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The Headlines
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION. Artist Mark Leckey has set up a remarkable-sounding temporary art school of sorts in Redruth, England, that is in the pages of the Guardian. Called the Music & Video Lab (its focuses), the monthlong program has aimed to draw young people typically locked out of art school. “If you’re not from a middle-class background,” Leckey told the paper , “art school is still seen as something that’s beyond you. I came out of art school thinking I wasn’t equipped intellectually to be an artist.” It “has given me the freedom to be who I am without the fear of someone telling me that I wasn’t good enough, which was what I constantly heard at music school,” one student told the Guardian. Leckey and his team are planning to host more workshops.
Related Articles
ON THE MOVE. After 15 years at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom Welsh is stepping down as its director of performing arts, music, and film to become managing director of the storied Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, Cleveland.com reports. In 2019, Steve Dollar covered the action-packed annual event for ARTnews , and described a “supersize lineup of legendary composers, blue-chip contemporary music ensembles, rock heroes, jazz visionaries, electronic disrupters, drone mavens, folksters, punkers, and happy collaborative mashups of all of the above.” And in London, Brett Rogers is planning to leave the Photographers’ Gallery at the end of 2022, following 16 years at the helm, per ArtDaily.
The Digest
On Monday, President Biden unveiled the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, which went into orbit late last year. It shows galaxies from a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang. More images from the device will be revealed this morning. [NASA and The New York Times]
In a collaboration with Google, the members of the K-pop sensation BTS shared some of their favorite artworks by embedding them in Google Street Views around the world. V, for one, installed works by Vincent van Gogh and Egon Schiele in London. [People]
After extensive rehab work over the past few years, Nam June Park’s 1,000-screen masterwork, The More, the Better (1986), is ready to go back on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, South Korea. [The Korea Herald]
What happens to temporary public artworks when the show is over? Journalist Zachary Small talked with Pamela Council, Sam Moyer, and other artists about the harrowing efforts that sometimes have to be made to preserve pieces. [The New York Times]
Painter Ross Bleckner will show new flower paintings with Petzel at the ADAA Art Show this fall in New York. “They are really about the movement of light and dark gliding along a surface and end up as abstract,” Bleckner said. [Cultured]
Researchers in England are excavating a 5,000-year-old tomb known as Arthur’s Stone (after that legendary king) in Herefordshire. The project is a partnership between the University of Manchester and English Heritage, which works to preserve the nation’s historic structures. [CNN]
The Kicker
ART TALK. Architect James Wines, of the legendary firm SITE, chatted with Curbed and shared what he termed an “amusing dialogue” that he once had with Robert Rauschenberg , when the artist hired SITE to renovate his Manhattan studio. “I had this idea for him to create an outdoor artwork on the very visible fire escape going down the back of his building,” Wines recalled. “His response was ‘Why would I want to do that?,’ which embarrassingly reminded me to never assume what an artist might want to do.” If only all architects were so self-reflective! [Curbed]