Episode 11: Hank Willis Thomas

episode 18: Brett Cook

Episode 17: Gabby Miller

I am interested in utopias, but a utopia where everyone actually is there. And can actually be there. And that means not erasing history.

Episode 05: A Very-Special-Episode Episode

Episode 16: Roberto Bedoya

“If you believe in common cause, you also need to learn how to work with antagonisms. Not everything gets resolved.”

Episode 15: Pallavi Sharma

“I always felt there was a big disconnect--especially where I live in San Ramon--between people who create art and people who view art."

Episode 04: #notallbillionaires

Jackie Im joins me to talk about Jay Z, patronage, accessibility, and the intersections of the art market and contemporary hip hop.

The Tall Tales of Jonas Becker

Becker speaks of a longing for West Virginia's culture of creating relationships through music and storytelling, rather than political ideology. 

Episode 14: Maria Gaspar

“How does the built environment in our communities affect us, on all different levels, on a political level, a civic level?"

Episode 03: Something Soft & Black

The SF Bay Area as an incubator for black creatives, Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, the enduring legacy of disco in black survival + more!

Episode 13: Jaime Cortez & Genevieve Quick (Live at Montalvo!)

A special live recording discussing balancing arts and writing practices in the Bay Area.

what are you looking at?: Summer Break

“what are you looking at?” is taking a break for the month of June catching up on Pride events, Warriors parades, Netflix original series, and neglected self-care regimens.

Episode 12: Steve Wong

“I am a product of the movement...This museum is a product of the movement, too: to recover that lost history, to recover that erasure of our stories.”

Episode 11: Hank Willis Thomas

“Part of what we’re trying to focus on is: what does it mean to be visionary in the midst of a storm?"

Episode 02: Analog Days - Do or Die

"I saw it as an opportunity for us, for the first time, as black women to be on the block, and exposing our body, in our way, in our time."
 

Episode 10: Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik & Lee Ann S. Wang

Unraveling the destructive politics and rhetoric shaping public understanding of migration and immigration in the United States.

What Imaginary Thing is a Museum?

“Dónde Está Ana Mendieta?” or “Where is Ana Mendieta?” supposes they are asking, where is the work she had yet to make?

Episode 9: Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo

"How do I tell the stories of blue--and tell the histories and all the research of blue, but by using other colors?"

Seeing Power through the Map

Viewers must make sense of each of these artistic maps and, in so doing, find their way in the world.

Episode 01: Doing Your Laundry and Doing Your Work

We discuss feminist playwrighting, Yoko Ono, and Bay Area "home" galleries.

Reflections in a Cyborg: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Civic Radar

The artist invites viewers to take leaps of imagination when considering the believability, cognition, and emotional potential of cyborgs, while exploring how they reflect our identities, anxieties, and aspirations. 

Episode 8: Nicole Marroquin

A discussion about creative and political research, Lower West Side Chicago student activist history from 1968 to 1973, and youth arts education.

Episode 7: Postcommodity

“[The work is] really about indigenous self determination. Whatever form that takes. It’s really about celebrating that, acknowledging it, and connecting those narratives to the public.”

In Memoriam: Leigh Markopoulos

Brief remembrances from a few of Leigh's former students and colleagues in honor of her life and work.

Episode 6: Mary Chou

What does cultural equity mean in the context of public art and city government?

Episode 5: Jacqueline Francis & Kathy Zarur

Jacqueline Francis and Kathy Zarur talk about the nuances of place, the movement of people and ideas, and curating.

Episode 4: Ramekon O’Arwisters

“Wherever you are, do it with whatever you have, so you can acknowledge that...you have creative power, and by extension that you have power.”

Episode 3: Grace Rosario Perkins

“I want other people of color to have a space to create this sort of dialogue or network...that’s where the real stuff is going to actually happen.”

Episode 2: Gisela Insuaste

“You can’t isolate the object from its history, from what’s happening around you in the world..."

