Arts news

• Dismissed, excluded and now adored: how the female surrealists finally had their revenge

  11-02-2025 16:51
  
  Written off as ‘muses’ and denied entry to the movement, they still produced extraordinary work that is only now being appreciated. We enter a gender-breaking world of occult worship – and cats‘Of course the women were important,” said the artist Roland Penrose in 1982, “but it was because they were our muses.” Penrose was talking to the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who was interviewing him for a book she was writing about women surrealists. “Th
  
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• Mervyn Street’s parents were paid in rocks instead of wages. He led a fight for his people – and won $180m

  11-02-2025 15:00
  
  The Gooniyandi artist’s new show, Stolen Wages, chronicles the lives of Aboriginal mustering workers, like himself and his father – who was never paid in his lifetimeAs a child in the 1950s, growing up on a cattle station in the dusty red Kimberley, Mervyn Street remembers finding a rock in his mother’s kitchen, with numerical markings on one side. This, he would learn, was a “black penny”.“My dad had, on the back of the penny, three ones – 1, 1, 1 &ndas
  
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• From escaped child bride to artist: why one Ghanaian painter puts women at the centre of her work

  11-02-2025 11:00
  
  Hawa Awanle Ayiboro’s solo exhibition opens this month in Accra with paintings that explore a difficult period in her childhood and the emancipation of other womenWhether self-portraits saturated in blue tones or sex workers elegantly dressed in suits, Hawa Awanle Ayiboro says her paintings are all infused with her childhood struggles. Ayiboro was 12 when she faced becoming a child bride.The pressure to marry a much older man came from her mother, who first sent her to cook and clean at hi
  
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• Between Nostalgia and Dreams: how immigrant identity is informed by possessions

  11-02-2025 10:02
  
  Yusuf Ahmed’s experience of moving from Ethiopia to Kenya to the US inspires his poignant new exhibitionWith his new show, Yusuf Ahmed is challenging traditional expectations of who belongs in the narrative of American history. Between Nostalgia and Dreams showcases Ahmed’s breathtaking photographs that explore the identities of young Black, brown and queer adults through the use of objects of their choosing that represent their personal history and resilience. It’s a direct ac
  
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• Between Nostalgia and Dreams: an immigrant photographer’s defiant stance against Trump

  11-02-2025 10:02
  
  Yusuf Ahmed’s experience of moving from Ethiopia to Kenya to the US inspires his poignant new exhibitionWith his new show, Yusuf Ahmed is challenging traditional expectations of who belongs in the narrative of American history. Between Nostalgia and Dreams showcases Ahmed’s breathtaking photographs that explore the identities of young Black, brown and queer adults through the use of objects of their choosing that represent their personal history and resilience. It’s a direct ac
  
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• Anselm Kiefer: Early Works review – his Nazi salute dominates a show haunted by horrors

  11-02-2025 01:01
  
  Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
  From shocking images of him Sieg Heil-ing to a woodland watercolour haunted by the atrocities of war, the German artist confronts his homeland’s fascist past – and it’s never felt so relevantWhen he was 24, Anselm Kiefer found his father’s old Wehrmacht uniform in the attic. This hidden, shameful family history was almost lost to time, almost forgotten, but Kiefer couldn’t let that happen. So he put on the overcoat and “Sieg Heil&rdquo
  
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