Utopian Visions with Srijon Chowdhury

Utopian Visions with Srijon Chowdhury

The Utopian Visions Art Fair in Portland, OR proposes an optimistic alternative to traditional models.

Fold, Staple, Embrace: The Body Alive in the Archive

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?

Magnetic Fields

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.

what are you looking at? Season 2, Episode 2: Deep In My Feelings

On this episode, Jay and Elena visit Bay Area Now 8, the YBCA triennial exhibition, and talk about faves and feelings.

(un)making Episode 34: Dinh Q. Lê

In this (un)making episode, Weston talks with Ho Chi Minh City-based artist, curator, and cultural organizer Dinh Q. Lê.

Between Ocean and Sky: Jerome Reyes’s Abeyance (Draves y Robles y Vargas)

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.

Medusa’s Last Laugh: An Interview with Bri Williams

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. 

Autumn Knight’s Sanity TV

Autumn Knight's Sanity TV is a performative talk show negotiating the complex socio-policital dynamics of its audience.

Going Outside at NanHai Art: The Solitary Landscapes of He Kunlin and Tong Yi Xin

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.

what are you looking at? Season 2, Episode 1: Let’s Do A Check-In

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.

(un)making episode 33: Jesus Barraza

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.

Apex at Portland Art Museum: The Gridded Architecture of Avantika Bawa

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.

Support Structures

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?

Chitra Ganesh & Sung Hwan Kim

"There are structural affinities between preservation of American race and American art."

Episode 5: summer fucking mason, Jamal Batts, and 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.

Imani Jacqueline Brown & Kenneth Pietrobono (Part 3 of 3)

"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."

Imani Jacqueline Brown & Kenneth Pietrobono (Part 2 of 3)

"Place is irreparably altered by markings in time; through action, place becomes something new entirely."

Imani Jacqueline Brown & Kenneth Pietrobono (Part 1 of 3)

"How do we repair the rifts within the self, between culture and civics, between human and nature?"

Episode 4: Tamara Porras, Emily Kuhlmann, & Soleil Summer

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. 

Episode 8: Bittersweet End Notes

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.

Episode 32: Barnali Ghosh & Anirvan Chatterjee

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.

Episode 31: Erick Arguello, Rachel Lastimosa, & Tommy Wong

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.

Gagged: An Interview with Marcel Alcalá

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.

Secrets and Other Superheroes

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.

Indira Allegra’s Grieving Technologies

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. 

Children of Children

In the exhibition Children of the Children of the Revolution at Stockholm’s Färgfabriken, five artists reckon with the legacies of their revolutionary upbringings.

Episode 7: MFA or Nah

Jay and Elena reflect on their post-grad experiences and give some tricks and tips that have helped them survive it (so far).

Episode 3: Andrew Wilson with Ángel 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.

Episode 30: Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux explores concepts of absolution, redemption, and the participation of audiences and institutions in exploitative systems.

The Ghost of Geys: Art as Artifice at Yale Union

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. 

Bree Lamb

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.

Mythmaking in and through Sublime Seas at SFMOMA

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.

The Performative Drawings of Dorian Katz, aka Poppers the Pony

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.

Black Prominence: The Vision & Re-vision of Art and Leadership

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.

Letter from the Executive Director

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.

Episode 29: Imani Jacqueline Brown

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.

Collapse: Dewey Crumpler’s Alpha and Omega

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.

Black Feminist Insurgence

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. 

Ceci n’est pas un mot: It’s Word Art

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? 

Interview with Takeshi Moro (tmoro projects)

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.

Episode 6: No More Pickle Juice

Jay and Elena chat it up with Bay Area-bae Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle about her solo exhibition The Retrieval at SFAC Galleries and ask how she fights against her own erasure and finds solace in humor.

Episode 28: Chinatown Art Brigade

Chinatown Art Brigade creates public platforms through which neighborhood residents can tell their stories, articulate their demands, and assert their presence in a rapidly gentrifying area.

A Moment of Respite: Looking Back at PST: LA/LA…

Irina Contreras examines performances from PST: LA/LA that share "an interest in the physicality of the pause, recline, or moment of respite" to reveal how "contemporary Latinx artists are considering and acting alongside the current political moment."

The Tactical Utopianism of Sondra Perry

In simultaneous exhibitions in Seattle and Portland, Sondra Perry addresses exploitation, ownership, and the commodification of racialized bodies.

Episode 2: Cheryl Derricotte and Angela Hennessy

Cheryl Derricotte sits down with Angela Hennessy to discuss her exhibition at MoAD and how her creative process lives under the “tyranny of title,” as a phrase will get stuck in her head, compelling her to research and create the ensuing art.

Episode 27: Sarah Biscarra Dilley

Sarah Biscarra Dilley discusses maps as myth and legislation as literature to be interrogated, her research into the stories embedded in her yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash familial lands, and role of intuitive image making in her practice.

Paula Wilson: Floored at Williamson Knight

Paula Wilson elevates her own historical narrative and experience of body, introducing an alternative to the traditional imagery found in those institutions.

