This week: The Collaboration, a new play dramatising the relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat has opened at the Young Vic theatre in London. It looks at the period between 1983 and 1985 in which they worked together on a group of paintings, many of which were shown to critical derision and commercial failure at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in New York in 1985. Ben Luke talks to the playwright Anthony McCarten and the director Kwame Kwei-Armah about bringing these complex characters to life, and the issues, including race and class, that their relationship brings into focus.
Faith Ringgold's Sonny’s Bridge (1986) © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022
In present-day New York, a Faith Ringgold retrospective has opened at the New Museum; Ben talks to Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition’s curator, about the astonishing breadth of the now 91-year-old artist’s work.
A rendering of Betye Saar's L.A. Energy (1983) Courtesy of the Artist and Roberts Projects Los Angeles California
And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Helen Stoilas is at the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles, where she talks to Julie Roberts, the co-founder of the gallery Roberts Projects, about Betye Saar’s mural LA Energy—created in 1983 and destroyed just four years later—now repainted for Roberts Projects’ stand at the fair.
The Week in Art podcast byThe Art Newspaper is available every Friday on our website and all the usual places where you find podcasts. This podcast is sponsored by Christie's.