Giving a reflective moment, this labyrinth shows the connection between nature and source of well-being that we clearly lack of in these times! 2020 has reshaped our way of living since we spend most of our time at home now. A number of people living in the city only have a limited access to greenery space. 

 

Richard Long’s work has been exhibited in Modern Art Oxford in December 1971 but also in 1979.

 

Richard Longis one of the best-known British land artists. The land art movement is a practice which emerged in the late 1960s in both America and Europe, the movement integrates aspects of minimalism and conceptualism with a direct engagement in the landscape.

Today's #ArchiveAdvent post was written by Modern Art Oxford volunteer and hospitality student, Faye.

 

#ArchiveAdventDay3 #ModernArtOxford #LandArt #Christmas2020

This is not what you think you see. 

Kerry James Marshall subverts traditional contexts by recreating narratives of the African diaspora through the very language of Western art.  As a kid, he would watch his father fix broken watches to resell them. He soon learned how to deconstruct items and recompose them as his own, reclaiming Black spaces in Western painting. In the series “At the End of the Wee Hours”, what seems at first just a gracious collage becomes a radical, painfully fragmented cry against the tragedies of colonialism. 

“Through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a sign / the slave ship cracks everywhere”. And Marshall’s photographs crack with it. The poem, “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” (1947), written by anti-colonialist poet Aimé Césaire inspired Marshall’s triptych of collages. «The poem [..] showed me how politics and poetics could be interwoven to magical effect. [..] Using analytical cubism as a model, I tried to evoke the sense of the tropics embodied in Césaire’s poem without reducing realistic detail to shape and texture».

In our 2016 retrospective “KALEIDOSCOPE: The Vanished Reality” we wanted to show, with exceptional pieces like Marshall’s, that the meaning of art changes completely depending on its context. The power of art to tell piercing stories rests on the assumptions that its audience makes. Sometimes, unlearning our assumptions, unveiling what’s behind a nice collage, can tell a much more powerful story. 

2020 has been a transformative year for us all. As its end draws near, we think of our loved ones and what we have learned along the way. Sometimes, however, to learn new things we need to unlearn assumptions that can’t fit reality anymore. Unlearn, for instance, that we are all equally safe, and turn our ear to dismissed Black stories. 

What assumptions have you tried to challenge this year?

...........................................

In the comments: #KerryJamesMarshall #MAO #modernartoxford #attheendoftheweehours #aimeecesaire #unlearn

#kaleidoscope #vanishedreality

#christmas2020