This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. Today, we invite artists, curators, a media specialist, and an invigilator to talk about art that challenges the resources of traditional exhibition spaces. Their backstories reveal how building relationships—through eco-systems, architecture, choreography, media archaeology and virtual community engagement – make exceptional art encounters possible. Featured voices: Brian Sonia-Wallace, Sarah… Read more »
Anna Kunz’s recent exhibition, Color Cast, at the Hyde Park Art Center surrounded visitors in a field of color that made one feel as if they were walking between the painted gestures of a large-scale painting. Draped across the space were large swaths of material painted in yellows, pinks, and reds that swayed with the… Read more »
Somewhere on a mesa in New Mexico on land belonging to the Zuni resides a powerful war god that once stood—more an exile than a piece of art—in the New York apartment of Emily Hall Tremaine. In solitude, visited by the wind, it looks out at the vastness of the land known as the Middle… Read more »
This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. What does it mean to be Black in 21st century America? The expression of Blackness in art has a history of intricate connections to civil rights and social movements. In the United States and abroad, painting and drawing, filmmaking and photography, performance and protest have long represented diverse… Read more »
Three distinct exhibitions, Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, and Black Is, Black Ain’t, took place in three different locations in the US, respectively in 2004, 2007 and 2008. While at first glance, all three exhibitions seem to contend with issues of what might be… Read more »
When the eminent art historian Robert Rosenblum was a graduate student at Yale in the late 1940s, he accidentally stumbled upon what seemed to be a catalog titled Painting Toward Architecture for a major exhibition of the same name then touring museums and galleries throughout the United States. He was stunned by what the book… Read more »
This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. Today, capitalism, also known as “the free market,” is linked to trade wars, massive student debt, entire countries going bankrupt, burgeoning virtual currencies and coded security systems. What does art have to say about our careening global economy? In abandoned bank buildings, failed urban development projects… Read more »
Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on Hyperallergic. Since Natufian people first put down roots in the city of Jericho 11,000 years ago, capitalism has been the prevailing economic regime for humans for less than three percent of the time. Yet, afflicted with chronocentrism, many contemporary cultures treat capitalism as the natural ordering of the… Read more »
I can’t think of a more triumphant testimony to the late art theorist Arthur Danto’s essay “After the End of Art” than the recent Ricky Saiz-directed music video “Apeshit.” In it, the Carters—a.k.a. Beyoncé and Jay-Z—pose haughtily in the Louvre, commanding the building in a manner true to its original function as a Crusades-era royal… Read more »
When artists, curators, historians and others talk about art and fashion as separate things, I’m always struck by the conversation. While taking in the essence of the 2004 exhibition Skin Tight: The Sensibility of the Flesh through the luscious images and the short, pithy essays in the catalog, I made note of the ways in… Read more »
This episode was originally posted on the Fresh Art International podcast. What happens outside the art scene inspires many of today’s curators, filmmakers and artists. They mine the conceptual depth of personal and communal rituals and routines. Community gardens, shared ride systems, public processionals, weathervanes, home improvement projects, live streaming radio and selfies on the internet are… Read more »
In the age of social media it has become easier to disseminate artworks to wide channels, providing a multitude of entry points to pieces that might lay inside institutional walls. Despite the increased accessibility, contemporary artworks can still become buried in social media algorithms, and often do not have the same impact when viewed outside… Read more »
In the fall of 1983, Louise Lawler was given the opportunity to photograph the art in the New York apartment and the Connecticut home of the Tremaines. The results included a photograph of the bottom edge of Jackson Pollock’s Frieze and a soup tureen on a sideboard. Another showed Léger’s painting of three huge women,… Read more »
To democratize art is to make it inclusive, to allow a wider audience to have access and participate. Art is often a field that causes many feel excluded from, that they are outsiders who do not belong to this otherwise unreachable and untouchable world that is controlled by the elite few. The two exhibitions, Work… Read more »
“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2002 Thirteen bold,… Read more »
On the wall in the headquarters of the Tremaine Foundation hangs a lithograph by Christo of a little red wagon. A Radio Flyer, it is the iconic type of wagon children all across the nation have owned and treasured for one hundred years, pulling all manner of things in it, be it a friend, a… Read more »
From inside a pitch-black, 6 ft. by 6 ft. by 8 ft. chamber within a gallery, a train screeches, machines hum, a cane taps on linoleum floor. The sounds co-mingle as they make their way across the six speakers mounted in the small room. A powerful transducer speaker causes the lowest frequencies to rattle the… Read more »
It is not unusual for there to be clashes between artists, curators, and collectors who loan works for exhibitions. Sparks can fly for many reasons including: differing understanding of an exhibition’s theme; fragility of the artwork; and difficulty in displaying it effectively and safely. A unique example of such a clash occurred between Emily Hall… Read more »
Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on Hyperallergic. New evidence of a Southern Pacific Garbage patch has been found. Longtime combatant of oceanic plastic Captain Charles Moore has published new findings that further detail the concentrated amount of plastic in the South Pacific Garbage Patch near Chile and Peru, with his NGO Algalita, which is dedicated to finding solutions to… Read more »
Editor’s note: This is a repost of a podcast episode by Fresh Art International. On this live streaming radio program, we consider how artists, curators, architects and writers are responding to climate change in South Florida. King tides, flooding and eroding beaches are now part of everyday life. Our guests reveal how the rising sea has… Read more »
Justice is a verb. It is a constant and relentless action, not something that can be distilled down into a collection of objects. The physical representations of justice need people. They need movement. Otherwise, they simply serve as fragments. Unlike static art objects, materials of resistance—protest signs, t-shirts, pamphlets, white papers, posters, books, songs, poems,… Read more »
More than ever in our tumultuous society, art can no longer exist parallel to activism, but must be woven into our efforts to construct a better world. We offer the following conversations on the role of art in fostering social change. This video content was provided courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage… Read more »
Emily Hall Tremaine (1906-88) was attracted to art in which theory and technology served as conduits for intuition. “You see a prophetic vision, especially if you train yourself to see it,” she explained. “You almost see what’s coming through the artist.” In her stellar art collection that eventually surpassed 400 works, one of the best… Read more »
Threatened by a rumor that a landslide may engulf his home, an elderly man becomes obsessed with a drive to preserve his knowledge for posterity. As he plasters his walls with pages torn out of the encyclopedia and his own personal taxonomies, he marvels that such a wealth of knowledge could have been accumulated in… Read more »
As with any form of social media, our private lives have traversed a line which now exhibits our daily routines, tasks, advances, and even downfalls. For artists, and not only those in the visual realm, social media is the new white box gallery. Museums like the Art Institute of Chicago host Instagram takeovers and smaller… Read more »