March 29 | Sir Nicholas Serota defends arts education & launches Durham Commission

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“Icons of Modern Art. The Shchukin collection” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton will go down in history as the most popular exhibition of 2017, but what about 2016? The Art Newspaper has revealed the blockbuster shows of last year. Elsewhere, Nicholas Serota’s priority as the new chair of the Arts Council England is to defend arts education.

Nicholas Serota to launch “major investigation” into the benefits of arts education

Sir Nicholas Serota is to announce one of his first proposals since being appointed the new chairman of Arts Council England, in collaboration with Durham University.

Serota will in fact use his first speech since starting in February to announce an 18-month inquiry investigating the ways in which young people respond to arts education, and they the best ways of nurturing creativity in young audiences. The Durham Commission’s aim will be to offer children in all schools the “kind of opportunities that are currently available only in the best of schools.” The news comes against the backdrop of concern regarding creative education, with the British government’s choices of subjects for the English Baccalaureate having considerably pushed out the arts from compulsory education. Read more on The Guardian.


 

Tate St Ives reveals details of £20m refurbishment ahead of reopening

Following a £20 million refurbishment and 18 months of construction works, Tate St Ives is reopening on March 31, with the inaugural exhibition “The Studio and the Sea”.

This Friday, just the original building, overlooking Porthmeor Beach, will open its doors, with the institution’s new extension — doubling Tate St Ives’ existing exhibition space — to inaugurate in October. “The Studio and the Sea” will run from March 31 through September 3, and it will be followed by the Tate’s first ever semi-permanent exhibition, showcasing works from Tate’s collection, including works by Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. More on The Art Newspaper.

 

The new Tate St Ives extension is behind the original building and will open in October (Image: © Jamie Fobert Architects)


 

The most popular exhibition of 2016 revealed

Christo’s controversial Floating Piers have attracted 1.2 million people to Italy’s Lake Iseo — becoming the world’s most visited art work of 2016, according to The Art Newspaper’s 2016 attendance survey.

Some of the most popular exhibitions were “Picasso Sculpture”, at the MoMA, co-organized with the Musée Picasso in Paris, (851,385 visitors in total) “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology”, also at the MoMA (752,995 visitors) and “Renoir: Masterpieces” at the National Art Center Tokyo. (667,897 visitors) Among the exhibitions with most visitors daily were: “Post-Impressionist Masterpieces”, (9,700 visitors per day) “Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum – The Exhibition” (8,340) and “Patricia Piccinini: Consciousness” (8,288 visitors) at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, all free of charge. Despite a drop in tourism in France, Paris’s Musée du Louvre remains the world’s most visited museum, with 7,400,000 visitors last year, followed by the MoMA (7,006,859 visitors) and the British Museum. (6,420,395 visitors) More information available via The Art Newspaper.

 

christo's floating piers in lake iseo, italy

 

 

Paris Cergy National School of Arts to launch post-graduate program with Triennale SUD and the Doual’art Art Centre

The Paris Cergy National School of Arts has announced an open call for the “Moving frontiers – Do and undo / Faire et défaire” postgraduate program, in partnership with Triennale SUD 2017 and the Doual’art Art Centre. (Cameroon)

Six young artists or theoreticians will be chosen to participate to the program, which will provide an “open and mobile experimental platform of artistic research”, with the aim to challenge established notions of “borders” and “frontiers” and to engage with some of the most pressing global issues, including migration, colonialism and post-colonialism with a special focus on Africa. All information is available via Paris Cergy National School of Arts’ official website.