Hammad, Mahmoud (1923–1988)

Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Mahmoud Hammad, born in Jarabulus, Syria, was among the first Arab artists to adopt the letterforms of the Arabic language as a basis for modern compositions. His experiments predate the pan-regional 1970s florescence of horoufiyah (visual manipulations of the Arabic letter in fine art) by more than a decade, and his early Arabic writing paintings, first exhibited in Damascus, Beirut, São Paulo, and Venice in the early 1960s, deconstructed the letters to produce semi-geometric abstract compositions. Hammad would continue to explore Arabic writing for the duration of his career, though his later paintings struck a more studied balance between formal and communicative properties. Coming of age during the Syrian struggle for independence, Hammad played the roles of both artist and organizer in the Syrian art world. He started exhibiting in Damascus as early as 1939, and was a member of Studio Veronese, the country’s first fine arts club. In 1952 he was granted a study fellowship to the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, which he completed in 1956. After returning to Syria, Hammad taught in rural schools, later joining the faculty of the new College of Fine Arts in Damascus in 1960. He became dean of the college in the 1970s, a role he retained until 1981. He died in Damascus, Syria.

Author(s):  
Juliano Aparecido Pereira

ENGLISHThe article presents and discusses an experience in Brazil on an architectural design method of teaching created by the School of Architecture and Urban Design of the University of Sao Paulo (FAU USP). We refer to a Pedagogical Reform proposed in 1962 and its consequences on the formation of Brazilian architects. Known as the 1962 Reform and having as its leader, in association with other professors, architect and professor João Batista Vilanova Artigas (1913-1985), the proposed new model for a method of project education ended up by being adopted, in some aspects, but not all, by the majority of Brazilian schools of architecture and urban design. The reform led by Vilanova Artigas proposed an overcoming of project teaching methods based either on the traditional model of architectural composition, by way of the School of Fine Arts, or on those for the formation of architect-engineers, by way of the Polytechnics. This new teaching method would be based on parameters for the comprehension of architectural practice, pointing to a generalist formation of the architect, thus instrumentalizing him to act within the various scales of architectural production: objects, buildings, cities and visual communication. In this context is manifested the intention for the creation of a University of Design, founded on the practice of investigation and studio research, thus overcoming the boundaries of a project scale in a school of architecture, limited between the realization of a building scale and, at most, of a city. To understand this generalist and plural outlook becomes a contribution to the discussion on the formation of contemporary architects and their awareness and instrumentalization for action before the complex professional demands of present day societies. PORTUGUÊSO artigo apresenta e discute uma experiência no Brasil de método e ensino de projeto de arquitetura, elaborado pela Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo, a FAU USP. Referimo-nos a uma Reforma Pedagógica proposta no ano de 1962 e as suas consequências à formação dos arquitetos brasileiros. Conhecida como a Reforma de 1962 e tendo como seu líder, associado a outros professores, o arquiteto e professor João Batista Vilanova Artigas (1913-1985), o novo modelo proposto de método de ensino de projeto passou a ser adotado, sob alguns aspectos, mas não todos, pela maior parte das Faculdades de Arquitetura e Urbanismo brasileiras. A reforma liderada por Vilanova Artigas propunha uma superação dos métodos de ensino de projeto baseados ou no modelo tradicional de composição de arquitetura, via Escolas de Belas Artes, ou então naqueles de formação de arquitetos-engenheiros, via Escolas Politécnicas. O método de ensino proposto iria se basear em novos parâmetros de compreensão da prática da arquitetura, apostando em uma formação generalista do arquiteto, instrumentalizando-o a atuar nas várias escalas de produção arquitetônica: objetos, edifícios, cidades e comunicação visual. Nesse contexto manifesta-se a intenção de criação de uma Universidade do Projeto, fundada na prática de investigação e na pesquisa do ateliê, superando assim o limite da escala de projeto de uma Faculdade de Arquitetura, limitada entre a realização da escala do edifício e, quando muito, da cidade. Compreender essa formação generalista e plural coloca-se como contribuição à discussão da formação do arquiteto contemporâneo e a sua sensibilização e instrumentalização para ação frente às complexas demandas profissionais das sociedades atuais.


Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Nazir Nabaa, a respected Syrian painter, made his greatest contributions to Arab modern art in the 1960s and 1970s, when he contributed to the graphic identity of progressive political causes and the Palestinian liberation struggle. He joined the Syrian Communist Party in the 1954 and in 1959 was briefly jailed for this affiliation. After his release, he traveled to Cairo on a fellowship to study painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, there developing a heroic realist style around social and labor themes. After returning to Syria in 1964, Nabaa taught drawing in rural schools and worked with myth and folklife. Moving to Damascus in 1968, he worked as an illustrator and became involved in creative projects in support of political mobilization, including poster design, puppet theater, fine art painting, and art criticism. Between 1971 and 1975, Nabaa studied in Paris at the Academy of Fine Arts. Upon his return, he joined the faculty of the College of Fine Arts in Damascus. His later paintings became more fantastical, combining goddess figures with still lifes of fruits, tapestries, and jewelry. He also developed a parallel corpus of abstract paintings based on the exploration of texture and color.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136787792110184
Author(s):  
Ricardo Campos ◽  
Gabriela Leal

