News / Events

Patti Smith was named the Literature Innovator at the 2020 WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards on November 11, 2020. This year marked the tenth anniversary of the awards, which recognize inspiring talents from a variety of cultural pursuits. The poet, artist, and award-winning memoirist and musician was honored for the indelible mark she has made on American letters and for her decades of revelatory work. Actor Ethan Hawke presented the award during the ceremony, which was filmed this year due to covid-19 restrictions. To watch the ceremony, visit the WSJ Magazine’s YouTube channel.

January 1–31, 2021, 8:21pm GMT daily
Piccadilly Lights, London
circa.art

Patti Smith will take over the Piccadilly Lights advertising screen in London’s Piccadilly Circus for two and half minutes every day at 20:21 gmt (8:21pm), transforming the 4k screen into a digital canvas. Her monthlong presentation A New Year will combine musical performance and poetry, and feature two live prerecorded events at midnight on New Year’s Eve and January 20, the date of the US presidential inauguration. The project is presented by Circa, a new platform presenting digital art in the public space established in 2020. Circa commissions a different artist each month to present new ideas that consider our present-day world. To watch the events online, visit circa.art. 

Created in 2020, Plan Your Vote is an initiative of Vote.org that harnesses the power of the visual arts to promote and empower citizens to exercise their right to vote. The organization has collaborated with artists, including Davide Balula, Sally Mann, and Patti Smith, to create a public library of voting advocacy images, available for anyone to download and share, in order to help ensure everyone has a voting strategy and is vote ready. To check if you are registered to vote, or learn more about your voting rights, visit vote.org.