By Sita K. Bhaumik, Jocelyn Jackson, Saqib Keval
"You’ve taught me that as I grow as an artist, I can think beyond the parameters I might even set for myself. You believe in dreams. I believe in wonder."
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By Dorothy Santos
Dorothy explores the artistic practice of artist Ani Liu and how she re-imagines portraiture and explores the translation between virtual to physical. In Liu’s most recent work, Real Virtual Feelings (2018), she examines how the digital realm affects our cognition and body chemistry.
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By Elena Gross, Jay Katelansky
In their final episode, Jay and Elena reflect on all the highs of this past year, revisit their all-time favorite segments, and interview their ultimate art crush Tschabalala Self.
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By Ala Ebtekar, Dorothy Santos
"I believe we planted that seed years ago, and I feel fortunate that it’s come to sprout this spring."
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By Weston Teruya
Weston talks with Oakland-based artist Katie Dorame, who creates narratives that explore colonialism and Native American pop-culture representations, leavened with moments of humor.
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By Dorothy Santos
Dorothy examines the ways in which assistive technology has become a new terrain for artists like Trisha Baga, Stephanie Dinkins, and Cara deFabio.
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By Elena Gross, Jay Katelansky
Elena and Jay reflect on the decades-long careers of Black artists and consider what their re-emergence says about our current moment and for the future.
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By David A. M. Goldberg
DB Amorin explores a queer Native "ambient identity" through video installations that include the geographic, the cognitive, and the historic.
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By James C. Fleming
From the performance-art practice of Hope Mohr Dance to the Sapphic brilliance of Juliana Huxtable’s poetry and soundscapes, sacred enclosures of queer desire abound.
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By Ariel Zaccheo
For her work Stranger Visions, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected genetic traces left on New York streets. Like the shed DNA, internet data collection leaves a trail through which to trace our digital lives.
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By Weston Teruya
Weston talks with artist, curator, and cultural organizer Nancy Hom, who has served as an anchor and mentor in the Asian American artistic community, creating platforms to support artists, bring together people, and advance social justice work.
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By Kelly Kirkland
Cybele Lyle renegotiates her relationship to the rapidly changing landscape of her childhood home: “I feel like I'm seeing a place I've known forever for the first time.”
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By Cliff Hengst, Scott Hewicker
"I keep thinking of Prue Leith from the Great British Baking Show (one of the few things these days that calms my rising anxiety) when she says knowingly to the contestants, 'It has got to be worth the calories.' I’m sure there’s a metaphor for art school in there somewhere."
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By Connie Zheng
The Feminist School of Painting is a solo exhibition by the Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti, but it is also an experiment and a “performance that begins with open questions.”
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By Helen Wong
An exploration of Xiaojing Yan’s exhibition, In Suspended Silence, and Wen-Li Chen’s installation, To My Unborn Child, at the Richmond Art Gallery.
By Dorothy Santos
In the first episode of PRNT SCRN, Dorothy explores the history and convergence of analog and digital technologies in the production of experimental sound.
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By Ashley Gifford
The Utopian Visions Art Fair in Portland, OR proposes an optimistic alternative to traditional models.
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By tamara suarez porras
Photographic objects and the subjects within them degrade over time, particularly when discarded through the sieve of archival practices. Do possibilities exist for the body to further live through the photograph? Can photographic objects invoke life over death?
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By Glen Helfand
The Bay Area may be losing some of its soul, but there’s a tenacious spirit here that cannot be eradicated. Ultimately, things boil down to our sense of truth and empathy.
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By Elena Gross, Jay Katelansky
On this episode, Jay and Elena visit Bay Area Now 8, the YBCA triennial exhibition, and talk about faves and feelings.
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By Weston Teruya
In this (un)making episode, Weston talks with Ho Chi Minh City-based artist, curator, and cultural organizer Dinh Q. Lê.
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By Yinshi Lerman-Tan
Comprised of quotes from three notable Bay Area Filipino Americans, Jerome Reyes’s Abeyance compels viewers to think about immigration, history, mothers and mother tongues, and the city.
