Jo Higgins

September 4, 2020

Musings

Recommended reading - Teen Vogue

Jo Higgins

September 4, 2020

Musings

“Teen Art Councils are Pushing for Change at Prestigious Museums.”

This is a brilliant article by Claire Voon for Teen Vogue on the current activism of a number of youth councils at museums across the United States. I had the privilege to meet with many of these organisations (and their young people) during my Churchill Fellowship last year, including the Brooklyn Museum, MCA Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and it just brings home to me, again, how truly transformative these programs can be.

Read the full article here.

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Frida Kahlo at the Victoria & Albert Museum

Jo Higgins

September 30, 2018

Musings, Review

Plaster corset, painted and decorated by Frida Kahlo, Museo Frida Kahlo. © Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Archives, Banco de México, Fiduciary of the Trust of the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums.

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.

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Frida Kahlo at the Victoria & Albert Museum

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Spotlight on MCA Young Guides

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