Episode 1: Gaye Chan

“I think that the Free Store allows us to see our irrational fear of the stranger.”

Jerome Reyes

Through these collaborations, Reyes creates layers of experience and intimacy between SoMa’s residents based on their personal understanding of time and place.

I Love You, But, Because Inexplicably I Love in You Something More than You…

You walk through a gallery in the same way that you move through the world: with a shifting weather of sensation fucking you up and composing you.

Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition

Extraordinary rendition, the practice of abducting to and torturing people at black sites around the world, is difficult to capture. 

Blank Map: Doing Whatever the Fuck We Want

Everything that I do is toward Black liberation. Giving Black people that freedom and space to be whatever we want—whether that be something that’s about Blackness or not—it’s all connected to our liberation.

On Fire by Jonathan Griffin

Griffin is fascinated by fire’s dual role in our collective imagination—as a mercurial force of destruction and loss and as a deeply felt, passionate form of inspiration.

Kate Rhoades and the Labyrinth of Discarded Materials at Recology SF

Rhoades is able to weave her characteristic humor into each creation, no matter what materials she uses.

Interview with Catherine Wagner

I'm not concentrating on the specificity of a portrait because the moment I do that it becomes about that person, and I'm trying to talk in much broader cultural strokes.

Black is the Subject: Dana Michel is Moving

This is part of the Utopia that I created for myself. I’m just going to put my hands deep in the guts of all the things I never allowed myself to touch.

Marina Pugliese

Rather than present Italian or Italian American art just to those communities in San Francisco, Pugliese’s exhibitions depart from the traditionally insular framework of cultural institutions.

Virtual Absence and Presence in the Museum of Stolen Art

As a VR museum, MOSA sidesteps the battle for cultural capital among conventional museums by offering immateriality and simulation. 

Interview with Tania Bruguera

We’ve had enough with respecting. It’s OK, be disrespectful. Go do something.

Hughen/Starkweather

When the colors and shapes of a nonrepresentational work of art rearrange themselves into remembrance or recognition, magic happens.

Daniel Coburn: The Hereditary Estate

The specter of some unnamed tragedy is undeniably present, as is the febrile, superstition-soaked atmosphere wherein tragedy might reasonably flourish.

Hail and Farewell

It is one thing to bring something into the world, it is quite another to know that it will go on without you. 

Question Bridge: Black Males in America

Question Bridge: Black Males in America resists monolithic racist attitudes and elevates individuality as the project’s core concept.

Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self by Susan O’Malley

The project as a whole breaks ground more in the expression and transmission of the ideas than in their collection.

Returning Street View to the Street

While Street View as a web-based network has great potential for dispersing information to wide segments of the world's population, it also operates according to corporate strictures and technological limitations.

Interview with Dread Scott

If this moment is going to stick, it will require not just a movement in the arts, but much more social upheaval.

LPP in Conversation: Amy Ho

Amy M. Ho builds video and spatial installations that bring attention to our existence as both physical and psychological beings. 

Interview with Janet Cardiff

My main interest in sound is how it surrounds us and influences us. It's invisible, comes into our body, but it hits us in a very three-dimensional way.

Storming the Castle

And while speculation is highly problematic, unreliable, and dependent upon conjecture more so than facts, I’ll indulge it here and share my opinion

Going Somewhere with Fakeness: Mica Sigourney Brings Drag to the Headlands

“I never want to change drag from what it is. But I do want people to recognize that it's culturally valuable.”

Photography is Magic

The book, like the practices it highlights, is a thoughtful and timely response to technological leaps that don’t often afford measured consideration. 

LPP in Conversation: Binta Ayofemi

Ayofemi’s practice is about activating such spaces as commons: repeatable, iterative experiences created through the intersection of location, materials, and opportunities for participation.

Raiders and Empires

Syjuco harnesses technologies of distribution and reproduction—the web, photography, and 3D scanning and printing—to create objects that reveal the tangled history of colonization and cultural hybridization.