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By Nat Marcus
Bri Williams often sources objects from antique malls, second-hand stores, or simply from the street: materials that were once possessed by someone or something else—and perhaps still are.
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By Ana Tuazon
Autumn Knight's Sanity TV is a performative talk show negotiating the complex socio-policital dynamics of its audience.
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By Christopher Frank Blackmore
Going Outside showcases the work of China-born, US-based artists He Kunlin and Tong Yi Xin. The exhibition addresses an ongoing negotiation of masculinity in the contemporary era.
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By Elena Gross, Jay Katelansky
Elena and Jay catch up from summer break and unpack the meaning of “back-to-school” by thinking about the benefit and necessity of alternative schooling models.
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By Weston Teruya
In this episode, Weston Teruya is in conversation with artist and educator, Jesus Barraza, whose work draws on a long and complex history of print, mural, and socially engaged practices within Indigenous and Xicanx communities.
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By Lusi Lukova
Apex at the Portland Art Museum takes the iconic Veterans Memorial Coliseum as its subject and explores the power of repetitive image making and observational variance in its production.
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By Jackie Im
What does the migration of people in creative fields away from the Bay Area mean for those who stay? What is needed to survive here?
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By Chitra Ganesh, Sung Hwan Kim
"There are structural affinities between preservation of American race and American art."
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By Jamal Batts, Malika Ra Imhotep
In this final episode, Jamal Batts and Malika Ra Imhotep, sit down with LA-born filmmaker summer fucking mason, to discuss their immersive installation and short essay film Gemini.
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By Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono
"For law to positively affirm ownership to an individual or group, it must simultaneously negate and vacate the claims of others as we’ve discussed throughout our letters."
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By Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono
"Place is irreparably altered by markings in time; through action, place becomes something new entirely."
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By Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono
"How do we repair the rifts within the self, between culture and civics, between human and nature?"
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By tamara suarez porras
In this episode, Tamara Suarez Porras sits down for an interview with Museum of the African Diaspora's curatorial team, Emily Kuhlmann and Soleil Summer.
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By Jay Katelansky, Elena Gross
This episode is the season finale of what are you looking at?, and our hosts Jay and Elena reflect on the bittersweet feelings of all different sorts of endings.
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By Weston Teruya
The Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour guides people across downtown Berkeley as they share stories that explore the multigenerational and intersectional work of South Asian Americans in the region.
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By Weston Teruya
Keeping Our Space: Organizing Cultural Districts in the Bay Area, was recorded live at the Bayanihan Community Center in the heart of SOMA Pilipinas in early April as the final event in Art Practical’s Process + Practice + Progress series.
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By Nat Marcus
To face the precarity of our present day and the psychic freight it offloads onto queer, POC, and undocumented people, Marcel Alcalá stages critiques that are in turn humorous and no-bullshit.
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By Genevieve Quick
In superhero films, the secret lives of the protagonists are self-protective, ensuring their security within the civilian world. While the secrecy of identities and societies can fortify resistance, it also suggests an absence, one that has parallels to the lack of representation produced by socioeconomic and racial inequality and political oppression.
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By Anna Martine Whitehead
Grief’s complexity is at the center of much of Indira Allegra’s work, which explores the intersections of loss, disability, and Black feminine physicality.
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By Anuradha Vikram
In the exhibition Children of the Children of the Revolution at Stockholm’s Färgfabriken, five artists reckon with the legacies of their revolutionary upbringings.
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By Jay Katelansky, Elena Gross
Jay and Elena reflect on their post-grad experiences and give some tricks and tips that have helped them survive it (so far).
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By Angel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción
Artist Andrew Wilson sits down with Curator and Educator Angel Rafael Concepcion Vazquez to discuss his affinity for fashion and honoring the ephemeral objects that acknowledge the histories of of Black bodies in America.
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By Weston Teruya
Edgar Arceneaux explores concepts of absolution, redemption, and the participation of audiences and institutions in exploitative systems.
