Ursula: Issue 18

Issue 18 of Ursula explores the mysterious ways artists influence one another. Curator Alexis Lowry embarks on a speculative inquiry into the largely unexplored friendship between two 20th-century titans, Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe. Both artists, in distinct yet unexpectedly aligned ways, engaged with color and abstraction as a means of comprehending the embodied experience of the built and natural world. Elsewhere in the issue, artist William Kentridge and novelist Colm Tóibín, in conversation for the first time, explore the myth of Orpheus as a symbol of art’s fragile power to reclaim the lost. The issue also features a never-before-published 1983 conversation between Jack Whitten and curator Henry Geldzahler about Whitten’s interest in African sculpture. Burberry’s archivist Carly Eck speaks with Sarah Douglas about combining heritage with innovation. Anna Maria Maiolino and Tania Rivera trace the materials, memories and gestures that have shaped the artist's visual language, in an excerpt from The Forgotten Her Story, and Tobias Kratzer, director of the Hamburg State Opera, speaks about the genre’s experimental future.