Brion Nuda Rosch: The Basement Years

Brion and I met in the 1970s; we knew each other through Jim Jones, the infamous one.

In the Dressing Room with Coco Fusco, August 19, 2015

We obsess about physical violence, which is bad, but it is the tip of the iceberg compared to the way that poverty is reproduced and expanded.

Interview with Orit Gat

I don't think that classic structure of the art review—here's the artist, here's what's on view, here's what it means, A, B, C—is actually that bad a structure. I just think it's about time we meddle with it a little bit.

Radical Presence, Absence, A Body Without Politics

How can we reckon with these remnants as anything other than traces of blackness after the historical fact of the performance?

Interview with Tanya Zimbardo

There was certain work that I wanted to experience in space and not just on my laptop at home. That was part of the interest for me.

An Old American Problem

By inserting himself as the artist/photographer/author, as opposed to a neutral observer, he dilutes his credibility as a critic.

Questions Brought to the Surface: On Curating Art and Technology with Ceci Moss

As our technological devices and the roles they play in our society change, so must critical inquiries in culture. 

Mechanized Bodies: Anxiety and Healing in a Global Economy

When manufacturing exits an area, it leaves its trace on workers' bodies. 

Finding Value in a Flattened Field

The commitment to paying contributors must be acknowledged as only the most visible link in a long chain of interlocking, concrete exchanges distributed throughout the ecosystem.

500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House

Ireland often likened himself to an anthropologist as he continually discovered new features and objects left over from the accordion maker’s 38-year occupation.

LPP in Conversation: Kate Rhoades

Rhoades is intent on seriously and hilariously wrestling with questions involving art, ethics, and access.

Is it possible to create a code of ethics for the arts?

A code of ethics not only protects the motivations of the individual artist, it also outlines objective standards for labor, regardless of what motivation compels it.

Reskill Now!

Let’s reskill with contemporary means, the shared authorship of feminist practice, the tactical adoption of sympathetic technologies

Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade

Through a fascinating blend of ethnography and art history, Wong casts Dafen’s “art bosses” as conceptual artists and their business as a kind performance.

Conversation with Brett Goodroad

The composing is the most mysterious thing, actually. Often I’ll change what seems easy to understand; I guess I need to confuse myself. Nobody loves, with a capital L, a one-night stand. I don’t, anyway.

Artists’ Markets: Parking Lot Art Fair and stARTup Fair

Parking Lot Art Fair and stARTup Fair served only a portion of the overall arts community in the Bay Area, niche markets within a complex system. 

LPP in Conversation: Scott Vermeire

For our interview, we headed south to Gilroy, garlic capital of California to visit Scott as he directs his latest project. 

Judy Dater: On Vaginas and Earthworks

The female figure appears not as an interruption of her environment but as a continuation of it, an extension of the peaked cone on which she stands. 

Sequence’s Travels Into Several Notions of the Museum

Sequence envelops me as I walk its passageways. It is not about my body becoming small, but about my body relating to an arrangement of space that is unfamiliar.

Interview with Rick Lowe

I just want to be as clear as possible about this: I’ve never worked on a project in which I didn’t feel like I was an outsider. And I own that.

The Unmooring of Jibade-Khalil Huffman

For Huffman, poetry is a means to shape-shift and mistranslate, reforming meaning by first dissolving it.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Words (and artworks) may be an insufficient means to describe or represent our desire for connectedness to land, but these efforts nonetheless afford a great gain in the breath that language and art can bring to otherwise mundane, thirsty living.

LPP in Conversation: David Bayus and Brynda Glazier

David Bayus talks about using 3D modeling to create uncanny tableaux and animations and collaborating with artist Brynda Glazier. 

Derek Jarman: Super 8

Derek Jarman: Super 8 shows an artist fully coming into his own at a social and historical moment when his distinct creative voice would become more needed than ever.