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By Lusi Lukova
Jef Geys, the artist’s posthumous exhibition currently on view at Yale Union (YU), is a compilation of works that conceptually teeter between the liminal authorships of artist and curator, creative freedom and institutional limitations.
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By Jamee Crusan
Bree Lamb produces sweet and sugary photographs that complicate partnerships and familiar relations while also instigating a hint of nostalgia for anyone who was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s.
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By Connie Zheng
The polyphony quickly reveals itself to be a major source of the power of John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea. Specifically, it provides a conceptual frame for greater consideration of the relationships between bodies and voices, media and environment, representations and reality.
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By Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa
Dorian Katz exposes forces of nature in the animal world that help to deconstruct human-held views of normative sexuality and gender. Katz’s metamorphic animals exist in the liminal spaces between species and genders, illustrating and leveraging other ways of embodiment and being.
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By Art Practical Editors
Black Prominence: The Vision & Re-vision of Art and Leadership joins Jamillah James of ICA LA, Maria Jenson of SOMArts, and Linda Harrison of Museum of the African Diaspora, moderated by independent curator Essence Harden.
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By Michele Carlson
Equity flows from the top down, not muscled from the bottom up by those who also happen to be the focus of said diversity initiatives. These voices should determine outcomes, be held accountable, and be given credit for successes, and failures—not just be leveraged for institutional equity strategies.
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By Weston Teruya
New Orleans-based artist, writer, and cultural organizer, Imani Jacqueline Brown, very carefully examines the underlying financial systems that destabilize and shape our lives, whether it be fossil fuel money, predatory development, student debt, or wealthy investment portfolios.
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By Thea Quiray Tagle
Collapse marks a new phase in Dewey Crumpler's prolific career while serving as a reconfirmation of his deep commitments to art, visual sovereignty, and abstraction.
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By Anisa Jackson
Anna Martine Whitehead, whose work engages with experimental spatial and temporal dimensions that can visualize Black queer relationships to these virtualities, investigates architectures of containment and resistance through an exchange of meditative gestures and lecture.
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By Rob Marks
In the visual hothouse of the gallery, word art—particularly the word art of artists whose language fosters ambiguity—faces enormous challenges. Can an artwork’s visual and verbal impacts co-exist and survive each other's force?
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By Vivian Sming
When artist Takeshi Moro was offered a teaching position at Santa Clara University in 2013, he decided to open up a non-profit art space, tmoro projects, in his garage right across from campus.
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PRNT SCRN is a podcast hosted by Dorothy R. Santos about bridging the gaps between analog, new media, and digital art practices.
How does one survive and thrive as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area? Living & Working is a multi-platform column focusing on the experiences and strategies from those who continue to live and work in the Bay Area.
Between You and Me is a series of dialogic exchanges between artists and their collaborators and peers to materialize the countless conversations, musings, and debates that are often invisible, yet play a significant role in the generative space of art-making.
Notes, thoughts, and recordings from events organized by Art Practical.
A podcast where Elena and Jay, two queer Black women in the Bay Area, talk about art, art crushes, art world gossip, regular gossip, and millennial woes.
New Takes is a column written by emerging writers on emerging artists as part of the Art Practical Residency in partnership with c3: initiative, a platform for critical inquiry in Portland, OR. One resident is nominated from a pool of recent graduates from California College of the Arts, who holds the position for one year. Our current New Takes contributors and Art Practical residents are Tamara Suarez Porras and Kelly Kirkland.
Notes from MoAD is dedicated to the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Emerging Artist Program, giving the exhibiting artists an opportunity to discuss their featured exhibition at MoAD and how their art practice is in dialogue with contemporary art as it considers themes of the African diaspora.
Tomorrow We Dreamt of Yesterday explores how artists create counter-narratives that fuse science fiction, present-day life, and histories of colonization, displacement, and economic and political inequities.
A series developed in collaboration with Lucas Artists Residency Program at Montalvo Arts Center.
#Hashtags is a column, formerly published on Daily Serving, that explores the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.
