Shortly after his release, Barnaby Martin travelled to Beijing to interview the artist about his imprisonment and to discover more about “what is really going on behind the scenes in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party”. In April of 2011, just six months after his vast, thought-provoking sculpture Sunflower Seeds was installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, Weiwei was arrested at the Beijing Capital International Airport and detained illegally for over two months in dire conditions. But rising the ranks to become China’s most famous living artist and activist has come at a price.

Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby MartinĪi Weiwei has spent his entire career creating very beautiful, deeply political works that challenge and confront his country’s totalitarian regime – to global acclaim. “He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and the outer darkness,” Baldwin once wrote.Ĩ. His wonderfully vibrant paintings boast an extraordinary psychological depth, betraying the hardships he faced and his determination to keep going no matter what. Delaney’s tale is both remarkable and heartbreaking: he was a much loved character, who counted Henry Miller and James Baldwin among his close friends, yet he often felt isolated and underappreciated, struggling with mental illness throughout his life. Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney by Beauford Delaney and David LeemingĪmazing Grace paints a poignant picture of the celebrated African American artist Beauford Delaney, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and later – following a move to Paris in the 1950s – a noted abstract expressionist.

Sally mann autobiography