Alberta Whittle is announced today as Scotland’s official representation at the 2022 La Biennale di Venezia. Whittle’s Glasgow International curated exhibition is set to take place at the Arsenale Docks, S. Pietro di Castello as part of the 59 th Venice Biennale. The announcement by Creative Scotland on behalf of the National Lottery and Scottish Government backed Scotland + Venice partnership comes at the end of a remarkable year for the Glasgow based artist. During 2020, Whittle was one of ten artists to be awarded a Turner Bursary. The Glasgow School of Art graduate also received this year’s Frieze Artist Award and a Henry Moore Artist Foundation Award. Born in Barbados in 1980, Whittle’s work in film, sculpture, print, performance and installation is often made in response to current events, and frequently draws on her research into the African diaspora and the decolonisation of Western histories. Whittle’s work has been shown in group and solo shows around the world. In
Diane di Prima – Poet, writer, artist Born August 6, 1934; died October 25, 2020 Diane di Prima, who has died aged 86, was a poet who was at the centre of the Beat Generation, who roared their way into the post-war American literary world with freeform libertine abandon. Di Prima may not have received as much attention as male contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, but her presence was vital, both as an enabler of other writers and for her own candid and fearlessly provocative work. The latter appeared in more than forty volumes of poetry and prose, beginning with This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958), published when she was in her early twenties. Di Prima decided to devote herself to being a poet aged fourteen, after she starting writing aged six. Dropping out of college to chase her muse, Di Prima landed in Greenwich Village in the midst of a jazz-soundracked cultural revolution. It was an era documented in a fantastical manner in the knowingly titled Me