Graffiti art and street art have been increasingly described as an artistic movement, with a constant presence in the streets, but also in galleries and museums. In this article we use the term urban art to define this institutionalized category, originating from informal street expressions. In the specific context of the city of São Paulo (Brazil), most of the social actors that make up this art world have backgrounds linked to graffiti and pixação. These two urban subcultures are linked to informal forms of appropriation of the urban space through illicit inscriptions. In this article, we aim, on the one hand, to describe the features and singularities of urban art as an emerging art world and, on the other, to understand how careers are developed in this universe. The empirical data derives from a qualitative research (in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation) developed during the past three years.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nancy Isabel Dantas

This thesis explores the distinction between commissioning and curating, adopting the Bienal de São Paulo (or Bienal) as its conceptual propeller and point of departure. The thesis regards exhibitions as palimpsests, in other words, platforms built on previous conscious or sublimated models, beyond the Venetian model inaugurated in 1895. By looking at world expositions, particularly the Cape presence at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, this project traces a lineage of commissioners, from Sir Henry Cole to Sydney Cowper through to the Director of the Pretoria Art Museum, Albert Werth. It distinguishes these men, their vision and allegiances from the curatorial model instantiated in South Africa by the late Okwui Enwezor as a consequence of the Second Johannesburg Biennale, held in 1997. The aim of this research has been to provide a partial but crucial account of this shift, and to remain attentive to the silences and deletions, to what happens in the interstice, at transitionary moments of ‘betweenness.’ I ask that readers consider the 1979 Bienal as an instance of an interstice where the occluded and silenced ghost of modernist artist Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso, who represented South Africa at the 1973 edition of the Bienal, garnering a substantial award for his work in drawing, resides. Matsoso was the first and only Black South African artist to receive this accolade. This thesis posits that Matsoso’s absence from the exhibition in 1979, an exhibition where he would rightly have featured, constitutes a curatorial haunting, wedged in the archive of the Bienal’s history, and an opportunity for revision and evaluation of commissioning vis-àvis curating. In reading the exhibition histories’ archive “along the grain” (Stoler 2002), the commissioner emerges as a man of letters, a privileged social category found in the archive; a colonial authority whose status was founded as much on his display of European learning as on his studied ignorance of local knowledge; an implementer of the taxonomic state and modernist art historical canon (in the case of Werth); a cultivator of the fine arts of deference, dissemblance and persuasion. At a later stage and moment of dissonance and disruption, the independent curator emerges to reconsider, question and expand the canon, distancing him/herself from the (South African) State to serve the artist or artists and a wider community. This research aims to contribute, albeit in a small way, to a reappraisal of the position of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso in South African modernism, and the distinction between commissioning and curating.


Art History ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Shtromberg ◽  
Camilla Querin

Often situated within the broader discipline of Latin American art, Brazilian art is distinguished by a unique linguistic and colonial history. Following the first encounter of Brazilian territory in 1500, the Portuguese attempted to pacify the different Indigenous tribes comprising the Tupi people occupying the territories along the Atlantic coast. Many tribes were put to work in the service of the Crown, particularly in harvesting commodities such as the red dye extracted from Brazilwood, the tree that gave Brazil its name. The Indigenous peoples, many of whom were decimated upon contact with heretofore unknown and infectious diseases brought from Europe, were later replaced by a huge influx of African enslaved people who were put to work on sugar plantations. A mixture of African, Indigenous, and Portuguese traditions thus characterizes much of Brazilian art well into the 20th century. One distinguishing feature of Brazilian artistic traditions was the arrival of the Portuguese royal family and their court to Brazil in 1807. Fearing the arrival of Napoleon’s army, the Portuguese king, John VI, fled to Rio de Janeiro, establishing the only monarchy in the Americas, which he ruled until 1822, when Brazil gained its independence. During the 19th century, Rio was established as the political and cultural capital of the Portuguese Empire. In 1816, the French Artistic Mission, comprising a group of French artists arrived in Rio to establish the first art academy there. The discussion of a nationally specific Brazilian art became possible during the 19th century, after the establishment of the first artistic institution dedicated to the teaching of art, the Royal School of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, which was later renamed the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (it underwent several other name changes through the century). The French Artistic Mission was dominated by European, namely, French artistic models, a practice that continued well into the 20th century. The transition from the 19th to the 20th century brought with it not only significant social upheavals, including the abolition of slavery in 1888, but also a renewed interest in a nationally specific Brazilian art. Modernism in Brazilian art had its culminating moment in 1922 with Modern Art Week in São Paulo, establishing this growing urban center as an important venue for the production and circulation of art. This renewal was furthered with the foundation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951. By the 1960s and 1970s, Brazilian art was exhibited in important international exhibitions, and today Brazilian artists have a strong presence in all major international art fairs and biennials. Contemporary art, although the most difficult to classify as having any specifically Brazilian traits, is also the most well-known art by international audiences.


