Interviews Archives

Art

Interview with Hide/Seek Co-curator David C Ward

by Hrag Vartanian December 9, 2010December 11, 2010

David C. Ward is co-curator of the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition, which has become a lightning rod for right-wing attacks on the federally funded Smithsonian institution. The show is the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture. There are many LGBT images on display but the work is not limited to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender artists and encompasses work by many names that are mainstays in art history, including Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, AA Bronson, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

But what has really catapulted the show into the limelight is the fact that last week Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough ordered David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video pulled from the National Portrait Gallery show.

Art

New Museum Director Lisa Phillips Explains Decision to Show Wojnarowicz Video

by Kyle Chayka December 8, 2010December 11, 2010

When the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced that it would be removing “A Fire in My Belly,” a David Wojnarowicz video work, from its Hide/Seek exhibition due to Republican political pressure, the art world rushed to the work’s defense. Among the first art institutions to respond to the scandal was the New Museum. In a press release on December 6, the museum announced that it would be displaying the video in its lobby “as an act of solidarity with the many artists whose rights of expression continue to be limited by misinformation and fear.”

In a Hyperallergic-exclusive Q+A with New Museum’s director Lisa Phillips, the director explains how the museum reacted to the initial controversy and how the decision was made to display the censored video in the lobby.

Art

Rawson Projects Takes Root on Bedford Avenue

by Hrag Vartanian December 2, 2010December 8, 2010

On November 11, a small gallery opened its doors on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and caused a ripple of excitement in local art circles. Not only was this one of the first galleries to open on Bedford for ages but many people are taking it as hopeful sign that some energy was returning to a neighborhood that used to be a central part of New York’s art world dialogue.

Named Rawson Projects, the small gallery consists of Christopher Rawson, Julian Calero, and James Morrill. Their first exhibition, Fingers in the Sun, features the work of local painter Sam Martineau and it is a smart show filled with works that are nuanced and almost impossible to capture in photographs.

Art

Marc Horowitz Crowdsources Life/Art From Strangers

by AX Mina December 1, 2010December 4, 2010

On November 1, one of People Magazine‘s Top 50 Hottest Bachelors, conceptual artist and Internet start Marc Horowitz, took a line from Subservient Chicken and let the Internet tell him what to do. He agreed to bound by these decisions, no matter how absurd, and to broadcast the results online for the wider world to see.

For the entire month, with the backing of the New York-based public art organization Creative Time, Marc has been crowdsourcing his life. Everything from what he should wear to how he should celebrate Thanksgiving becomes open to the masses. The piece continues in the tradition of Marc’s extensive body of enormously popular Internet-based works, from “Talkshow 247,” where he broadcast his life continuously for three months, and the “Google Maps Roadtrip,” a journey across the country using only Google Streetview.

Art

Covering Times Square’s Ads With Art, Impossible?

by Kyle Chayka November 23, 2010November 23, 2010

Over the years, various artists including Maya Lin, Marina Abramovic and Keith Haring have presented artwork in Times Square, often on one of the large video screens that dot the space. But why not turn every advertisement in Times Square into art? Justus Bruns, an enterprising Dutch guy, started a project that has gradually snowballed into something like a viral movement. His goal? To turn Times Square into Art Square (so goes the name of the project, TS2AS), and cover up all the visual noise in New York City’s most famous public space with works of contemporary art. It’s certainly a tall order, but with the momentum Justus and his team have already pulled together on an international level, there’s a better chance than ever before. I interviewed the young art impresario to get his thoughts on the future of TS2AS.

Art

From Bushwick Block Party To Street Art Park?

by Hrag Vartanian November 23, 2010November 23, 2010

Last Saturday’s All City Block Party at Factory Fresh in Bushwick attracted street art fans and artists to cover the walls of the block-long Vandervoort Place with murals and art work by Brooklyn talents, including Chris Stain, Gaia, Skewville, Imminent Disaster and Tek33 and Dscreet of London’s Burning Candy crew.

Of course, photographer Luna Park has the goods at The Street Spot, and there are some more pics on Juxtapoz via Gaia, but I wanted to talk to Ali Ha, co-founder of Factory Fresh, about the project. I was dying to ask her what exactly is going on with Vandervoort Place and their dream of turning it into a street art park or more specifically an artist-run green space for the community.

Art

Seychelle Allah Talks Space Slave Trade & His Aggregate Style

by Hrag Vartanian November 22, 2010November 22, 2010

One of the figures behind Space Slave Trade, Seychelle Allah discusses his brand of afrofuturism that layers the visual culture around him into a world in which the aggregate plays an important role.

Allah’s relationship with social media has been complex. Space Slave Trade, named after a friend’s band, started after he was kicked off Facebook for sharing images deemed inappropriate by the service. The resulting blog is NSFW and careens from porn-like images with young Asian girls to absurd representations of starving Africans. The aesthetic is young, fresh, and aggressive without being violent.

Art

Loren Munk Talks Social Network Paintings & James Kalm Report

by Hrag Vartanian November 15, 2010November 17, 2010

Last Saturday, #TheSocialGraph was honored to host the first-ever retrospective of Loren Munk’s popular online video channel, the James Kalm Report.

Started as a conceptual performance of sorts, Munk and his alterego, James Kalm, have over the course of four and a half years garnered a cult following in the art world (particularly outside New York). The painter turned video artist has demonstrated his savvy in the world of social media and fit in perfectly to the types of conversations we are attempting to have in the social media art show.

To honor Munk, I asked another art visionary Austin Thomas to curate a selection of video since I knew she shared the same respect and passion for Munk’s project as I did. And this is what she had to say in person (and on her blog) about the short videos she chose:

Art

Jennifer Dalton Talks Social Media Consumption

by Hrag Vartanian November 12, 2010November 15, 2010

This is the second in a series of interviews with artists, writers, and personalities involved with #TheSocialGraph, which opens today (November 12, 6-9p). For more information, visit hyperalleric.com/thesocialgraph.

Jennifer Dalton stepped right into the heart of New York’s social media art movements when she, along with artist William Powhida, organized #Class at the Winkleman Gallery earlier this year. The exhibition was as much a social media event producing a constant stream of Facebook content, Twitter conversations, livestreams, and Flickr images, as a IRL one.

Since then she has completed “What Are We Not Shutting Up About? (Five Months of Status Updates and Responses from Jerry Saltz’s Facebook [Profile] Page)” (2010), which she exhibited this past summer at the FLAG Art Foundation. I interviewed her in July about that social media profile turned art work and she talked about the reasons she makes art …

Art

“Concerned New Yorkers” Hatch Poster Project for Park51

by Hrag Vartanian September 20, 2010September 20, 2010

It’s impossible to escape the heated rhetoric around Park51 in lower Manhattan. And now Adam Wissing, Kenny Komer, and Boris Rasin, who have been making a name for themselves for their clever and in-your-face street interventions, have joined the very public fray with a poster campaign that invites people on the street to voice their opinions in writing. We caught up with them to ask about their latest project.

Art

Free (With Admission) at the New Museum

by Hrag Vartanian September 8, 2010September 16, 2010

Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, gives us a taste of what we can expect from her exciting new exhibition, Free, at the New Museum this fall. Incorporating 23 artists, Free will reflect “artistic strategies that have emerged in a radically democratized landscape redefined by the impact of the web.”

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