Art

It’s easy to forget, but art galleries are ‘our’ galleries: they are supposed to belong to us. You might even like to think of them as having taken the place of (now defunct) churches. So how did oil money seep through their walls?

Mel Evans begins by charting the journey of arts funding in the UK. The Arts Council of Attlee’s postwar Britain was deliberately at arm’s length from the state. Thatcher and Tebbit increased government involvement, which enabled New Labour to follow…

A reader in Germany has sent us news of PN appearing as an artefact in an art exhibition!

A display case in the 'Picasso and contemporary art' exhibition in the gigantic Deichtorhallen art centre in Hamburg, Germany, contains a recent edition of Peace News!

Moments Later: ‘Shell Shocked US Marine,
Vietnam, Hue 1968’, printed 2013 © Don McCullin.
Don McCullin speaks eloquently about this image
on the Tate website. He clearly recalls taking the
photograph – in fact, he took multiple pictures

‘Did you enjoy the show?’ asked the woman in the Tate Modern bookshop, whilst I purchased a copy of the Conflict, Time, Photography catalogue.

‘Enjoy’ wasn’t the verb on the tip of my tongue as I stood at the counter,…

Rolls-Royce directors were confronted with the harrowing testimony of a Hiroshima survivor, Setsuko Thurlow, at their AGM on 1 May. Although the quote was lengthy, the chair was too disorientated to interrupt, and the board responded with nervous laughter.

Rolls-Royce provides power systems for Britain's Trident nuclear-powered, nuclear-missile-carrying submarine system. In June 2012, Rolls-Royce was awarded a £1bn contract to produce new reactor cores for the submarine that is…

All the fights that we cover in Peace News against fracking and roads and climate change have at their heart an anger and a love for our intimate home landscapes. We fight for the hills of Lancashire to the fields of Norfolk. Sebastião Salgado’s grand photographic project Genesis opens one’s eye and heart to a world beyond anything most of us will ever experience. Here are images that bring one to tears for the magnificence and frailty of the earth.

The Genesis project ‘is an attempt…

Satta Hashem grew up in Buhrez, Diyala province, and left Iraq in 1978 aged 18, having been involved in opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. He trained in Algeria and the Soviet Union, later moving to Sweden and then the UK. He has kept a daily diary of drawings throughout the wars of 1990-1 and 2003-. A departure from his practice in painting, in which Hashem draws on scientific theories of…

PHOTO: Emily Johns

“This banner is one of many that I and Lorna Vahey have made for the peace movement. Our first banner was made when Hastings Against War was formed ten years ago. We have also made ones for International Women’s Day and against domestic violence. They are all used for demos, conferences and stalls in the High Street. Our speciality is making banners for individuals at times of  celebration marking their lives as peace makers. There is one we gave to Connie Mager (see BBC…

Architecture for Humanity, a nonprofit design services firm set up in 1999, has launched an Open Architecture Challenge: an invitation to architects and
designers help communities reclaim abandoned, closed and decommissioned military sites anywhere in the world.

More than 130 teams from 45 countries have already entered the competition (entry fee US$50 western professionals; $25 western students; free to developing nations). More than $5,000 is available in prizes. Register by 15…

Shamsia, 23, is a graffiti artist in Kabul, Afghanistan. She learned graffiti in December 2010 at a workshop by Combat Communications: ‘I was used to working with paints on canvasses but when I used a spray can for the first time and worked on a big wall it was exciting and cool and such an achievement. I wanted to do something about women’s rights in Afghanistan and the burqa, but in an ironic way and take the idea of the burqa away from how we are used to seeing it.

Image by Emily Johns

From January to March 1912, women led a successful strike of 25,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, USA. The phrase ‘bread and roses’ was coined to represent the struggle for quality of life as well as wages. See more on the Bread and Roses Centennial website.