Gypsy Makers
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Gypsy Makers
January 20 @ 10:00 am - March 30 @ 4:00 pm
The Romani Cultural & Arts Company (RCAC) is pleased to announce the latest edition of their ground-breaking Gypsy Maker project.
The Gypsy Makers touring exhibition will feature newly commissioned artworks made specially for the 2024 exhibition alongside existing artworks from the RCAC art collection to mark the tenth anniversary of the Gypsy Maker programme, which has been fully supported by the Arts Council of Wales since its inception in 2014.
The Gypsy Makers exhibition tour will be accompanied by a programme of artist-led workshops that will expand upon themes within the show and further enlighten audiences regarding each artist’s practice.
The Gypsy Makers exhibition will include works by the artists Daniel Baker, Billy Kerry, Artur Conka, Corrina Eastwood, Cas Holmes, Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros, Shamus McPhee and Dan Turner and is funded by the Arts Council of Wales. The Gypsy Maker initiative supports the development of innovative creative works by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller artists and expands the work of the RCAC by continuing to engage GRT communities with the wider public in an ongoing dialogue about the ways in which art informs our lives today.
Join us for the public launch event – Friday, 19th January 2024, 5.30pm-7.30pm
Normal gallery opening times: Mon-Sat, 10am-4pm
Gypsy Makers 2024 Artists’ Biographies
Daniel Baker is an artist and curator. He holds a PhD on the subject of Roma aesthetics from the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been included in documenta fifteen and Manifesta 14, and has featured in four editions of the Venice Biennale, both as artist (2007, 2011, 2022) and as curator of FUTUROMA in 2019. Baker’s work examines the role of artistic practice in the enactment of social agency via the reconfiguration of aspects of Gypsy visuality. His work is exhibited internationally and can be found in collections worldwide. Publications include WE ROMA: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Ex Libris, FUTUROMA and GRT LGBTQ+ Spoken History Archive . He lives and works in London. www.danielbaker.net
Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros is a Dance Historian and Critic, Roma Scholar, Flamenco Historian and Peace Activist who graduated from the UW-Madison Dance Program and went on to complete her Master’s in Dance History and Criticism from UNM-Albuquerque. Rosamaria is a professional dancer, choreographer, curator and qualified teacher, who has lived and danced in various parts of the world and collaborated with many Flamenco greats and other leaders in the Dance field. She has taught throughout Europe and the US at places like UW-Madison, UIUC, Boston Conservatory, Brown University and at various other places in Germany, Spain and Turkey. She is a dance writer who makes regular contributions to Bachtrack Magazine and Flamenco News having also danced with Protein Dance Company in the UK.
Artur Conka is a photography graduate from the University of Derby. One of the few Roma to have documented his community from behind the lens, his photography and film making has focused on the plight of the Roma Gypsies and Travellers in Europe. His first documentary film ‘Lunik IX’ was released to much acclaim. Conka’s work has appeared in various international publications including Huffington Post, The Independent, Vice Magazine, Foto8 Magazine, Vas.Cas.Sk, Creative Boom, Lab Kultur TV Magazine and Derby Evening Telegraph. Artur will produce a new body of work for GM2 continuing his original and innovative approach to filmmaking and photography.
Corrina Eastwood is an artist, art psychotherapist, lecturer, writer and activist. Corrina is Romani and has been prompted by her personal experiences of marginalisation and oppression, felt at the intersect of being both a GRT (Gypsy Romani Traveller) and as a woman, to develop, an interest in the privileging of marginalised voices and challenging, social disparities and normative power, through art, activism and education. Art based self-reflexivity and explorations of Romani identity, ethnicity, culture and trans and inter-generational trauma, have been the focus of her art practice for some time.
Cas Holmes trained in fine art and currently work in textiles and mixed media. Part of Holmes’ practice involves community collaborations to develop a range of projects based on environmental themes from the natural and observed world. She is author of three books for Batsford, including the ‘The Found Object in Textile Art’ which is used a primary reference source in education. Her fourth book for Batsford ‘Textile Landscape: Painting with Cloth in Mixed Media’ focuses on the relationship between, textiles, painting and landscape. Holmes’ work is held in collections including the Museum of Art and Design New York, the Embroiderer’s Guild UK and the Garden Museum, London.
