By Art Practical Editors
Sarah Hotchkiss, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Micki Meng, James McAnally, Roula Seikaly, and Vivian Sming address the current and future states of arts publishing.
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By James McAnally
Criticism is a field forever in crisis: purgatorial, underfunded, and dependent on other structures for its existence, so the litany of complaints are both lived realities and perennially relevant.
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By Maddie Klett
"What is the future? What is hope? Where can it go? Who has access to hope when everything crumbles?"
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By Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen
Rhiannon Evans MacFayden sits down with Rodney Ewing and Indira Allegra to discuss collaboration, scarcity and abundance, community, and collective modes of creating and presenting work.
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By PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Artist Sydney Cain and curator PJ Gubatina Policarpio meditate on the vision and process that inspire Cain’s upcoming show Refutations at MoAD.
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By PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Artist Vincent Miranda and curator/organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio talk about the ideas and influences for Miranda’s upcoming exhibition at MoAD.
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By PJ Gubatina Policarpio
Photographer and visual artist Chanell Stone and curator/organizer PJ Gubatina Policarpio revisit Natura Negra (Black Nature), Stone’s exhibition at Museum of African Diaspora.
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By Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen
DeShawn Dumas and Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss the fragility and resilience of glass and the limits of the art institution as community space.
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By Maddie Klett
Trees, pets, technology, all have been made to serve the advancement and preservation of humankind. What happens when advancement stalls, or doesn’t move forward as expected?
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By Art Practical Editors
At Art Practical, we have compiled a selection from the many proliferating online lists and guides in response to COVID-19 directed to artists, art educators, cultural workers, and cultural organizations. While certainly not all-encompassing, we hope that this list can direct our readers to useful resources and strategies, as the situation rapidly evolves.
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By Maddie Klett
The history, imagery, and culture of survival skills are central to Dionne Lee’s work. What skills are necessary, who has access to them, and thus who is positioned to survive?
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By Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen
Rodney Ewing and Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen talk about institutions and the things we learn about our work when we listen openly.
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By Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen
For our sixth episode of Notes from MoAD, multidisciplinary artist Indira Allegra and curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen discuss an expanding of world and experience, the interplay of consent and complicity, exhaustion of identity-based inquiry, and the temperature of colonialism.
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By Maddie Klett
Brian Bartz places plants in the middle of technological systems to suggest that the politics of obfuscation are in plain sight.
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By Art Practical Editors
Emory Douglas sits down with the California College of the Arts (CCA) Students of Color Coalition in a roundtable conversation.
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By Art Practical Editors
Jakeya Caruthers and Xandra Ibarra reminisce in the Growlery’s kitchen to commemorate the many conversations had in each other's kitchens.
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By Art Practical Editors
Brontez Purnell and Sophia Wang discuss communities have shaped their practices, and how the two work together through dance and movement.
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By Art Practical Editors
Mik Gaspay and Kija Lucas share an intimate conversation about their experiences growing up in Palo Alto, and the paths that led them to becoming Bay Area-based artists.
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By Weston Teruya
Weston Teruya speaks with artist Maya Stovall about her interrogations in ethnographic traditions and the expectations of artists in public practice.
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By Leora Fridman
Keith Hennessy’s de(composition) workshops invite erosion of power systems and anticipate failure in both posture and in politics.
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By Tina Takemoto
Filmmaker & CCA Professor, Tina Takemoto, gives us an intimate portrait of the Center for Asian American Media through her personal memories and encounters as an early filmmaker.
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By Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos speaks with Jenny Odell about exercises in attention, space for refusal, bonding over our experience of an Ellsworth Kelly painting at the SFMOMA, and much more.
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By tamara suarez porras
Works by Georgina Reskala and Dionne Lee consider how bodies orient themselves when confronted with embedded histories and memories in landscape.
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By Weston Teruya
Weston Teruya speaks with Honolulu-based artist Rebecca Maria Goldschmidt about her methodologies on understanding the land and de-centering the United States.