Little Rebellions: Women and Robots at di Rosa

Fascinating subthemes emerge in di Rosa’s vast collection of modern and contemporary Northern California art, as in one unexpected moment in the main gallery devoted to explorations of technology and gender. 

DOC/UNDOC: Transgress, Transcend, Transform

DOC/UNDOC echoes this history of conceptual and experimental art but equally invites us to consider older histories of colonialism, religion, and indigenous practices.

In Defense of Play: Javier Téllez’s Games Are Forbidden in the Labyrinth, or How Do You Play Chess?

As an act of curation, Téllez’s essay is particularly effective at drawing out parallels between the structured, brutal rules of chess and the dehumanizing logic of institutionalization.

Conversation with Steve Seid

There was this new art form called video art, but there wasn’t an audience yet. [W]e were not only exhibiting it, but also creating an audience.

LPP in Conversation: William Emmert

William Emmert’s work risks being unnoticed in his own studio...and its quietness is both impressive and a little disturbing.

If I, Brontez Purnell

Central to every Renaissance personality, Purnell always lets the project define his practice—which is also to say that he never lets the project define him.

Interview with Pauline Oliveros

If you’re not listening, if you’re blocking them out, then you don’t get it.

The New Endurance of Linda Mary Montano, Part 2

“I don't want to ever perform what we are doing. It is too beautiful.” He said, “It will be even more beautiful when we perform it.”

The New Endurance of Linda Mary Montano, Part 1

It’s almost like seducing the teacher, you know? I’m sharing the power with the patriarchy in both those pieces.

Context Is Everything: Visiting di Rosa

How will this collection be displayed, conserved, promoted, and carried forward into the uncertain future that institutions face today?

All the Feels

Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour ruminate on the di Rosa collection and its founder in writing, while Erin Jane Nelson provides her interpretation through altered digital photographs. 

The Message is the Medium

July provocatively disrupts conventional standards for communication and efficiency to reimagine how technology could facilitate social interaction.

The State in Which You Find Yourself: Mamela Nyamza and Meryem Jazouli

Nyamza and Jazouli's respective senses of place...reasserts the primacy of their positions as laborers with families, complicating what it means to be an “African artist.” 

Remote Viewing with Stairwell’s

We drove up from San Francisco to di Rosa on an exceedingly hot day in late September, shortly after the Napa earthquake and the same weekend a closure on Highway 37 slowed wine-tasting traffic to a walking pace.

Claudia La Rocco: The Best Most Useless Dress

The vagaries of assessment are all here, not just present and accounted for, but celebrated.

Therapeutic Bodies

Rottenberg and Moulton never explicitly identify the condition that the world or individual suffers from, allowing the viewers to speculate that it could be imagined or cyclical. 

Transformations—Death, Breakage, and the Unexpected

I was particularly interested in the question of how things change us when circumstances beyond our control take place.

Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art

The mythology around Jean-Michel Basquiat continues to proliferate in the twenty-six years since his death.

Re-Engineering: Geek Sublime

Code is uniquely kinetic. It acts and interacts with itself, with the world. In code, the mental and the material are one.

Rigorous Ecstasy—Language & Performance, Part II

 It’s rather hard to describe because the language that is appropriate to the origins of performance art didn't exist and is still elusive. 

Rigorous Ecstasy—Language & Performance, Part I

Dentists have to practice. Ballerinas practice. Visionary artists do not practice! We enable. We enact. We realize. 

Michael Danner, Critical Mass

Danner’s photographs systematically carries the viewer through the environments so bizarre they verge on otherworldly. 

Jim Melchert at Winery Lake

One feels palpably that di Rosa is a place that has been cultivated, nurtured, grown.
 

Inside the Artist’s Studio, Part 5: Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman

Sometimes you are in opposition and think you have no voice, but you are still a part of it and you're paying into it.

