The life of an art historian has never been easy. Even under normal conditions, this career is a tough one, with long years of research and training. Lotty Rosenfeld died on July 24th at the age of 77 from cancer. The Chilean artist pursued an artistic career intimately connected with politics and protest. Annie Flanagan is a photographer, educator, and freelance journalist who works on themes such as sexuality, gender, identity, and trauma. Annie recently won the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. On 22 October, Christie’s will present 41 works from the collection of French dealer and art collector Paul Haim at a dedicated auction. This collection was supervised by his daughter Dominique, since Haim’s death in 2006.
Art-History students and the pandemic hit
July 23, 2020 – Via news.artnet.com
The life of an art historian has never been easy. Employment opportunities are almost insignificant in a market of falling demand, low salaries, and limited possibilities. Even under normal conditions, this career is a tough one, with long years of research and training. Added to this, the pandemic has worsened the situation for all types of activity within this field, whether they are doctoral students or recent graduates.
Those who are still studying are facing indefinite delays in completing their research. Those who are graduating this year are facing an extremely tight labour market. Many students have had to choose between abandoning their research altogether or extending the length of their studies due to the closure of libraries during the pandemic.
The library occupies an important place in the lives of art history students, in addition to providing access to materials for research, it also provides stable internet and air conditioning to these students who cannot afford these types of services in their student rooms. The study program of this career is known to be object-based, which generates great problems in these times of isolation. In general, universities do not have substitutes for object-based studies. This creates a lot of frustration for these students, as they cannot find a way to access study materials, consult sources, or verify quotes.
Among the resources used to study the arts are international travel. These are very important for art history students who often receive scholarships to spend months abroad doing research for their doctoral theses. But the current scenario of pandemic and isolation generates what seems like a never-ending break in this study activity.
The Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld dies at the age of 77
July 24, 2020 – Via artnews.com
Lotty Rosenfeld died on July 24th at the age of 77 from cancer. The Chilean artist pursued an artistic career intimately connected with politics and protest. Together with Raúl Zurita, Juan Castillo, Diamela Eltit, and Fernando Balcells, she founded the Art Action Collective (AAC) in her native Chile in 1979.
Lotty Rosenfeld was born on June 20, 1943 in Santiago, Chile. Her real name was Carlota Eugenia Rosenfeld Villarreal and between 1964 and 1968 she studied at the School of Applied Arts of the University of Chile. There, she was a student of important Chilean artists such as Eduardo Vilches, Kurt Herdan, and Florencia de Amesti.
Until the end of the 70s, her work was focused on the technique of engraving. But the civil-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet made Lotty rethink her social role as an artist. She turned her career in order to carry out artistic protest practices in public spaces. She developed a work linked to performances and artistic actions.
One of her most important artistic protest actions is Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, when it covered Manquehue Avenue with crosses in 1979, with an intervention that was recorded in photographs and videos. Lotty defined her work as “a warning against authoritarianism and exploitation”. This was what she expressed last year during an interview with artnews.com.
The crossings on Manquehue Avenue had a great impact on a global level, causing replicas of the action in several cities such as Havana, New York and Berlin, among others. Lotty demonstrated a deep commitment to political and social issues during her extensive artistic career. Through her work and the intervention of symbols, she questioned institutional rigidity and political status.
In 1982 she received the Special Jury Prize from the First Tokyo International Video Biennial in Japan. In 2007 she was named Visual Artist of the Year by the Chilean National Arts Council. In 2001 and 2003 she received the Altazor Prize of the National Arts of Chile. During 2015 she represented Chile at the National Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennial in the exhibition Poetics of Dissidence.
Annie Flanagan and the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers
July 23, 2020 – Via artforum.com
Annie Flanagan is a photographer, educator, and freelance journalist who lives between New Orleans and Vermont. She works on themes such as sexuality, gender, identity, and trauma. Annie recently won the Robert Giard Grant for Emerging LGBTQ+ Photographers. This award was created by Queer|Art and Robert Giard Foundation.
Annie holds a Master of Science degree from Syracuse University and works as a freelance journalist for publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and Smithsonian Magazine. With this $10,000 award, Annie plans to develop her practice outside of editorial projects and to continue funding her work documenting rural America from a queer perspective. she plans to do work dedicated to the environment and people for whom she has a great love and who she wants to know more and more about. Her goal is to contribute to a queer archive in the tradition of Robert Giard.
Robert Giard was a landscape and portrait photographer, well known for his project Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers. This project ended with an exhibition at the New York Public Library in 1998 and an anthology published in 1997. But his career took a turn after seeing Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, a film about the onset of the HIV crisis in New York’s gay community during the 1980s. Then Giard decided to turn his camera to the LGBTQ community to preserve a record of the lives and stories of gay people.
The Robert Giard Foundation was created after Robert Giard’s death in 2002, with the aim of preserving his photographic legacy so that all his work, consisting of nudes, still life, landscapes, and portraits, would be accessible to a growing audience.
Giard’s photographs are a faithful testimony to the lives and stories of LGBTQ+ people, reflecting what it means to be gay, lesbian, or queer. The foundation promotes the use of Giard’s work for educational purposes, supports the continuation of the LGBTQ+ grants in America, and also promotes LGBTQ+ movements and activism.
The Secret Garden of Paul Haim
July 24, 2020 – Via artdaily.com
On 22 October, Christie’s will present 41 works from the collection of French dealer and art collector Paul Haim at a dedicated auction. This collection was supervised by his daughter Dominique, since Haim’s death in 2006. The works that make up this collection were located in La Petite Escalère, this place was created in the 70s by Haim himself. It is located on the banks of the Adour River, very close to the border that separates the Basque Country from the Landes.
It all started at the end of the 1960s when Haim, together with his wife, the photographer and painter Jeannette Leroy, settled on the Basque Coast. Haim was already by then, an art dealer with great reputation in Paris. He played a very important role in the entrance of impressionist and modern art in Japan. He devoted many years of his life to this task, even holding dedicated exhibitions of Rodin and Bourdelle. In his travels, he met many important personalities within the art world, such as the Japanese collector and owner of Fuji Television, Shikanai Nobutaka.
La Petite Escalère is a private sculpture garden that was created by Paul Haim, Jeannette Leroy, and Gilbert Carty, a collector, an artist, and a gardener. Between the woods and the meadows lies a collection of contemporary works of art belonging to artists such as Zao Wou-Ki, Maillol, Rodin, Niki de Saint Phalle, Chillida, and several others. This adventure has been going on for more than forty years, today the garden and the collection are managed by a non-profit association created in 2012 called Les Amis de La Petite Escalère.
