The luxury French fashion and fragrance brand Chanel has pledged to support the contemporary arts as they emerge from the pandemic.
The Chanel Culture Fund is committing to long-term partnerships with leading cultural institutions around the world to create new programmes supporting innovation in creative and cultural thinking. In the UK, the National Portrait Gallery will be backed to develop the exhibition ‘Reframing narratives: women in portraiture’.
A team led by art historian and curator Dr Flavia Frigeri will research and highlight the representation of women in the collection and within the gallery's displays generally when it reopens in 2023 following refurbishment. She told The Guardian: “When it reopens in 2023 the walls will be noticeably more balanced”.
Others receiving awards include the Los Angeles Underground Museum and the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
In another strand of work, the CHANEL Next Prize, will make ten individual awards of €100,000 to artists in music, dance, performance and the visual arts who are radically redefining their fields. An international advisory board will nominate and shortlist the recipients of the inaugural awards.
These initiatives will be led by Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel, Yana Peel. For three years she was CEO of the Serpentine Galleries until she resigned under controversial circumstances in 2019.