Growing up in Lublin, Poland, Agnieszka Polska had little access to contemporary art. So a visit to the Tate Modern on a trip to London as a teenager, she said, was “a revelation.”
Two decades later, Ms. Polska is an artist and filmmaker whose video works have been featured at institutions like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, where in 2018 she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie. Read more
On a Sunday stroll up 16th Street in Washington, D.C., years ago, Lonnie Bunch got a hug and a gentle talking-to from an African American woman.
Mr. Bunch — who at the time was the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, which was still under construction, and now heads the entire Smithsonian Institution — had been very visible in the media discussing the newest of the Smithsonian museums. Read more
LONDON — Several years ago, Bari Shaffran and her husband were meandering around Frieze London when they came across the booth of Berlin-based gallery Eigen + Art.
While not avid collectors, the couple had purchased works at art fairs before. One of the gallerists introduced them to Birgit Brenner, an artist featured in their show. The couple bought three of Ms. Brenner’s pieces. Read more
LONDON: As the first of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings to become part of a public museum collection, the provenance of“Poplars Near Nuenen” is easily traceable. The landscape’s restoration history, however, has not been as straightforward.
Painted on a used canvas, it has another work beneath it. An early attempt at restoration weakened the paint’s already compromised stability. And questions about added brush strokes remained unresolved. Read more
LONDON: Dr. Ayoade Alakija, an infectious disease specialist based in Nigeria, is co-chair of the African Union’s Vaccine Delivery Alliance (AVDA). In December 2021, Dr. Alakija, nicknamed Yodi, was put in charge of accelerating equitable access to Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines for the World Health Organization’s global initiative known as the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator. She uses the term “global north” to describe high-income countries and “global south” to describe low- and middle-income countries. Read more