named Interim Art, the gallery changed its name to Maureen Paley in 2004 as a celebration of its 20th anniversary. Since September 1999 the gallery has been situated in Bethnal Green, and in September 2020 relocated to Three Colts Lane. In July 2017 Maureen Paley opened a second space in Hove called Morena di Luna. In October 2020 a third space was opened in Shoreditch, London called Studio M. From its inception, the gallery’s aim has remained consistent: to promote great and innovative artists in all media.-Maureen Paley was one of the first to present contemporary art in London’s East End and has been a pioneer of the current scene, promoting and showing a diverse range of international artists. Gallery artists include Turner Prize winners Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2019; Wolfgang Tillmans, 2000 and Gillian Wearing, 1997 as well as Turner Prize nominees Rebecca Warren, 2006; Liam Gillick, 2002; Jane and Louise Wilson, 1999 and Hannah Collins, 1993. Represented artists also include AA Bronson, Felipe Baeza, Tom Burr, Michaela Eichwald, Morgan Fisher, General Idea, Anne Hardy, Peter Hujar, Michael Krebber, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Olivia Plender, Stephen Prina, Maaike Schoorel, Hannah Starkey, Chioma Ebinama, Oscar Tuazon, and James Welling.Maureen Paley, the gallery’s founder and director, was born in New York, studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated from Brown University before coming to the UK in 1977 where she completed her Masters at The Royal College of Art from 1978–80.Together with running the gallery, Maureen Paley has also curated a number of large-scale public exhibitions. In 1994 she organised an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzales Torres, Joseph Kosuth and Ad Reinhardt at the Camden Arts Centre. In 1995 Wall to Wall was presented for the Arts Council GB National Touring Exhibitions and appeared at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Southampton City Art Gallery and Leeds City Art Gallery showing wall drawings by international artists including Daniel Buren, Michael Craig-Martin, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Lawrence Weiner. Maureen Paley also selected an exhibition of work by young British artists in 1996 called The Cauldron featuring Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Steven Pippin, Georgina Starr and Gillian Wearing for the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust which was installed in their Studio space in Dean Clough, Halifax.Follow @MaureenPaley on Instagram. Visit the gallery's official website at https://www.maureenpaley.com/Maureen Paley are exhibiting at Frieze London art fair next week in Regent's Park, Stand C19, 12th-16th October 2022. See works from her booth at Frieze's website: https://viewingroom.frieze.com/viewing-room/1750 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet leading artist Amy Sherald, one of the defining contemporary portraitists in the United States. We discuss her new works about to be exhibited in London, growing up in Columbus, Georgia, the experience of painting Michelle Obama's portrait and how New York has become her home.From 12th October, Sherald will unveil a suite of new paintings in a major exhibition at Hauser Wirth London, marking the artist’s first solo show in Europe. Featuring a series of small-scale and monumental portraits across both the gallery’s London spaces, this presentation is the artist’s largest to date with the gallery. Sherald is acclaimed for her paintings of Black Americans at leisure that have become landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture—a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, families, and artists whose lives have been inextricable from public and politicised narratives. In this new body of work, Sherald humanises the Black experience by depicting her subjects in both historically recognisable and everyday settings, at once immortalising them and reinserting them into the art historical canon. Sherald foregrounds the idea that Black life and identity are not solely tethered to grappling publicly with social issues and that resistance also lies in an expressive vision of self-sovereignty in the world. By subverting existing narratives, Sherald hopes to offer the viewer a reflection of themselves and the complexities of their interior lives, void of the constructs of race, gender, religion and preconceived notions.The first widely available monograph on Amy Sherald will accompany this exhibition, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Newly commissioned texts include an art historical analysis of Sherald’s work by Jenni Sorkin, a meditation on the poetics of the Black ordinary by cultural scholar Kevin Quashie and a conversation between Sherald and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.Amy Sherald has recently donated $1 million to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates, a gift made possible by the sale of Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor made in 2020 to the Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation.Amy Sherald's major new solo show 'The World We Make' opens at Hauser & Wirth London from 12th October – 23rd December 2022.Follow @ASherald on Instagram and her gallery @HauserWirth. Learn more at Hauser & Wirth's website: https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/11577-amy-sherald/THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!!! