I sit down with my laptop in a quiet, central Brooklyn café, not far from Prospect Park on a slightly overcast day in August to interview the mysterious Parisian street artist Princess Hijab. I order a San Pellegrino with lime; she abstains from any snacks or beverages. Despite the time difference from France, she’s alert and ready to engage with me. I go into the interview knowing how she guards her anonymity, and the concrete details of her identity remain elusive — this is an email interview after all.
Interviews
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Mr. Dropout Is Serious
Nate Hill is at a crossroads. After a series of performances steeped in childhood imagery, he’s ready for something new. For an artist his age it’s amazing that he’s already become the subject of posts on Gawker, Time Out NY and other mainstream blogs, an article filled with anger in the Daily News, and never mind the general snarkiness of online citizens (he accused me of being one of those). Yet, Hill feels that Mr. Dropout, his new performance, is about turning a page. Starting a few weeks ago, Hill has been walking the length of Manhattan via Broadway wearing all white, including a gauze veil tucked into a white balaclava.
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Beyond Hello Kitty: Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian
Curator Joann Kim doesn’t want you to think of Mao Zedong, Hello Kitty, bukake or Panda bears when you think contemporary Asian art, and she’s offering an alternative at Arario Gallery’s New York branch titled, “Irrelevant: Local Emerging Asian Artists Who Don’t Make Work About Being Asian.” She tells us why.
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Jennifer Dalton is “Making Sense” of Jerry Saltz’s Facebook Page
Now that Jerry Saltz has proven himself — yet again — to be an attention whore with his stint on Work of Art, I’m starting to like him more … yes, I love a car crash. And just when we were all jonesing for another fix of “What is crazy uncle Jerry up to?” Artist Jennifer Dalton is opening a show today at the Flag Art Foundation called “Making Sense,” which (among other things) is an “ … attempt to make sense of … New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s incredibly popular Facebook page.” Let the games begin …
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London’s Xylo Creates Street iPhones to Highlight Chinese Suicides
Xylo is a street artist who has just started mounting fake iPhones to the walls of London. They’re designed to raise awareness about the electronic worker suicides in China and some of the social injustices feeding our electronic obsession.
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Honoring US Freedoms Through Dissent: Interview with Dread Scott
In recognition of the Fourth of July, I interviewed groundbreaking artist “Dread” Scott Tyler, whose work is directly engaged in challenging public perception of and reactions to US politics and history. He answered my questions about his desire to engage, America’s relationship to freedom of expression today, nationalism, and the lack of critical discourse around his work.
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Census Art: Anita Glesta Reflects on the History of Counting
In 2004, Brooklyn-based artist Anita Glesta was commissioned by the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create a permanent seven-acre landscape intervention for the Census Bureau Headquarters Building in Suitland, Maryland. Six year in the making, on July 12 Glesta will inaugurate her artistic meditation on the idea of counting and numeric order with a global perspective.
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Momo At Home: Making the Public Private
New York street artist Momo’s latest project took place in the unlikely town of Key West in the Florida Keys. The veteran street paster decided to work with locals on a one-to-one basis and create art works that would be integrated into their lives and bring what was normally a public piece of art into a very private domain, the home. Key West’s The Citizen newspaper described the project as “art for the masses.”
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Same Show, Different Channel: An Interview with Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes
On Tuesday, Tyler Green announced that he was leaving his 8 1/2 year stint at ArtsJournal for the mainstream art media world of Louise Blouin Media’s ARTINFO and Modern Painters. The news came as a surprise to many who view Green’s online voice as a cornerstone of the indy art blogosphere. Yet the veteran art blogger — though he dislikes the label — doesn’t expect to change what he already does. The following is the first interview with Green since the big news came out.
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Off the Beaten Path with the Mysterious @MuseumNerd
One of the most popular art feeds on Twitter right now doesn’t have a name or a face or a gender. It doesn’t represent an established arts institution or magazine, nor does it have any kind of credentials. And yet, less than a year since it started, it now boasts 10,000 followers.
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10 Years of Newsgrist: The Interview
Ten years is a longtime for a web-based project and Newsgrist is celebrating a decade of existence this month.
I spoke with its creator Joy Garnett about her online project and how it has evolved since its inception. She assured me that, “after all these years [it] remains as close to my heart as ever.”
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The Black List is A-Listed: An Interview with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders about The Black List: Volume III, his increasingly popular documentary series on the African American It-list, which premiered February 8, 2010, on HBO.