Billy Kerry is an Artist and educator from Cambridge. Billy was trained at Chelsea College of Art and Design London, where he archived a First class Degree (BA Hons) in Fine Art. Kerry’s eclectic practice narrates the close interrelation between artist and material; between body and object. Through his work Kerry investigates and challenges preconceived views of ethnicity, gender roles and constructed conformity. He employs diverse conceptual elements and aesthetic motifs ranging from Victoriana to current Pop Culture in clashes which challenge established values to allow new insight into the way we live today.
Shamus McPhee is a Scottish Traveller, artist and activist. He holds a M.A. in Celtic Hispanic Studies from Aberdeen University. Shamus was born at Bobbin Mill, a Gypsy Traveller site in Perthshire, Scotland where he lives until today. McPhee’s art practice combines art and activism in his pursuit of cultural visibility and recognition. The role of the artist within the Gypsy community and as wider social commentator is explored through his work along with notions of how art might enable new ways of tackling long-standing questions. Shamus exhibited at the second Roma Pavilion “Call the Witness” at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011
Dan Turner’s work explores the end of travelling as a way of life. His art is concerned with changes in group identity and social cohesion. It uses traditional iconic objects to explore themes of transaction, scrutinising interactions between Romani and mainstream cultures. He reflects on how these objects affect Traveller cultural experience within mainstream society, and how these experiences feed into collective memory. Turner has worked with the Wellcome Trust Reading Room, Chisenhale Art Place. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale in FUTUROMA (2019) and at The Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje (2022).
Romani Cultural & Arts Company
Founded over a decade ago, in 2009, the Romani Cultural & Arts Company has been promoting the rights and social inclusion of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities and individuals, through the arts and performance, to empower the Romani and Traveller communities, building confidence and competences across genders and generations. The organisation began as a community-generated initiative to address the significant gap in Wales for a genuinely Romani and Traveller managed, run, and operated Third Sector organisation, that fully and confidently represented the interests and aspirations of Romani and Traveller folk. From small beginnings as organisers of the Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month celebrations in Newport, Swansea and the capital, Cardiff, the Romani Cultural & Arts Company has grown exponentially to become the largest, most active, and effective voluntary organisation from the Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities in Wales. Delivering a wide range of activities and programmes, funded by The Arts Council of Wales, BBC Children in Need Appeal, Books Council of Wales, The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, The European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, The National Lottery Community Fund, and The National Lottery Heritage Fund, from children’s arts and crafts workshops, women’s health and wellness programmes, to nature projects that “re-wild” Romani people, many of whom have become detached, through increasing isolation from the countryside due to being ‘encamped’ in over-crowded caravan sites or homes, from the natural world.
Romani Cultural & Arts Company has also delivered world-class arts and performance initiatives and exhibitions, in major galleries and arts venues across the country, featuring artists and work that would otherwise remain inaccessible to the majority of visitors. ‘Mainstreaming’ Romani arts, in all its forms and expressions, is one of the key ‘missions’ of the organisation. Demanding attention for sorely neglected areas of arts and knowledge production that have been previously treated as aspects of ‘naïve’, or ‘folkloristic’ arts, or relegated to the ‘subjective’ and intrusive giorgio (non-Gypsy) gaze, one that disempowers as it ‘strips’ the ‘object’ of reality and converts it into stereotype, or misrepresentation, is uppermost. The pervious romanticism and sensualist approaches of British artists who have use Romani and Traveller people as models, or (unacknowledged) inspiration, have been challenged by the Romani arts practitioners who have been represented in the Gypsy Maker programme over the previous decade; artists who offer a Romani ‘gaze’ that looks back at the viewer in a complex, transformative dialogue, refusing the imposition of preformed and preconceived ideas about ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The Romani Cultural & Arts Company’s success in delivering Romani and Traveller artists to a much wider public has been acknowledged through the continuing support of the Arts Council of Wales for these and other programmes and projects, and the positive reviews that each show has been greeted by.
The international conferences organised and presented by the RCAC have engaged many Romani and Traveller academics and experts to deliver positive and profound papers and reports at well-attended and respected events where government ministers and members of the Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament have been in attendance. Additionally, the RCAC has been active in soliciting the views and experiences of Romani and Traveller communities, in projects funded by the Welsh government’s equalities bodies in projects that give ‘voice’ to those who were previously voiceless, and a presence in policy that was previously missing.