Slavic Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 819-843 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Johnson

How did the Stalin Prize function in the Soviet fine art establishment of the 1940s and 1950s and how were the awards interpreted by members of the artistic community and the public? This examination of the discussions of the Stalin Prize Committee and unrehearsed responses to the awards reveals an institution that operated at the intersection of political and expert-artistic standards within which the parameters of postwar socialist realism were negotiated and to some extent defined. The Stalin Prize for the Fine Arts played an important part in the development of the leader cult and contributed to the self-aggrandizement of an elite minority. The symbolic capital of the Stalin Prize was compromised by its role, perceived or actual, in the consolidation of a generational and ideological hegemony within the Soviet art world and the establishment of an aesthetic blueprint for socialist realism.


Author(s):  
Anneka Lenssen

Fateh al-Moudarres is considered a leader among Syria’s generation of modernist painters born in the 1920s. Because of his early participation in literary salons, his freeform and intuitive style of drawing and painting, and his willingness to express contrarian and independent views about culture and authority, al-Moudarres enjoyed widespread respect in the Arab world as an authentically modern artist. Al-Moudarres represented Syria in numerous international exhibitions, including biennials in Venice and São Paulo. A polymath who also wrote poems, short stories, and composed for the piano, his career began in the cultural circles of Aleppo in the 1940s, where he experimented with surrealist modes of composition. He would subsequently hone a semi-naïve style of painting and a repertoire of imagery drawn from the myths of ancient Syrian civilizations, religious icons, the land and its flora, and rural custom. In 1956, he was granted a four-year study fellowship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Al-Moudarres settled in Damascus after finishing and joined the faculty at the new College of Fine Arts. Always a prolific artist, he painted and taught in Damascus for decades, where he served as a role model and mentor for emerging generations of Syrian artists.


2020 ◽  
pp. 487-488
Author(s):  
Juan Pablo Fajardo

Sobre la obra de Powerpaola.PowerpaolaArtista plástica, historietista y dibujante. Estudió Artes Plásticas en Bellas Artes de Medellín, Expresión Artística en la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Cali y Grabado y Encuadernación en el College of Fine Arts en Sydney Australia. Ganadora de las residencias artísticas La Cité Internationale des Arts, París (2003- 2005) y Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney (2007). Ganadora del proyecto “En Vitrina” en Lugar a Dudas, Cali. Realizó un club de dibujo en el Amazonas por dos meses gracias a la beca de la Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño. Ha expuesto sus diarios de viaje, dibujos y pinturas en Nueva York, Bogotá, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Milán, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Lima y París, entre otros, y en ferias como La Fiac, Arco y Slick, y una muestra individual, “De frente me escondo”, en el Museo La Tertulia de Cali (2008). Autora de Virus Tropical, Por dentro/ Inside, Diario de Powerpaola, qp (Éramos Nosotros), Todo Va a Estar Bien, Nos Vamos y el libro de artista Amazonas editado por Artedos Gráfico. Hace parte del libro An Illustrated life de Danny Gregory. Hace parte del colectivo Chicks On Comics, No Tan Parecidos y La Casa Telepática. Publicó por 11 años una tira mensual en la revista cultural Arcadia (Colombia). Directora artística del largo animado Virus Tropical basado en su novela gráfica.e-mail: [email protected]


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-175
Author(s):  
Gabriela Aidar

O texto apresenta e problematiza diferentes pontos de vista a respeito da acessibilidade em museus. Usualmente entendido como sinônimo de ações voltadas a pessoas com deficiência, a acessibilidade possibilita outros olhares a coletivos com dificuldades de acesso. São discutidas ainda questões relativas à inclusão e desenvolvimento de públicos nas instituições museológicas e compartilhados exemplos de projetos de acessibilidade da Pinacoteca de São Paulo, do Museo Nacional de Colombia e do Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.


Crisis ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Hideki Bando ◽  
Fernando Madalena Volpe

Background: In light of the few reports from intertropical latitudes and their conflicting results, we aimed to replicate and update the investigation of seasonal patterns of suicide occurrences in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Methods: Data relating to male and female suicides were extracted from the Mortality Information Enhancement Program (PRO-AIM), the official health statistics of the municipality of São Paulo. Seasonality was assessed by studying distribution of suicides over time using cosinor analyses. Results: There were 6,916 registered suicides (76.7% men), with an average of 39.0 ± 7.0 observed suicides per month. For the total sample and for both sexes, cosinor analysis estimated a significant seasonal pattern. For the total sample and for males suicide peaked in November (late spring) with a trough in May–June (late autumn). For females, the estimated peak occurred in January, and the trough in June–July. Conclusions: A seasonal pattern of suicides was found for both males and females, peaking in spring/summer and dipping in fall/winter. The scarcity of reports from intertropical latitudes warrants promoting more studies in this area.


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