Displaying items by tag: activist

Celebrated poet, writer, actress, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou’s private collection of African-American art, most of which has never been shown publicly, is heading to auction at Swann Auction Galleries on September 15.

The collection of nearly 50 artworks, including pieces by Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Melvin Edwards, and Jonathan Green, was directly consigned by Angelou’s estate to auction house’s African-American Fine Art Department. Angelou’s family are “happy to have the art that she loved, bring joy and inspiration to the lives of others,” according to a statement by the author’s son Guy Johnson.

Contemporary Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei's work is to go on show as the launch exhibition of the Blenheim Art Foundation in London.

Opening at Blenheim Palace this fall, the exhibition will showcase more than 50 artworks by Ai Weiwei produced over the last 30 years in the artist's most extensive U.K. exhibition ever.

The show will cover the breadth of Weiwei's career, spanning the early photography dating from his New York period in the 1980s through to new works conceived in China specifically for the exhibition.

Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Human Rights has launched its Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism thanks to a $400,000 grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The Fellowship is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting Fellowship for a scholar, activist or artist to teach and conduct research at the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The recipient will investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change and present original research in an annual lecture. The findings will be published and distributed among colleges and universities worldwide.

Julia Gruen, Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said, “We are honored to establish this dynamic fellowship at Bard College in Keith Haring’s name. The artist as activist was a role integral to Haring’s own vision, identity and practice, and we are confident that a fellowship dedicated to this approach can produce illuminating opportunities for discourse and scholarship.” Haring, an American artist and social activist who succumbed to AIDS in 1990, often raised political questions about HIV/AIDS and gay identity through his work. Through his activism, Haring helped the mainstream understand the AIDS crisis as a human rights issue rather than an affliction faced by a specific community.

Bard College will begin accepting applications for the Keith Haring Fellowship in February. The first Fellow will be announced in the spring of 2014.

Sotheby’s will offer the Collection of Alex and Elisabeth Lewyt in a series of auctions in New York and Paris beginning on May 7, 2013. The works, which include paintings and drawings by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), will lead Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sale in New York. Proceeds from the sale will benefit a charitable foundation to be created in the couple’s name. The 200 works, which also include illustrated letters by artists such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), are expected to garner anywhere from $67 million to $98 million.

The first sale of the series will present a selection of 20 works from the Lewyt’s collection. Highlights include a seminal Cézanne still-life titled Les Pommes, which the Lewyts bought from the Wildenstein Galleries in 1953; Modigliani’s sensual portrait of the socialite Marguerite de Hasse de Villers titled L’Amazone; and various works by Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

Alex Lewyt, a New York-based vacuum cleaner inventor who died in 1988, and his wife, Elisabeth, an animal-welfare activist who died this past December, began amassing their remarkable collection in the 1950s.