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

SPECIAL EPISODE!!! Live Talk Art!!! Robert Diament meets legendary artist Ai Weiwei (*1957, Beijing) recorded at Kite Festival, Oxfordshire on 12th June 2022. Ai Weiwei lives and works in multiple locations, including Beijing (China), Berlin (Germany), Cambridge (UK) and Lisbon (Portugal). He is a multimedia artist who also works in film, writing and social media. Special thanks to Tortoise Media, Tom Macklin and the wonderful team at Kite Festival."Expressing oneself is a part of being human. To be deprived of a voice is to be told you are not a participant in society; ultimately it is a denial of humanity." www.aiweiwei.comAi Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values. Recent exhibitions include: Ai Weiwei: Resetting Memories at MARCO in Monterrey, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis, Ai Weiwei at the K20/K21 in Dusseldorf, and Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City.Ai was born in Beijing in 1957 and currently resides and works in Berlin. Ai is the recipient of the 2015 Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International and the 2012 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation.A global citizen, artist and thinker, Ai Weiwei moves between modes of production and investigation, subject to the direction and outcome of his research, whether into the Chinese earthquake of 2008 (for works such as Straight, 2008-12 and Remembering, 2009) or the worldwide plight of refugees and forced migrants (for Law of the Journey and his feature-length documentary, Human Flow, both 2017). From early iconoclastic positions in regards to authority and history, which included Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and a series of middle-finger salutes to sites of power, Study of Perspective (both 1995), Ai’s production expanded to encompass architecture, public art and performance. Beyond concerns of form or protest, Ai now measures our existence in relation to economic, political, natural and social forces, uniting craftsmanship with conceptual creativity. Universal symbols of humanity and community, such as bicycles, flowers and trees, as well as the perennial problems of borders and conflicts are given renewed potency though installations, sculptures, films and photographs, while Ai continues to speak out publicly on issues he believes important. He is one of the leading cultural figures of his generation and serves as an example for free expression both in China and internationally.Follow @aiww on Instagram and @aiww on Twitter. See more of Ai Weiwei's work at Lisson Gallery's website: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/ai-weiweiTo learn more about Kite Festival, visit: https://kitefestival.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art Season 14 continues with a truly special episode!!! We meet artist Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Kentucky) who has lived and worked in New York since the early 1970s. We discuss queerness, Queer Art of the 1960s & 70s, grief, a lifetime of painting, his close friendship with the Chicago Imagists, being taught by Ray Yoshida and his extraordinary new solo exhibition ‘Flowers For Ken’, which has just opened in New York at Fierman West gallery, 19 Pike Street and runs until October 23rd 2022.Text by Ashton Cooper: "In 1988, Ken Nuzzo was diagnosed with HIV, an official pronouncement that confirmed years of suspicion, but had long been avoided for fear of losing the insurance coverage provided through his government job. For the next three years, Ken’s partner Jimmy Wright cared for him in ways both familiar and painfully unfamiliar in their 16-year-long relationship. During that time, Wright also began work on a pair of monumental paintings titled Flowers for Ken. The first of these, Flowers for Ken, Sunflower Stem, was dated 1988-1991 to reflect those “three years of horror,” as Wright described them, and the painting’s date of completion was mirrored by Ken’s death in 1991 at the age of 41. Measuring 6 feet high and