STATE OF THE ART

Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City, Royal West of England Academy (RWA), until 13 August

Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City, is a national touring exhibition curated for the Arts Council Collection by Turner Prize-winning artist and cultural activist Lubaina Himid CBE. This exhibition of over 60 works, including some by Bristol-based artists, presents a wide array of modern and contemporary art, including painting, sculpture, photography and film from both the Arts Council Collection and artists’ studios.

The work in this exhibition can sometimes appear challenging and encourages visitors to view the city through a woman’s eyes, questioning our understanding of the urban city. Found Cities, Lost Objects addresses themes ranging from safety and navigation to concepts of belonging and power and fun, freedom and discovery.

RWA is excited to include work by Bristol artists Valda Jackson, Mellony Taper, Beth Carter RWA, Huma Mulji, and Veronica Vickery, amongst others.

• Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, BS8 1PX

Threads: ‘Breathing Stories into Materials’, Arnolfini, until 1 October

Arnolfini welcomes you to discover Threads, a major exhibition featuring 21 contemporary international artists and makers, who use textiles as their chosen medium. Celebrating material and making, these artists use the storytelling power of textiles to connect with past traditions, find commonalities between cultures, time and place, and to ‘breathe stories into materials’. Threads encompasses processes of weaving and spinning, rugmaking, stitching and embroidery, print, knit, threading, mending and found materials, with materials and techniques handed down, reused and reinvented.

Co-curated by leading textile artist Alice Kettle, Threads weaves throughout Arnolfini’s three floors, to reveal how textiles ‘remember’, how memory is ‘embedded within the process of making’ and how new narratives are created.

• arnolfini.org.uk; 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA

Image: Anya Paintsil, God will punish him (2021). Photograph courtesy of the artist and Ed Cross Gallery

Rainmaker Gallery welcomes back Indigenous artist Marla Allison, a celebrated painter from the Laguna Pueblo and Hopi tribes. The graphic paintings in this exhibition utilise traditional pottery designs and stylised portraiture to celebrate her thriving tribal cultures in a contemporary context. Also showing at Rainmaker Gallery, colourful, innovative, abstract paintings by Navajo artist Randy Barton and modernist landscapes by Cotswold-based Muscogee artist Rick Grimster.

• rainmakerart.co.uk; 140 Whiteladies Road, BS8 2RS