“Endurance Tests” is an irregular column on current explorations of representation, the ethereal, and compulsiveness by Black artists working in the field of performance. Across profiles and interviews, the column takes seriously the proposition of performance as a repeatable and assimilable text. “Endurance Tests” will examine contemporary performance-makers actively syncretizing the many implications of "Blackness": illegality, contagion, maladaptivity, and a privileged relationship to cool.
Originally published on Daily Serving, Odd Jobs is a column exploring artists’ varied and untraditional career arcs.
Elena Gross is joined by other closet culture junkies and pop vivants. No detail is too banal and no subject too proud, or too base. Critically minded and unabashedly opinionated, every energetic discussion peels away the sticky layers of our media and visual culture.
Weston Teruya welcomes artists, arts administrators, and cultural workers of color to get real about their lives, practices, and careers. Each episode is an in-depth look into how art gets made, but more importantly how these folks are seeing to the system of art’s (UN)making.
Studio Sessions offers behind-the-scenes access to artists, writers, curators, and creative individuals through a variety of tête-à-tête conversations that consider the how, and what, and where of making art. Studio Sessions are presented as interviews, profiles, and studio visits through text, photo essays, and videos.
LPP in Conversation visits Bay Area artists in their studios and project sites to explore the research, readings, obsessions, and inspiration they use to inform their practice.
Inside the Artist's Studio is an occasional series that offers intimate, insightful portraits of Bay Area artists and places where they make their work.
A series in collaboration with community partners.
Notes from di Rosa is produced in conjunction with Art Practical's yearlong residency at di Rosa, in which the museum's collection serves as a focus and cornerstone for an in-depth exploration of Northern California contemporary art.
In-depth, critical perspectives exploring art and visual culture on the West Coast.
Bad At Sports is a weekly podcast about contemporary art. Founded in 2005, the series focuses on presenting the practices of artists, curators, critics, dealers, various other arts professionals through an online audio format.
Women in Performance, curated by Jarrett Earnest and Patricia Maloney, is dedicated space for conversations with leading artists addressing the aesthetic and conceptual issues, historical precedents, and critical language shaping contemporary feminist performance.
Locating Technology considers technology and artworks in rather broad terms, such as: mechanical objects, analog and digital photography and video, and computer and web-based work. Through these types of works, writers explore the evolution of technology and its effects on artists’ processes, disciplinarity, and the larger social context of media creation, dispersal, access and interactivity.
On April 19, 2014, the Arts Research Center hosted Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum. This daylong event included a series of artist-led workshops that developed exercises, prompts, or actions that engage questions of art, labor, and economics.
The Visiting Artist Profile series, which highlights some of the artists, curators, and scholars who intersect with the Bay Area visual arts community through the various lecture programs produced by local institutions.
The Op-Ed column is a space for readers and contributors to sound off about Art Practical's content and to contribute to the larger conversation about Bay Area art which Art Practical supports.
Re-Engineering is a series of op-ed articles and real-time conversations co-produced by Art Practical and the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts that invites constructive dialogue between the region's art and technology sectors. By bringing together seemingly disparate voices from both communities, these conversations underscore the creative impulses, capacity to take risks, and desire for positive social impact that these groups have in common.
From artists' monographs to beach reads, "Printed Matters" offers a monthly take by a rotating group of contributors on visual art through the printed word.
An Exhibition, Postpartum is a series that examines the components of making contemporary art exhibitions in order to encourage readers and art practitioners to evaluate an exhibition as a process rather than simply as a finished product. Each installment includes an interview with the curator(s) and/or the artist(s) behind an exhibition, preceded by a review for context and critical analysis. Accompanying these texts is a slideshow of images of the exhibition, from installation to de-installation, as a way of diagramming its true lifespan.
Wall labels. Curatorial text. Provenance. Titles (or un-titles, as the case may be). At what point do the words surrounding an artwork serve the work, and at what point do they disrupt it? In terms of the museum, specifically, when do explanatory labels benefit museum-goers, and when do they detract from an individual’s experience? Rob Marks' "The Museum On My Mind" is a meditation on the role of museum commentary and what it means to “know” a piece of art.