Fantasies and Fascinations: Social Photography at Grapefruits Art Space

Fantasies in Parallel, curated by Jess Garten and hosted at Grapefruits Art Space, is a group show of thirteen female and gender nonbinary-identifying Portland photographers.

Alien Agents

In popular culture, science-fiction films express the US's paranoia of immigrants and hybrid identities as alien agents. Tseng Kwong Chi and ADÁL create counter-narratives that challenge traditional science-fiction tropes that vilify the Other.

Decolonial Strategies: Anuradha Vikram, Michelle Dizon, and Việt Lê

"Decolonial Strategies" joins Anuradha Vikram, Michelle Dizon, and Việt Lê as they discuss the framework that art operates within, and potential strategies that artists, curators, and cultural workers alike can take to decolonize that framework.

Episode 5: Meh at Sports

In the spirit of March Madness, Elena and Jay tackle the relationship between art and sports culture.

Episode 26: Tyese Wortham

Tyese Wortham breaks down how CAST approaches their work and the nuances of Oakland’s cultural ecology—including hopeful examples of people self-organizing resources to hold onto their spaces.

Curatorial Privilege

The current institutional vogue for Harald Szeemann seems to embrace his visionary aesthetic—but not his vision for championing an art that was evolving, groundbreaking, and new, at the expense of institutional priorities. 

Interview with Artemisa Clark

"I think a lot about how you carry trauma and culture. How do we embody it and how do we learn it?" 

Round

"A sonic assertion this large requires a degree of submission or sublimation, reframing dissonance—which always feels like a kind of threat—as sublime." On Chris Duncan's 12 Symbols, Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet, and Ragnar Kjartansson's The Visitors.

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Adrienne Tarver’s seductive jungle landscapes blur the lines between looking and voyeurism.

Episode 1: Jacqueline Francis and Ebitenyefa Baralaye

Sculptor and designer Ebitenyefa Baralaye reveals to art historian Jacqueline Francis details about his relationship to clay as a material taking the form of obstruction.

Dan Bustillo & Gelare Khoshgozaran

"I think I need to walk into the simulacrum of a so-called Middle Eastern town at a US military training center and see how at home I really feel."

Episode 25: Vero Majano

Vero Majano’s work explores the cultural history of San Francisco’s Mission District, creating spaces to assert and remember the queer and Latinx communities that shape one of the city’s most iconic but highly contested neighborhoods.

How the Dirty New Media Movement Informed the First Virtual Art Galleries

Dirty New Media (DNM) is the inconformable art of disobeying software, and artists using DNM push against normative coding languages to see what will happen and to see how "dirty"—which for DNM implies both the terra firma as well as online pornography-raw or muddled their design can get.

It’s Elemental: Reclaiming and Redefining Space

The inaugural art exhibition of Ori Gallery launches the vision of a space that recontextualizes and elevates the artistic narrative of trans and queer creatives of color.

Bit Torrent: The Work of Cynthia Hooper

Cultivated Ecologies uses videos, maps, and graphics to chart the epically scaled works of 20th-century engineering that reconfigured California’s waterways, and upended the state’s ecological balance in the process. 

Astrid Kaemmerling

Walking artist Astrid Kaemmerling analyzes the manifold roles artists have played in gentrification processes beyond being its agent or victim.

An Empty Identifier: In Criticism of “Asian American” as Curatorial Construct

Sarah Hwang considers how Portland-based artists Ivy Lin, Samantha Wall, and Takahiro Yamamoto navigate the complexity of their identity through art.

Episode 4: Black Hoooooles

It’s Black History Month and what could be Blacker than black holes? 

Episode 24: Trisha Lagaso Goldberg

Trisha Lagaso Goldberg creates platforms to support artists in Hawaiʻi through exhibitions, programming, and her work as the Public Art Project Manager for the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture & the Arts.

The Propeller Group: We Are Restless, But We Will Not Rest (Even After Death)

The Propeller Group has interrogated and intentionally disrupted the space between what is defined as the Global North and the Global South, global commerce and global culture, communism and capitalism, and fine art and popular media.

Whose Place, Whose Space?: Extraterrestrial Stakes

Frances Bodomo and Larissa Sansour create poetic and fantastical extraterrestrial missions as alternative narratives to existing space programs, in order to explore, respectively, the tenuousness of Zambian and Palestinian national identity.

Laurie Anderson

Emily K. Holmes chats with Laurie Anderson about her deep concern for the current political moment, as well as the narratives and themes that infuse Anderson’s broad-sweeping creative practice.

Ben Kinmont: On Becoming Something Else

Ben Kinmont's antiquarian bookselling business is also an ongoing sculpture titled Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family (1998–ongoing).

Edgar Arceneaux: Playing in the Black Hole

Edgar Arceneaux’s practice treats reality as diverse and time as multitudinous.

Interview with Aaron Wong and Don Felix Cervantes

Aaron Wong and Don Felix Cervantes founded the artist-in-residence program TRADES as a means of fostering wider appreciation for O‘ahu’s vibrant but underappreciated and geographically remote contemporary art scene.

Rupert García

In Rupert García’s work, one sees the military-industrial complex, feels the patriotism, and hears the lies the government told.

