Nicola Vassell. Image courtesy Nicola Vassell. Photo: Luigi Cazzaniga.
Few people in the art world have had a career as complex as Nicola Vassell’s.
After leaving Jamaica for New York in the late ’90s to pursue a career as a fashion model and culture writer, Vassell landed some of the art industry’s most coveted roles, including directorial positions at Deitch Projects and Pace gallery, two New York art-world institutions.
While at Deitch, Vassell worked with then-emerging artists such as Sterling Ruby and Dan Colen to curate “Substraction,” an exhibition chronicling the grit of New York life post-9/11, while also overseeing the careers of artists like Kehinde Wiley, Tauba Auerbach, and Nari Ward. At Pace, she worked with the likes of Adam Pendleton, Robert Irwin, and Raqib Shaw.
With the pandemic bringing on food insecurity for 40% of Americans for the first time, now with the holidays around the corner, what’s next?
‘Tis the season for the art fundraiser. Artists, curators and art galleries across the country are fusing forces to raise funds to fight food insecurity. From exhibitions to online auctions, raffles and print sales, art with heart is another way to help feed people, just in time for Christmas.
New York art gallery Fort Makers has created a benefit exhibition called Dreamscapes, which is helping support the Henry Street Settlement Food Access Initiative, by selling prints until 17 January.
B is for Bob T-shirt. Photo courtesy of Anchors-n-Asteroids.
The mother-daughter-duo behind Los Angeles’s Anchors-n-Asteroids have released a delightful series of eco-friendly shirts (made from post-consumer plastic bottles) featuring 10-year-old Pearl’s drawings of famous figures, many of them artists. Just try and resist the call of more-popular-than-ever Bob Ross and his bursting afro on this design.
£34
This 13.7 t-shirt represents the 13.7 percent of living artists represented by galleries in Europe and North America who are women. Photo courtesy of Art Girl Rising.
The latest offering from Art Girl Rising, which has long offered a line of black t-shirts listing the names of deserving women artists in crisp white type, is a plain t-shirt that reads “13.7.” That’s the percentage of living artists represented by European and North American galleries that are women a great conversation-starter for your favorite art-world feminist.