Response: Precarity as Profession

What, if any, difference exists between the creative effort devoted to making art and other kinds of work—like, say, shipping art?

Response: Negotiating Terms and Setting Precedents

Negotiation is the most demonstrable and effective means of creating agency.

Response: Dear Christian

How we are implicated, being in this system? Do you really believe that as art teachers we exist firmly in the service economy? 

Response: Common Measure in Kind

After the craft making, after the questionnaires, after the yoga, the debt screams, and the ad-hoc curating—we adjourned to a larger plenary space to think together about what we had wrought.

Response: Hammering It Out

One sculpture, Jonathan Borofsky’s large, red Hammering Man (1976–1983), part of the Berkeley Art Museum’s permanent collection, kept returning to me so insistently it felt like it was haunting me.

Response: Archiving Exchange, Mapping Value

Caroline’s response to her timer’s quacking stuck with me for days after the workshop.

Response: Reigniting Public Art Policy as Social Practice

Have today’s artists, curators, and academics internalized the prevailing neoliberal ideas of individual entrepreneurship, self-help, and sustainability? 

Response: Can We Talk About the Audience?

Society should both demand from and reward the arts community for more engagement, by more people, with more, better art.

Augmented Reality: The Political Potential of Hybridized Space

Artists, philosophers, scientists, and technologists continue to unravel reality as a complicated matrix of self and perception.

Holland Cotter

Constantly learning, constantly reading—I would stay a student, basically, which is what I consider what I am, and I love that.

Dawn Weleski

These hawkish voices, guided by ignorance and misinformation, are often the loudest ones, calling for shock and awe when tensions flare around the globe. Dawn Weleski aims directly at this destructive connection between ignorance and hostility with her social art project Conflict Kitchen.

Alfredo Jaar

Jaar provokes contemplation with negation and absence, by referencing what is missing or unseen. The images in and documentation of Studies on Happiness and The Rwanda Project show so little but say so much.

Against Recognition

In Facial Weaponization Suite, Blas effectively asks: How is difference marked on the body, read by us, and in turn, read by machines (made by us)? And how can we complicate all of the naturalized assumptions underlying each of those ideas? 

James Benning

Benning creates a social history of California by lingering on scenes bypassed by eight-lane freeways or left out of Hollywood depictions.

Interview with Andrea Bowers

And I just wanted to reference that it’s not just about physical rape. There’s a culture of oppression of women that takes many different forms.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

As political as they are, La Tormenta and Search don’t suggest specific problems or solutions. Rather than action, the artist’s aim is discussion.

Re-engineering: Venture Culture | Platforms for Art+Tech

The infrastructure to catalyze creative speculations and cross-disciplinary collaborations in creative engineering is woefully inadequate, a conspicuous omission in this most technological of regions.

The Squeezing of the Middle Class Gallery

With their leases recently terminated, the mid-sized galleries at 77 Geary Street in San Francisco are the latest casualties of the massive wealth divide that plagues contemporary American society.

Youngsuk Suh

Suh says that contrary to the simplified nature-versus-culture dichotomy, he views nature as a “highly engineered and civilized institution.”

Almost There by Aleix Plademunt; MACK and Ca l’Isidret Edicions 2013

The individual images may or may not be immediately recognizable, but through the combinations, their significance ignites like the explosion from a door opened to a burning room starved of oxygen.

Casey Reas

Software is integral to the form and process of Reas’ work, and he has even said that all of his ideas about how the world operates come from software.

Participatory Economics

While lighthearted, Bernie Lubell and Packard Jennings use technology to facilitate participation with sharp critique while viewers engage in learning, teaching, exploring, and challenging their roles in the economic system.

A Considered Space: The Work of Suné Woods

Reimagining the interrelations of intimacy and silence in the production of a visible black self is a task left to Woods’s audiences, not the artist. 

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent

The shortcomings in design and layout, however, do not diminish the book’s capacity to serve as a resource for Kent’s work, which in itself makes the strongest case for her ongoing relevance.