Episode 3: What’s the deal with California?

Is the West Coast the Best Coast? Our two hosts consider collectives, competition, and compassion within the Bay Area art scene.

“The Unbearable Whiteness of Whiteness”

The unbearable whiteness of whiteness has been worked into an exhibition reconstructing color.

Tannaz Farsi’s Agents of Dispersal

Flowers are as gorgeous as they are cliché, and the artist is as suspicious as she is seduced by that which is popular and easy to love.

Three Movements through Klea McKenna’s Witness Mark

Witness Mark provides an evocative depiction of ritual, the objects of its acts, and the artifacts of its occurrence.

The Radicality of Women

Sexual harassment and assault in the art world have always been elements of the soft-power domination that global-capitalist culture enacts.

Light and Space in the Prison-State

Adjacent to the redeveloped neighborhood of Bunker Hill with its own history of displaced communities, the First Street Courthouse is anything but neutral.

Episode 2: Let it scroll, Let it scroll, Let it scroll

In this holiday episode of what are you looking at?, our hosts grapple with the constant stream of images and information clogging their overly-congested newsfeeds. 

Episode 23: Taraneh Hemami

Taraneh Hemami builds platforms for artists and activists to gather, find ways to address past traumas, create work, and weave together a collective institutional memory. 

Episode 22: Wei Leng Tay & Michelle Wong

Singaporean artist Wei Leng Tay and Hong Kong-based researcher Michelle Wong talk brought together a group of artists to explore public space, visuality, and post-Umbrella Movement.

Episode 21: Edra Soto

I’m using craft as a vehicle to create this social connection. And to provide awareness, educate, and also put these objects that I collected in other people’s hands.

A Different Kind of Treehouse: Máximo González’s The Collector

It’s hard to imagine a world without us, and yet an empty house and the image of dead, decaying trees convey those ideas. 

Don’t Look the Other Way: Escuela de Arte Útil

Arte Útil designates an art that overcomes the aesthetic role posited by modernism, and operates as a tool for social, political, and cultural change.

Jel Martinez

Jel Martinez re-creates graffiti-laden street walls in his large paintings, using a process that questions and reenacts acts of erasure.

Episode 1: Rooting For Everybody Black

what are you looking at? relaunches with Elena Gross, who is now permanently joined by artist and selfie-queen Jay Katelansky as co-host!

Whose “Again”? Reconciling Historical Erasures through Futurist Narratives

How, as Americans and as a global community, do we construct our pasts, presents, and futures?

Interview with Aria Dean

Aria Dean’s recent work has taken the form of material and textual articulations of a reality particular to the ontology of Blackness. 

Flouting the Work History

"...it suits me better to not live my life worrying about the steps I have to take in order to get to the end. You don’t really know where your life is going to go or how long you’re going to live."

Interview with Allie Hankins and Rachael Dichter

"...what I value most is the mutual care and interest, the friction, the compromises, the unexpected influences of working alongside another person."

Episode 20: Kim Anno

Weston Teruya talks with Kim Anno about about restorative justice, the ethics and process of building trust, the role of sports as a visual language, and building legislation to support artists in the city of Berkeley.

Kaori Yamashita

This rock is exceptional, if only for the fact that it is covered in white slivers of hair.

the once and future California, a utopic island of the imagination

In Rubbi's work, the spectator and participant are actively engaged in the recreation of something that they may know about, but have yet to really understand through their own experiences. 

Judy Darragh: FOIL

More than a political pun, Darragh’s work provides a nonjudgmental platform to brainstorm unconventional solutions.

Interview with Ellie Dicola

There are three common threads I see going through all of my work: gender and my perception of femininity, experiences of sexuality as they relate to trauma, and mental-health issues, which are linked in a cause-and-effect cycle with the trauma.

Interview with C. Davida Ingram

"I’m committed to having spaces to think about the conditions Black people and people of color are living in and what might produce our freedom—spaces for communion, dancing, good music—all the conversational prerequisites for creativity."

Episode 19: Kimberly Drew

“I like the idea that you can build more of an artillery of images and things that you have to base your own taste levels off of.”

Royce Allen Hobbs

For some, the need to remain concealed is a mode of both survival and self-preservation.

Being an Artist in a Small City

In a small city, if you want stuff to happen, you have to organize it.

The Big Lie

What does this initiative do to rectify decades of disempowerment of Latin American and Latinx people in Los Angeles?

Looking at Sound, Listening to Sight

"Soundtracks" materializes as a master class in listening, deviating from, if not rejecting, the implicit precept that museum art is visual.

Interview with Tom Marioni

I keep doing different things because I don’t like to repeat myself, but at the same time, I’m doomed to repeat myself because it’s what most people know me for—that one work from 1970.

Prompts for Inclusion: FAQ

Are you working to strip away bias and to foster greater inclusion, wherever you can?

Episode 18: Brett Cook

Brett Cook and Weston Teruya talk about creating skillful outcomes, bringing people into relationship with one another, and creating a culture of assessment and reflection. 

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

Eden Redmond and Elena Gross chat about this summer's most entertaining, cringe-worthy, and solidly thought-provoking TV programming.

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.