August 2022 Art News

We all need water. No matter where, no matter when, human life cannot survive without it. This has been made acutely and painfully apparent across large swaths of the globe this summer as human-driven climate change has fueled water shortages with detrimental effects to both the environment and human life.
The Benin Bronzes of Nigeria, their provenance, and the possibility of restitution have been making headlines of late. Currently scattered across the world, this collection of a thousand plus statues and plaques was stolen in 1897 from the African Kingdom of Benin, modern-day Nigeria, by British troops.
Fresh off its survey of Faith Ringgold, the New Museum presents a retrospective of another veteran African American painter whose aesthetic DNA courses through subsequent generations of black artists. “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” is the artist’s first museum outing since 1989.
Many countries decided to impose very strict regulations on the press in order to limit, or completely prevent, the circulation of negative accounts. Lord Kitchener, the British Secretary of War, made sure that the control on correspondents was so watertight that the photojournalist Jimmy Hare reported that “to so much as make a snapshot without official permission in writing means arrest.”
Along with the exhibition, Hendricks’s art and its impact will be further explored through a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue with contributions by artists and creative figures including Derrick Adams, Nick Cave, Awol Erizku, Jeremy O. Harris, Rashid Johnson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Fahamu Pecou, and Kehinde Wiley.
Daniel Sprick, an acclaimed master of realism, is arguably the most widely respected artist working in Denver today. Sprick’s representational oil paintings are so impressive that when the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened its Hamilton Building in 2006, the museum devoted a gallery to Sprick and his artistic process. The DAM left the homage to Sprick still-life installation up for 10 years and gave Sprick a show of portraits, too. In Denver, Gallery 1261 represents the prominent painter and is unveiling a new Sprick landscape, Sanderson Gulch, in the Denver Art Showcase.