Jo Higgins

August 3, 2024

Musings

Los Angeles art binge

Jo Higgins

August 3, 2024

Musings

This year has been so busy, between writing commissions and stepping in as the Publications Editor at the Biennale of Sydney and running the National Gallery’s Digital Young Writers Residency that I haven’t known which way is up.

It’s been a good problem to have but a bit of literal distance has made me appreciate it all the more.

I’ve just got back from a trip to LA with my Mum and sister and so this is just a shameless grab of photos of some of the extraordinary art we saw. Proof of (artistic) life and a reminder of the joys of just looking at art.

Some of the highlights:

Ed Ruscha and Simone Leigh at LACMA, Mickalene Thomas at The Broad, Josh Kline at MOCA, WInfred Rembert at Hauser & Wirth….

Melbourne work trip

Jo Higgins

March 9, 2024

Musings

I’ve been in Melbourne for a few days - doing some commissioned interviews with artists and curators about living with art for a new book publication and meeting up with some of the Melbourne cohort for the National Young Writers Residency.

I took the opportunity to see a few exhibitions while I was here - From the Other Side at ACCA, Sarah Ujmaia’s Marmoreum at Gertrude Contemporary and the Triennial at the NGV. Some works that I will obsess over and remember for a very long time and some conversations that will also stay with me - about flea markets and travel and hoarding and taste and the ways we express ourselves and our values.

I so, so loved seeing Frida Kahlo: Making Herself Up at the V&A when I was in London earlier this month.

Despite finding the haunting soundtrack they bled into every room a bit emotionally manipulative, I felt that the exhibition - full of personal belongings and artefacts exhumed after 50 years from a locked room in her house, La Casa Azul, in Mexico City - powerfully cut through so much of the myth about her, absolutely anchoring her life and work and extraordinarily wonderful, powerful sartorial choices in her body.

The plaster casts and steel braces; her prosthetic leg; her many medicines and the details of her pain – so much pain – brought a real clarity and urgency to her work. To create such visceral, clear-sighted, provocative works despite and because of her pain, I’m just in awe really of her intense female energy. To have her passion and anger and vision, when so many others would have foregone their politics and aesthetic agendas for painful solitude and defeat, I was profoundly moved actually. And I also really, really loved – thinking about her jewellery – how she used it to do and say so many things – about herself and about Mexico. Jewellery really can be this extraordinarily powerful, subtle tool for communication if you wear it right…

There’s so much more to say about Kahlo, her work, the exhibition, the god awful, tasteless shit they were selling in the giftshop (I can’t imagine how the socialist Kahlo would have felt about £45 floral headbands being sold in her name…) but really, for me - it was about that visceral, tangible connection to her pain and her clarity of purpose.

Spotlight on MCA Young Guides

Jo Higgins

June 21, 2018

Musings

Just wanted to share this film, which I helped to produce with some colleagues at the MCA in honour of UN World Refugee Day on 20 June.

Shaqaeq is one of our Young Guides and possibly one of artist Khadim Ali’s biggest fans. The opportunity to facilitate this conversation between them (Shaqaeq herself explains how it came to pass - thanks Instagram!) has been a joy and a privilege. One of those connections that really demonstrates the transformative capacity of art.

You can read more about the Young Guides program (and when to drop in for one of their tours!) here.

Los Angeles art binge

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Melbourne work trip

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Frida Kahlo at the Victoria & Albert Museum

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Spotlight on MCA Young Guides

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