Art

Arty stuff.

Women in revolt!

• Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-90 8 November 2023 to 7 April 2024 Tate Britain This is an exhibition born out of love, respect and admiration. It is loud, proud, angry and gritty. It gives space and voice to those traditionally excluded: “working class [women], women of colour, the queers and the punks”. It is trans-inclusive, intersectional and socialist focused. It is groundbreaking and rule breaking, audacious and unapologetic. It brings together the work of over 100 artists alongside feminist-activist artefacts and ephemera in an exhibition of art, social history and...

Champion of outcasts: Lisetta Carmi

• Lisetta Carmi: Identities 20 September to 17 December 2023. Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art Lisetta Carmi (1924-2022) said that she “took photographs in order to understand”, and it is this humanism and empathy that Identities , exhibited by the Estorick Collection in London, sought to capture. The exhibition was split into two rooms, both featuring her work from the 1960s. The first contained her study of two working-class communities: the dockers in the port of Genoa and women in a cork factory in Sardinia. As Carmi’s friend Giovanni Battista Martini wrote: “Wherever there was an...

The liberating power of monstrosity

While the horror film genre exploits the female body as a site of terror, women artists can weaponise the same theme as a powerful creative source. Here, Liliana Pavier examines fine art objects through the lens of the horror film genre. WANGECHI MUTU: MYTHMAKING Wangechi Mutu is a self-proclaimed “irresponsible anthropologist and irrational scientist” and uses the canonically exploited black, female body as her point of departure. She fragments and distorts with collage and mixed media, splicing cuttings from magazines with medical diagrams. Mutu’s collages merge monstrous mythology with the...

The left and a famous cartoonist

The Ruling Clawss , by A. Redfield, was originally published by the Daily Worker (US) in 1935. It is now republished as The Ruling Clawss: The Socialist Cartoons of Syd Hoff . Hoff was unknown to me. But after a career as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and Hearst publications from the 1930s he found fame in the USA as a children’s author and illustrator, with Danny and the Dinosaur (1958) selling more than ten million copies. The cartoons in The Ruling Clawss are from 1933-35. They appeared in the Daily Worker as a single panel strip poking fun at the wealthy and ruling class during the...

Hot tramp I love you so

• A review of Rebel Rebel , an exhibition by Soheila Sokhanvari at the Barbican, London Three weeks after the state murder of Masha Amini in Iran, an exhibition of Soheila Sokhanvari ’s Iranian feminist icons, 'Rebel Rebel', opened at the Barbican in London. It is an outstandingly curated exhibition of exquisite work that has taken several years to put together. It memorialises the lives of the 28 women who were exiled, obstructed and passed from sight after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Curve at the Barbican has to be one the most alluring exhibition spaces in the UK, and Eleanor Nairne...

Hannah Höch: The innovative, enduring and undervalued woman of Berlin Dada

The First World War — the first truly mechanised, global war — began on 28 July 1914. What started as a squabble between the great empires of Europe resulted in the mass slaughter of the working class across large swathes of the world. In the years that followed the war, the entire social order up to that point was ripped to shreds. Empires fell, new ones were born, revolutions took place, new countries were formed and new ideologies took root. Russia was the site of the world’s only victorious communist revolution. It would eventually degenerate into one of the greatest stains on history...

Tim Hales: a tribute

On Sunday 6 September my good friend and comrade Tim Hales passed away several months after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Tim will be known to many readers of Solidarity for the colourful and vibrant cartoons he produced regularly for the paper over recent years. He had been an art teacher since the 1980s, first in Barnsley and then Leeds, and was able to devote more time to his own artwork after retirement. He took the responsibility for producing cartoons very seriously and was always proud to see his work published in the paper. I first met Tim as an activist in the Leeds division...

Arts under threat

Workers at the Tate galleries in London and at the South Bank Centre have organised union-backed protests against big job cuts. 200 jobs in the cafés, shops, etc. at the Tate galleries are threatened (these jobs are in Tate Enterprises, the profit arm of Tate, which passes its profits to the charitable arm of Tate), and 400 (two-thirds of the total) at the South Bank Centre. There is more to it than the lower ticket sales for exhibitions or shows, or even than café revenue being down. Since the 1990s such venues have been pushed into a “model” where a lot of their income comes from hiring out...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.