The Baldwin curates dialogue between cultures, nature and art. Representing contemporary artists and specializing in Canadian First Nations art and international environmental art, we curate, procure and consult for museums, cultural institutions, arts organizations and collectors in the UK and abroad.
Dennison Smith, (PhD, University of East Anglia) founded The Baldwin in January 2016, receiving Graduate Entrepreneur sponsorship form The University of East Anglia and ongoing mentorship from the Enterprise Centre, UEA. The Baldwin was the recipient of a 2016 UEA Santander Grant and a finalist for The Innovation and Impact Award 2018.
Recent and upcoming collaborations or commissions in London include The National Maritime Museum, Canada House, Ikon Gallery, The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, The Horniman Museum, Border Crossings’ ORIGINS Festival, Blacks Club (Soho), The h Club (Covent Garden), The Dark Mountain Project, Art Mur, Equinox Gallery and Eurostar (Paris).
The Baldwin was begun in 2016 by novelist and creative director, Dr. Dennison Baldwin Smith, and is co-curated by Oceana Masterman-Smith and Verity Seward.
Past Curations:
AS IMMENSE AS THE SKY: MERYL MCMASTER
Canada Gallery, Canada House
Trafalgar Square (Pall Mall Entrance)
Canada House presents As Immense as the Sky a new curation of recent works by Canadian photographer Meryl McMaster. Following on from the first solo presentation in the United Kingdom of McMaster’s work at IKON Gallery, Birmingham (December 2019), the exhibition features a selection of works from McMaster’s latest series As Immense as the Sky (2019) and Edge of a Moment (2017).
WOMEN IMPRINTED: h Club Gallery
24 Endell St, Covent Garden,
London, WC2H 9HQ
Featuring nine artists in various stages of their career from all around the world, Women Imprinted is a dynamic exhibition celebrating colour, form and pattern. Women Imprinted presents the works of Louise Bristow, Florence Blanchard, Helen Pritchard, Hello Marine, Selma Parlour, Katrina Russell Adams, and Alexandra Roussopoulos, all of whom are presenting work in a variety of print mediums taking inspiration from nature, pattern and architecture.
From sci-fi to superheroes, interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu investigates what it means to be an Indigenous Canadian today. Raised in North Delta BC, a suburb of Vancouver, it wasn’t until Assu was eight years old that he learnt of his Ligwildaʼxw/Kwakwaka’wakw roots. His work is informed by a deep understanding of his heritage, radically remixing Kwakwaka’wakw iconography with western and pop aesthetics. Assu uses humour and irony to unsettle misconceptions of Indigenous peoples and expose enduring legacies of colonization. Curated by The Baldwin, this is the first solo presentation of Assu’s work in the UK and coincides with his residency at The Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts in Norwich.
WORTHY OF BELIEF: THE MESTIZO ART OF CARLOS ZAPATA
In Worthy of Belief: the Mestizo Art of Carlos Zapata, fetish and icon are interchangeable. Folk and tribal art meet Christian iconography to express spiritual and political realities, as Columbian sculptor, Carlos Zapata, draws on the traditions of his mestizo heritage (Spanish and Native American) and Afro-Columbian culture. ‘Worthy of belief’ is the criteria used by Catholic bishops to determine true visions from false ones, but in South America, where indigenous and slave cultures became syncretic with colonist Christianity, what is deemed worthy remains personal.
TRANSIENT: Gare du Nord, Paris
We are thrilled to have arranged an exhibit of Alexandra Roussopoulos’ artwork at Paris’ Gare du Nord Eurostar Business Lounge with The Hospital Club. Roussopoulos’ new series Transient will hang from September 15th 2018 through to August 2019.
SUBSTRATA: In conjunction with Border Crossings ORIGINS Festival of First Nations
Meryl McMaster • Sarah Sense • Patrick Dean Hubbell • Sonny Assu
FIRST NATIONS NOW: BETWEEN WORLDS
Indigenous Canadian artists, from the Northwest Pacific Coast to the Cree heartland, explore hybridity and autobiography. Traditional art practices and iconography meet remix culture, performance art and corporeal narrative, reconstructing personal and shared identities betwixt realities. Lithographs by Robert Davidson, Haida; sculptural photography by Meryl McMaster, Plains Cree; digital interventions by Kwakwaka’wakw Sonny Assu; and panel and hide paintings by Kwakwaka’wakw Steve Smith, as well as Japanese-inspired Inuit block prints and the place-based collaborative spirit of Pacific Coast artist and designer, Sabina Hill.
THE SUBLUNARY WORLD
The Sublunary World brings together the polymorphic figures of Royal Academician Tim Shaw’sMiddleWorld with the Anthropocene skulls and FutureImperfect body-landscapes of Canadian photographer David Ellingsen and the self-portraiture of photographer Meryl McMaster.
BETWIXT: The Hospital Club
The Hospital Club presents The Baldwin Gallery’s Betwixt, exploring the organic and psychic transference between selves and species, featuring the shape-changing photography of David Ellingsen and Meryl McMaster.
Of indigenous and European descent, Plains Cree sculptural-photographer, McMaster, pits delimiting identities – Native American, Canadian, female, human – against the immediacy of her lived body in the natural world. She expresses heritage and contemporaneity as a synergistic strength of unities, rather than a struggle between opposites.
Ellingsen’s Anthropocene series is inspired by the proposed renaming of our geological epoch, as Earth’s systems are irrevocably altered by human activity. Transmuted skeletal remains, adrift on blackness, reference future and past and are both a warning and rendering of hope.
Both artists have shown in museums around the world, from The Beaty Biodiversity Museum, Canada, and the Datz Museum of Art, South Korea (Ellingsen), to the Smithsonian and the Art Gallery of Ontario (McMaster).
FIRST NATIONS NOW: CONTEMPORARY INNOVATIONS
Indigenous Canadian artists, from the Northwest Pacific Coast to the Cree heartland, explore hybridity and autobiography. Traditional art practices and iconography meet remix culture, minimalism, performance art and corporeal narrative, reconstructing personal and shared identities betwixt realities and contemporising traditional stories. Recent serigraphs and historic lithographs by Robert Davidson, Haida; sculptural photography by Meryl McMaster, Plains Cree; digital interventions by Kwakwaka’wakw Sonny Assu; panel and hide paintings by Kwakwaka’wakw Steve Smith; and a 2017 form-line tree drawing by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Coast Salish, as well as the place-based collaborative furniture of Pacific Coast artist and designer, Sabina Hill.
MOBILE FORMS: PARISIAN ABSTRACTION TO AMERINDIAN POP
Mobile Forms: Parisian Abstraction to Amerindian Pop juxtaposes Alexandra Roussopoulos’ curvilinear shaped canvases, minimalist self-abstractions (libre et mobile formes), and skin-like geometries with the work of experimental Canadian First Nation artists, Steve Smith and Sonny Assu. From mobile formes to form lines, Western European thought and feminism, on one side, and First Nations’ art practices and post-colonialism, on the other, come together in dialogue.