The 20th Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Johannesburg-based practice Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally, will open on 11 June 2021. Vally is the youngest architect to be commissioned for this internationally renowned architecture programme. Her Pavilion design is based on past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging across London. The forms in the Pavilion…
Active between 1974 and 1980, the Combahee River Collective was born from a sense of dissatisfaction that both the feminist movement and civil rights movement did not address the needs of Black women and queer people. The collective joined together in the early 70s, seminally publishing The Combahee River Collective Statement, a key document in…
A trailblazer of street photography in India, Raghubir Singh, born in 1942, worked and published prolifically from the late 1960s until his passing in 1999, aged 56. Born into an aristocratic family in Rajasthan, over the course of his life he resided in Hong Kong, Paris, London, and New York, but his eye was inevitably…
Arthur George ‘Art’ Smith, better known by Art Smith, was a leading modernist jeweller of the mid-20th century, and one of the few Afro-Caribbean creatives working in the field to reach international acclaim. Inspired by biomorphism and primitivism, Smith’s jewellery is dynamic and diverse, varying dramatically in size and form. His designs were influenced by…
Renowned for his outstanding collection of Modernist furniture, the Maharaja of Indore is a legendary figure in the world of design. Born in 1908, Yashwant Rao Holkar II spent his youth living in luxury, enjoying the privileges afforded to India’s aristocracy. During the 1920s, Holkar II relocated to England to study at Oxford where a private tutor, Dr. Marcel…
One of the most celebrated and influential designers of the 20th century, Pierre Cardin, born in 1922 in Treviso, Italy, commenced his career at the age of fourteen undertaking an apprenticeship at a clothier. The Italian French designer, who passed away last week aged 98, left home in 1939 to work for a tailor in…
In the mid-sixties, brimming with new ideas and the need for a career change, Michael Chow, widely known as M, established his vision of bridging the East with the West through the cuisine of China in a participatory theatre of art, architecture, design and food. Born in Shanghai as Zhou Yinghua, Chow’s father was Zhou…
The women of Gee’s Bend, a small, remote, Black community in Alabama, have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. Resembling an inland island, Gee’s Bend is surrounded on three sides by the Alabama River. The some seven hundred or so inhabitants of this small, rural community are…