Podcast Turns to Pan-Africanism, Art and Health, and Barbara Hepworth in London
A traveling exhibition about Pan-African culture has arrived in London with a new local inflection. Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica is now on view at the Barbican Art Gallery through September 6, after earlier presentations at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museu d’art contemporani de Barcelona (Macba). One of the show’s curators, Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of Macba, discusses how the exhibition has shifted as it moved from city to city.
The latest episode of The Week in Art also looks beyond the gallery wall. Ben Luke speaks with Daisy Fancourt about Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health, which was shortlisted this week for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in the UK. The conversation considers how research on the arts and wellbeing might be put into practice, a subject that has gained fresh attention as museums and cultural institutions expand their public-health language.
The episode’s Work of the Week is Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red (1943), a work included in Hepworth in Colour at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Alexandra Gerstein, the exhibition’s curator, joins Alexander Morrison to discuss the sculpture and its place in Hepworth’s practice. The show runs from June 12 to September 6.
Together, the three segments trace a familiar but revealing art-world pattern: exhibitions that change as they travel, scholarship that crosses into health policy, and a modernist sculpture that still rewards close looking. In that sense, the episode offers not just a survey of current programming, but a snapshot of how art continues to move between institutions, disciplines, and audiences.
