Griselda Murray Brown

The African-American painter on stereotypes, the western canon and who decides market value

Ignoring the old adage about the things one should never work with, Pierre Huyghe is an artist who works with animals. He brought an aquarium to London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2011, and at Documenta 13 installed a compost heap in a Baroque garden complete with a sculpture of a nude woman with a beehive for a head and a real dog sniffing about the detritus. Fresh from a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last year, which is due to travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Novembe…

Chris Goode’s ‘Men in the Cities’ is the highlight of this year’s line-up at the Traverse

Mari Vanna Mari Vanna is a curious piece of old-world Russia on Knightsbridge, a place where regulars pore over newspapers from home and sip black tea from tall glass tankards away from the traffic jams outside. Not one inch has been left unadorned: there are painted tables and cane-backed chairs, ornate dressers displaying Russian dolls and fine china, and old photographs on the patterned wallpaper. Afternoon tea consists of tasty pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings), vareniki (the vegetarian vers…

“In those days you would come to this area and it was like the end of the world. It reminded me of those Edward Hopper paintings, those totally desolate places.” This is how Ziba Ardalan describes the post-industrial part of east London where she set up her non-profit art gallery, Parasol Unit, 10 years ago. On a quiet street between the bars of Shoreditch and the restaurants of Islington, Parasol is still somewhere one is unlikely to happen upon. Yet the area has changed since Ardalan first vi…

The Prince of Wales certainly gets people talking about architecture. His pronouncements on, and interventions into, designs for new buildings date back to 1984, when he was invited to speak at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) on its 150th anniversary. He shocked his hosts by denouncing the modernist architect Peter Ahrends’ proposed extension to the National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle”. Ahrends’ design was later scrapped and the speech was said to have sparked a “style wa…

In a world saturated with images, handwriting is a strangely private thing. Most celebrities could drop their shopping list in their local supermarket (were they to shop there) and no one would suspect it of having a famous author. David Shrigley’s handwriting, however, is instantly recognisable. Known for his scratchy drawings with deadpan captions exposing the vanity and banality of contemporary life, Shrigley had major exhibitions in 2012 at London’s Hayward Gallery and Manchester’s Cornerhou…

Not every business that moves into a new building invites the public in too. But that is precisely what one of London’s most prestigious picture framing firms will do this week. The John Jones Arts Building opens on Thursday, fitted out with light-filled workshops, conservation studios – and a non-selling art gallery with a café. On a site behind Finsbury Park train station, a busy interchange in a formerly overlooked corner of north London, the new building gives credence to the perhaps unlike…

Where sport leads, culture follows. To tie in with Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games in July, visual arts centres all over Scotland will be showing work by Scottish or Scottish-trained artists made in the past 25 years under the umbrella Generation. The exhibitions run from April to November and take place everywhere from the National Gallery in Edinburgh to Orkney’s Pier Arts Centre. But what does the project say about contemporary art in Scotland? When the Glasgow-based artist Douglas Gordon won t…

Artists aren’t exactly known for their accommodating, easy-going ways. More often, it’s words such as “egocentric” and “introverted” that spring to mind. In reality, though, few artists work in total isolation, especially once they have achieved a certain level of success. The likes of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have teams of assistants making their work – yet these people, never namechecked, can hardly be called collaborators. At the other end of the fame scale, collaboration is crucial for s…

A vivid two-part adaptation that combines powerful drama and unexpected humour

A spiky retelling of the Cinderella story from RashDash theatre company

Lord Singh is widely known for his contributions to the “Thought for the Day” slot on BBC Radio 4, urging religious tolerance in gentle, measured tones, but his influence extends far beyond the breakfast table. This tireless campaigner is currently demanding an apology from the British government over its possible involvement – revealed this week – in the 1984 attack by the Indian government on the Sikh temple at Amritsar. A practising Sikh, Singh co-founded the Inter Faith Network for the UK i…

Own a Picasso for just €100

Carrie Cracknell’s production of Ibsen’s 1879 classic first opened at the Young Vic last year. Following high acclaim, it was revived at that theatre this spring and now transfers to London’s West End. Hattie Morahan reprises the role of Nora Helmer, for which she won the Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard awards for Best Actress in 2012,and she remains as captivating here. Skittish and self-aware, Morahan’s Nora is a woman acutely conscious of her role as wife and mother – yet unable to play…

Shakespeare comes in all shapes and sizes, and there’s no better illustration of this than the two Macbeths just opened in London and Manchester. The play’s haunting images of ambition, greed and obsession invest both productions – but in tone and effect they are quite distinct. In truth, the only sensation common to both is the hardness of the pews. Bring a cushion. At the Globe, director Eve Best mines the play for unexpected humour and gets real laughs from the audience. Here Macbeth’s horri…

Is it the most prestigious contemporary art event, an opportunity to project soft power, or just an excuse for great parties?

Carrie Cracknell is the latest in a line of directors moving into opera from other genres. She has the kind of CV worth reciting. At 19, as a history student at Nottingham University, she co-founded the theatre company Hush Productions, whose first show toured New York and London. She went on to study directing at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and, in 2005, won a Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival. At 26, she and Natalie Abrahami were appointed artistic directors of the…

Lenny Henry gives a powerful performance, but this Pulitzer Prize-winning play is somewhat heavy handed

“Is there anything else than roguery there?” asked the 19th-century art critic John Ruskin of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s “Invitation to a Game of Argolla”, a painting of two young street urchins. “Or was it well for the painter to give this time to the painting of those repulsive and wicked children? …We all know that a beggar’s foot cannot be clean; there is no need to thrust its degradation into the light.” Today the 17th-century Spanish painter is more often associated not with dirty realis…