Image: Ben Uri Gallery, London
Ben Uri has outlined a September programme that pairs a last-chance exhibition opportunity with a day-long symposium and a fundraising sale, while also highlighting a separate presentation devoted to Boris Lurie later in the month. The gallery’s email says that the week’s announcements are intended as a “feast of art, culture and fascinating life stories,” and directs attention to several dates in the coming weeks.
The first of those dates is 4 September, when the gallery notes the final day of ‘Disruptors’. The email does not supply further details about the exhibition, but flags the closing day as one not to miss. Ben Uri, whose public materials frequently connect art with migration and cultural history, uses the newsletter to steer readers toward works and programmes that reflect that broader remit.
A second event follows on 9 September at St John’s Waterloo, where Ben Uri is involved in ‘A Tonic to the Nation: Immigrant Contribution to the Festival of Britain’. The programme is listed as running from 9.15am to 8.15pm and is described as a full day of programming, including a symposium in which Ben Uri’s Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall will present. The email says booking is through Eventbrite. The institution’s framing of the event points to its continued interest in immigrant contributions to British cultural life, a theme that runs through much of its research and collection work.
On 16 September at 6.30pm, Ben Uri will hold a private view for a ‘Selling show’ of donated artworks intended to raise funds for the Research Unit. The email says the sale is designed to support research and invites people to acquire or inquire by email at donatedartsales@benuri.org. It also asks those who wish to offer similar works for sale to contact admin@benuri.org with the subject line “Gift Offer of Art.” Among the works listed in the message is Maurice Blond’s ‘Artist's Palette’, an oil on board measuring 37.5 x 45 cm, framed and ready to hang, signed and priced at £850.
The fundraising sale is distinct from another event announced for 23 September at 6.30pm, when Ben Uri says it is honoured to present ‘Boris Lurie: Ever the Radical’ at Oxo Tower Gallery on the South Bank, in association with the Boris Lurie Foundation in New York. The email adds emphatic promotional language, calling it “the South Bank’s exhibition of the year,” though it does not provide further curatorial or exhibition detail. The newsletter says more information will follow in the coming weeks.
The same email also turns to Clare Winsten as its “Artist OF THE WEEK” on 10 August, giving readers a concise overview of the painter and sculptor. Born Clara Birnberg in Romania to Galician Jewish parents, Winsten later came to England with her family around 1902. Ben Uri’s text places her within the Whitechapel boys circle linked to the East End Jewish community, and notes her Slade School contemporaries David Bomberg and Isaac Rosenberg. It also recalls her inclusion in the Jewish section of Whitechapel Art Gallery’s 1914 ‘Twentieth-Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements’, co-curated by Bomberg and Jacob Epstein.
Alongside Winsten, the newsletter’s week-by-week highlights point visitors toward a virtual exhibition on Jacob Kramer, an artwork by Aithan Shapira, a podcast on Leon Kossoff, an essay on Isaac Rosenberg, and a profile of Hans Feibusch. The email’s central message, however, remains the sequence of September dates now set in motion at Ben Uri and its partner venues, beginning with the final day of ‘Disruptors’ on 4 September and extending through the South Bank presentation of ‘Boris Lurie: Ever the Radical’ on 23 September.