Re-Engineering: Artist-Run Spaces

It has been another great year for the opening of new artist-run spaces, despite skyrocketing rent and the growing discontent among the creative community toward the latest tech surge.

Interview with Christian Jankowski

I hope that in Silicon Valley, people might become more sensitive to the possibilities of their language and use it not only to build machines, but also to make poetry.

The Year in Books

Art Practical contributors provide a list of must-read titles they've enjoyed this past year.

Alter-Circuit: Virlani Hallberg

Viewers of the piece have also had to put themselves in Et al.’s hands, as it were, journeying below ground into the dark of a laundry basement to engage with something potentially transformative.

Rick Prelinger

Prelinger describes his films as being in “a perpetual state of incompletion,” and he urges his audience to construct their own narratives

Interview with Takeshi Murata

I just went off the deep end, trying to figure out what these characters and the space they were in would sound like.

Brad Kahlhamer

Kahlhamer’s dolls are something deeper than mere imitations of katsina dolls, something new and personal. 

Fault Lines

Fault Lines offered poignant commentary on the connection between the seeming disintegration of healthy (although idealized) family dynamics and contemporary society’s obsession with a growing self-voyeurism.

Machines of Critique

As different as Delvoye and Pauline may appear, they seem to draw the same conclusions regarding the art world and its economic demands. 

Re-Engineering: Art and Tech in the Bay Area Part Two

A passive approach toward art facilitation will do little to challenge the predominant political and cultural bias toward big technology in San Francisco.

Tyrus Wong

Though Wong’s most well-known work is the background art he did for Bambi, he has also been an exhibiting artist since before Roosevelt was elected president.

Re-Engineering: Art and Tech in the Bay Area Part One

Interview with Monique Jenkinson

I do like to say that I like working from obstacles. I love to work with women’s fashion or drag as an obstacle. I’m using drag as a constraint to generate movement.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Robinson writes that on Mercury all the hundreds of planetary craters are named after famous artists, writers, and composers; I scoffed, unable to suspend my disbelief—then I found out that this is in fact true.

Zarouhie Abdalian / MATRIX 249

Just as Abdalian’s art makes palpable the shortcomings of institutionalized democracy by hampering what we can see, hear, and touch, so too do the pieces in MATRIX 249 marshal the physical properties of the museum’s space for their critique.

Interview with Claudia La Rocco

One of the things that I love about performance is that if you weren’t there, then you weren’t there. It does disappear, and we disappear

Known Artists: The Catholic Church, the Cuban State, and the People

How can artists use the exhaustion produced by a public procession when the state has withdrawn all support

Performance Art’s Big Year: A Response to Recent Criticisms of Marina Abramović

Did celebrities make performance art famous or has performance art claimed its own fame?

Nandipha Mntambo

Mntambo says that the biggest misconception about her work is that it has a “feminist agenda at its core.”

Camera-less

As a medium based on mechanical reproduction, photography has long lent itself to appropriation.

Mickalene Thomas

Thomas says her work “is about presenting beauty and the black body.” She proclaims, “You’ll see me, therefore I exist."

Disquiet by Amani Willett

Disquiet (Damiani Factory, 2013) utilizes the photo book format to weave a dreamlike meditation on life, death, destruction, and rebirth.

Interview with Osha Neumann

I could no longer stay in my apartment and paint; I was drawn into what was happening on the streets.

External Combustion

He taught me about demanding the most from oneself: the highest possible level of rigor one is capable of.

Interview with Pat Williams

America ought to run the risk once in a while of mirroring itself, in determining whether or not we really value the arts

Part 2: Writing on Water

In my mind I see an image, but it’s really a feeling and it’s really in my gut.

Part 1: If The Walls Would Not Speak

The museum is the kindest parent, ushering me to the brink, toward moments of wonder and awe, insight and revelation. But almost at once, it is the cruelest parent, jerking me back.