This week on The Week in Art, Ben Luke talks to Melanie Gerlis about the recent turbulence in the banking sector, as US banks go under, an ailing Credit Suisse is acquired by UBS and Deutsche Bank shares fall at one point by 14%. What are the implications for the art world? Melanie also explains the figures in the latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report.
Installation view of The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century at the Baltimore Museum of Art Photo: Mitro Hood/BMA, April 2023
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in the US this week opens the exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. We speak to Asma Naeem, the director of the BMA and co-curator of the show, about what she’s called “the second pop art movement”.
Juan de Pareja represented himself (far left) in his own large painting of Calling of Saint Matthew (1661), which he created when he was a free man © Museo Nacional del Prado
And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661) by the 17th-century Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. He is best known as the subject of one of the greatest ever portraits, by Diego Velázquez, the artist who enslaved Pareja before his manumission in Rome in 1650. David Pullins and Vanessa K. Valdés, the curators of a new exhibition about Juan de Pareja at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, tell us about the painting.
• The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, until 16 July; St Louis Art Museum, 26 August-1 January 2024
• Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 July