The RA hosted an arts festival as part of the Mayfair Art Weekend which took inspiration from Eileen Cooper’s direction for the 2017 Summer Exhibition, providing a platform for young up and coming artists. As well as art-making workshops, kids activities, talks and live music, I commissioned three young artists to create temporary installations and interventions for the weekend in Mayfair.

Exhibition installation: Oh Brother Where Art Thou 2: Expedition Files, Adele Morse
Showing the culmination of five years of research by Morse on a creature currently unknown to science, the Orang-Pendek. It took her on an 18-day expedition to the Sumatran jungle acting as a cryptozoologist in search of DNA and scientific evidence of the species. The work brings together image, casts, models, documentary and DNA findings that question what it means to be a conscious species.

Artist in residence: Murray O’Grady
During his residency in the Burlington Arcade, O’Grady conducted research into the historical and contemporary culture of the place as it relates to ongoing investigations in his practice; the relationship between history and fiction, of identity and performance (particularly in relation to social class) and how these ideas relate to a fetishized idea of "Englishness" and theories of Dandyism.

Installation: Arches with Velvet Curtains, Frank Kent and Jon Kipps
A collaborative installation occupied the West Yard, is a little-known, disused Victorian passage running parallel to the Burlington Arcade. The monumental wooden door was opened, with a large velvet curtain by Kent marking the installation threshold. It revealed a sculptural work by Kipps and a second curtain by Kent. With a combination of low-fi plasterboard construction and column-like shapes, Kipps’s sculpture draws attention to West Yard’s contrasting surroundings and its relationship to affluent Mayfair.

Photographs by David Parry, c. Royal Academy of Arts