Five of the best arts events to enjoy this month

Visit a music museum, discover new portraiture and see St Paul’s anew this month

Courtesy RCM museum

Discover a new home for music

London’s newest cultural hotspot, the Royal College of Music Museum, is now open. It’s filled with priceless items, including the world’s oldest guitar and the earliest keyboard instrument with strings. In addition to the displays of instruments drawn from the Royal College’s collection of 15,000 items, there are exhibitions, guided tours, contemporary and classic artworks and, each Friday, the chance to enjoy a lunchtime performance of music, while sitting surrounded by fascinating artefacts. Other highlights include a celebration of female contributions to classical music, to coincide with International Women’s Day.

rcm.ac.uk/museum

Fruitmarket staff member Chris Counihan looks on at Plankton Lace #1, 2020, by Howardena Pindell

Experience a UK first for Howardena Pindell 

The African-American writer, activist, educator and artist Howardena Pindell has, over six decades, carved her own abstract language through her work. Her fiercely experimental, beautiful art addresses potent topics including apartheid, homelessness, xenophobia and the AIDS crisis. This year three galleries – Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Spike Island, Bristol – stage her first solo institutional UK exhibition, Howardena Pindell: A New Language.

Howardena Pindell: A New Language, at Fruitmarket until 2 May
fruitmarket.co.uk

See St Paul’s Cathedral anew

As part of the 50 Monuments in 50 Voices collaboration between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Department of History of Art at the University of York, artist Victor Ehikhamenor has installed a new textile-and-metal work that critiques a plaque commemorating Admiral Sir Harry Holdsworth Rawson, who led the Benin Expedition in 1897. The punitive attack on the kingdom led to the plunder of the Benin bronzes. Over 100 years later, Ehikhamenor’s artwork, which includes the fusion of handmade statuettes cast in modern-day Benin city as well as Catholic rosaries, questions not only colonial histories but the notion of sacred objects. 

Victor Ehikhamenor’s Still Standing at St Paul’s Cathedral

stpauls.co.uk

Get to know some extraordinary portraits

A new six-part BBC show explores the art of painting portraits, with musician and passionate collector Tinie (formerly known as Tinie Tempah). Every episode see a ‘British hero’ matched with a leading portraitist, offering a chance to not only learn the sitter’s story – such as surviving an explosion or a crocodile attack – but understand what makes an excellent likeness, whether it be in paint, photography, or graffiti.

Extraordinary Portraits, airing on Sundays at 6.30pm on BBC One

bbc.co.uk

Ingrid Pollard, Self Evident (detail), 1992. © and courtesy of the artist

Get to grips with Ingrid Pollard’s incredible oeuvre 

This major retrospective considers the drawing, printmaking, video, photography and socially minded activities of Ingrid Pollard. The trailblazing artist considers everything from our relationship with nature to social constructs of race and identity, whether pointing a camera, printing posters or arranging exhibitions. Alongside documenting performances and speeches by the likes of Maya Angelou and Alice Walker during the 1980s, Pollard was a key player in activist and community-minded groups such as the Lenthall Road Workshop, which produced materials for radical political campaigns, spread messages of anti-racism and campaigned for LGBTQ rights. She was also a founding member of the influential photography organisation Autograph, which champions black photographic practices.

Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning, at MK Gallery, 12 March–29 May 

mkgallery.org