Sheyda Porter – a taste of Something Black.

We’re busy, it might not look like that but we are very busy, the Red experiment was, I think we can say, rather successful. If you haven’t checked out the Red on-line show then you can find it on the Cultivate website as well as via this link on the always busy Organ website. The Red show has now been viewed by over 15,000 visitors, people feeding back from all over he world. The on-line shows are not a substitute for the physical Cultivate shows of course, there is no serious substitute or alternative to the act of viewing art in the flesh on a wall in a gallery (or on a street wall or hanging in a tree or on a plinth in a city centre or…). We follow the Red show with a second on-line show, Something Black will open in just under a week on April 24th.

Opening night of the Something Black show, once again via both the Organ and Cultivate websites, will be Monday April 24th at 6pm. We’re busy “hanging” the show right now, we expect it to be at least twice the size of February’s Red show (and I expect we’ll do it all again on-line later in the year, rather enjoying the experiment and exploring the submissions, especially from artists working outside of London who we don’t get to see so much of). Really excited by the submissions to the black show, we’ve been busy going through them all over the last month (and no, even though there have been hundreds, we’ve not felt the need to cynically charge artists just to submit an image via e.mail, it really isn’t that difficult to go through them and respond to them without the cynical need for an “admin” charge)

The next physical Cultivate will almost certainly be a group show called Interact (next unless something else comes together first). Interact will open at Coate Studios on 15th June. Coate Studios is a big exciting white-walled space just off the Hackney Road, London, E2.

CULTIVATE presents INTERACT  – Another gathering of pro-active artists coming together and doing it.  A group show of invited artists curated by the Cultivate team of Sean Worrall and Emma Harvey. Another short sharp art show in a rather big and rather exciting East London space we’ve not used before (just off the Hackney Road, right by the Sebright Arms, at Coate Studios, 37 Coate Street, Hackney, London, E2 9AG Artists once again coming together and doing it ourselves… watch this space…. More details very soon…. Doing it rather than just talking about doing it.  We’re busy inviting and curating Interact right now, this one is not a general open call, (however we are considering including an element of open call in terms of bringing in artists we might not already know or know about).

More about interact soon, more about other shows soon, we’re busy working on a number of things right now, both in terms of more traditional contemporary gallery shows and what you might think of as more “left-field” events, and we’re already looking forward to this year’s Art Car Boot Fair events in London and Folkestone as well as a number of other things we can’t mention yet.

Coate is a new venue for us, yes we do miss not having a permanent base and all that that allows, but we are enjoying our nomadic lifestyle and doing things in a whole exciting range of places and spaces. Here;s a look at the blank canvas that is the venue for the Interact show.

Here’s some shots of the “blank canvas” that is Coate, we take it over for Interact in June…  Click on an image to enlarge or run the slide show of “borrowed” photos.