wide, Flowers for Ken, Sunflower Stem depicts the backside of a massively enlarged sunflower in the process of decay, its spindly petals withered but still vibrantly orange-yellow as they erupt around the rim of the top-heavy flower. Its partner, Flowers for Ken, Sunflower Head, 1989-92, was completed in the months after Ken’s passing. It renders the same blossom, but this time from the front. Also measuring six feet high, the entire canvas is occupied by the dark center of the flower’s head, its spiral-patterned disc florets rendered in somber tones of brown and gray."Read more at: https://fierman.nyc/ and http://www.jimmywrightartist.com/Follow @JimboAlley and @FiermanGallery on Instagram.Wright's work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago; The Springfield Art Museum, MO; among other institutions. Recent gallery exhibitions include The Queen’s Court, Fierman, NYC (solo), LA 73 – NY 74, M&B Gallery, Los Angeles (solo) and Rachel Harrison, Albert Oehlen, Jimmy Wright, Corbett Vs. Dempsey, Chicago, both in 2019. Fierman released a limited edition publication of Wright’s tearoom drawings, featuring writing by Alissa Bennett and Alison Gingeras, published by Heinzfeller Nileisist. In 2016 Corbett Vs. Dempsey published a major monograph of his work from the 1970s entitled New York Underground. Wright stopped making this body of work as the AIDS crisis wracked the gay community and New York changed. The extant drawings from the period as such serve as a dreamlike document of an oft mythologized cultural moment. The first of Wright’s many flower works, were painted 1988-91, in homage to the artist’s partner who had recently died of AIDS. In 2018 he was named Academician of the National Academy of Design.We love Jimmy's paintings. Thanks for listening!!! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New Talk Art!!! SEASON 14!!!! We begin with a generous, heartfelt conversation with emerging artist Pam Evelyn who creates paintings that read as abstractions, however she incorporates a sensitivity and consideration towards figurative and landscape structures. Born 1996, Guildford, we speak to Pam from a residency in Cornwall on the southern coast of UK.To tolerate occupying a space of unresolved.To hover in the perpetual state of building towards.Every step forwards feels like it’ssupported by clay.Each application can sink.As one element emerges another isdemolished.– Pam Evelyn, 2022Evelyn's recent debut solo exhibition Built on Clay at The Approach took its title from the geological composition of the city of London, which has a predominantly clay foundation. As a material, clay is volatile and unpredictable, it shrinks and expands depending on its water content, imbuing it with the capacity for collapse. Evelyn’s painting process shares similar qualities, the title becoming a comment on the work itself. From the moment she approaches the canvas, Evelyn begins with a problematic and challenging foundation, an untackled and incalculable terrain. Yet, through placing trust in her own intuition, following her own painterly impulses, Evelyn builds – brushstroke by brushstroke, layer by layer, ‘brick by brick’ – a densely rich and textured canvas. Thick layers of paint sediment atop one another; abstracted landscapes and figurations slowly emerge, disappear and reappear like changeable weather, a process which the artist likens to “a mist rising.”On entering the main gallery, four large scale paintings hang impressively in the space. Promised Land, the largest painting in the exhibition is composed of three segments and echoes an abstracted version of Edvard Munch’s monumental painting The Sun both in scale and composition. This sublime landscape behaves like a mirage that oscillates between psychological and physical space.In Built on Clay, waves appear to swirl, circle and crash on an open ocean. Recalling a recent essay by Martin Herbert, Evelyn’s “art is a productive meeting of two perspectives: the slower, airier time by the sea—where, as anyone who has lived there knows, you simply think differently—and its recollection amidst metropolitan tumult. In the paintings, the maritime world is infused with headlong pace and concrete clang.”In Sweet Smelling Smoke, tangles of red and blues paint intertwine, outlines of figures emerge and fade away. Warm autumn shades evoke a woodland scene, or perhaps, more menacingly, suggest the drama of forest fires still in the throes of flame and destruction. Whilst in Routine Escape, blues and greens taken from the palette of a Turner painting move fluidly together, brushstrokes round and fold back on themselves, waves of paint settle and recede. A sailing vessel appears to drift through swells of paint and choppy patchworks of canvas. Recalling Herbert once again, Evelyn’s: “compositions themselves arise out of a process of repeated strategic wrecking and partial salvage, destruction of what was there before until a sense of vivid spontaneity is achieved, as if the painting had achieved its final form in an instant.”Follow @PamEvelyn and @ApproachGalleryLearn more about Pam at: https://theapproach.co.uk/artists/pam-evelyn/images/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art Season 13 FINALE!!!! And what a corker of an episode we are bringing you!!! WE MEET SELF ESTEEM!!!! Iconic pop star, singer, songwriter, producer, poet, actor, novelist, soundtrack composer... and our dear, DEAR friend!!!! We discuss sincerity and her supportive artistic community in Margate, her surprise love of making ceramics and painting, her creative process for songwriting and all art, collaborating with her longterm friend & leading artist Lindsey Mendick, visiting exhibitions and artspaces like Sheffield's S1, and how she's adapting to her recent global mega stardom!!!! We also discover her admiration for artists including Marina Abramović, Tracey Emin and Jenny Holzer.Rebecca Lucy Taylor, known professionally by her stage name Self Esteem, is an award winning English singer-songwriter. On her recent hit album, Prioritise Pleasure, Taylor states “I suppose this record is just me going, what if this isn’t failure? What if this is actually pretty good?” Pretty good feels like a modest estimation as Taylor was nominated for a BRIT award and wins numerous other accolades including BBC Music Introducing’s Artist Of The Year and Attitude Magazine’s Music Award. Self Esteem continues to sell-out shows at ever-growing venues across the UK and plays the largest gigs of her career –in recognising herself and others, Rebecca Taylor has made countless people feel esteemed.We love Self Esteem SO much! You can stream her award-winning album PRIORITISE PLEASURE now at Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your music!!!Follow @SelfEsteemSelfEsteem on Instagram and @SelfEsteem___ on Twitter. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet leading artist Guy J Oliver in his hometown of Margate to discuss video art and film! Guy's award-winning interdisciplinary practice employs video as well as text, painting, collage and performance.We discuss his major film 'You Know Nothing of My Work'. This extraordinary project is a multi-chapter rumination on the cultural dilemma of the disgraced popular icon. Considering how collective, systematic failure led to cases of abuse from powerful figures in the cultural scene, this work proposes a conflict between the enjoyment of and respect for their creative work and what we now know (or at times failed to recognise) about their behaviour. Can we erase the existence of abusive yet influential figureheads, or should we acknowledge and discuss their actions alongside their work? Through a piece that uses elements of film musical and music video traditions within the form of an experimental essay, Oliver takes the pulse of society’s reaction to this fast-evolving and contentious subject. You Know Nothing of My Work was commissioned for the Jerwood/ and Film and Video Umbrella Awards 2020. See the work online at Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Hindsight | Online ExhibitionWe also discuss 'The Year Everyone Died', a meditative video essay that looks back at the year 2016 and explores the artist’s own feelings towards the various deaths that were announced during those twelve months. 2016 appeared to have an unusually high number of well-known figures pass away, from David Bowie at the beginning of the year through to George Michael on Christmas Day and Carrie Fisher on Boxing Day followed by her mother Debbie Reynolds the day after. Guy was recently nominated for the Jarman Award 2021. Inspired by Derek Jarman, the Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of artist filmmakers in the UK. In July 2022, Film London announced Guy was one of its Lodestars 2022, the annual list honouring innovative UK-based creators and practitioners to watch.We also discuss Quench, a project space and gallery in Margate, Kent run by artists Lindsey Mendick and Guy Oliver. Quench was created in the pandemic with the aim of giving artists and curators an opportunity to develop new work and put on exhibitions. We are a not-for-profit venture and all possible art sales and proceeds go directly to the artists. We will also be housing one-off events within the gallery such as screenings and performances, as well as, pop-up opportunities for local practitioners.Visit Guy's official website: GuyOliver.co.ukFollow: @GuyJOliverLearn more about Quench at: @QuenchGallery or visit their website at:https://www.quenchgallery.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.