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By Taravat Talepasand
Artist, Taravat Talepasand, invites us to Sinopia Pigments, where some of the world's rarest pigments are mixed for her paintings.
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By Victoria Gannon
"The backpacks of my youth were not optimized. They had padded straps and meaningless loops that dangled like ponytails."
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By James Knowlton
Exploring how concrete monoliths control and subvert light, Dan Paz works to expose the underlying levels of surveillance one incurs within the Brutalist building forms of Seattle University and the juvenile detention center nestled nearby.
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By Brian Karl
Future IDs intervenes in the cycle of hollow tourism by inserting the stories of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals into Alcatraz, complicating the site’s own story.
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By Kelly Kirkland
The works in Built Environments present the visibly fabricated architecture of everyday life as a way to remember a human presence in the natural and urban world.
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By Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos looks at how artist Veronica Graham translates her drawings and paintings into digital architectures within the virtual world.
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By Sofía Córdova
Artist and musician, Sofía Córdova, takes us to the "foot" of the tech empire to talk to us about the intersections of art, climate change, and finding one's community in an apocalyptic Oakland.
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By Dodie Bellamy
"I’m not the first and I won’t be the last writer in whose work San Francisco is more than a place; it infuses the writing to such a degree that it assumes the position of protagonist."
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By Monica Westin
Maria Porges has written a book in which the image-text relationships hover in a strange new space.
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By Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa
The solo exhibition Michael Richards: Winged, at the Stanford Art Gallery, focuses on visual narratives of historical trauma and Black resilience.
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By BONANZA
Art collective, BONANZA, takes us to their favorite dive bar in San Francisco where they gather to drink, dance, and host art events.
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By Weston Teruya
Weston Teruya speaks with Honolulu-based artist Leland Miyano about his connections to nature and natural materials and his process for the new site specific installation at the Foster Botanical Garden.
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By Lindsay Costello
Lilian Martinez's new paintings depict womxn of color in moments of confident ease, revealing a duality of domestic quietude and regal poise.
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By Lusi Lukova
Each garment within Ceremonial Vestments is a scene of worship of its subject and her commitment to inhabiting a duality of strength within herself.
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By manuel arturo abreu
At their worst, contemporary social practices reinforce the idea that aesthetics trump all else: art, even unconsciously, acts within the market.
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By Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos discusses analog immersive technologies including the View-Master, Paper Peep boxes, and the Mareorama.
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By Libby Black
Artist and educator, Libby Black, takes us on her favorite routine stroll at the Berkleley Marina to reflect on her life as an artist in the Bay Area for the past 18 years.
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By Brian Karl
Within on Joaquín Segura’s Pyre are geographically specific questions about how we respond to the failure of government and often-hidden, interwoven politics. The work also asks: what are the geneses and consequences of violence, vigilantism, and voyeurism?
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By Emily Wilson
Masako Miki has created more than a dozen sculptures representing shape-shifting spirits (yōkai), on display in exhibitions in Berkeley and San Francisco.
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By Maria Porges
In the art world, the word "work" serves so many purposes that it is difficult to know what it really means or how to use it. Do we live to work or work to live?
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By Emily Pothast
By replicating and transforming images derived from processes that generate multiples, such as viral videos, mold making, and etching, artist Danny Giles reveals an abiding interest in the roles that reproducibility and mass media have historically played in the dissemination and perpetuation of the structures of white supremacy.
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By Weston Teruya
Weston Teruya speaks with L.A. artist, Carolina Caycedo, about ways she investigates the impact of extractive economies and hyper development on communities, local systems of knowledge, and the environment.
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By Justin Carder
Justin Carder, bookstore owner and cultural producer, shares his journey to ownership and defining home and community in a rapidly changing Oakland.
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By Melanie Stevens
Monuments. presents the labyrinthine practice of Afrofuturist artist Sun Ra.
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By Genevieve Quick
As diasporic artists, Won Ju Lim and Ma Li construct new homes—real and imagined.
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By Zach Horn
Nicole Eisenman, Monica Majoli, and Ann Toebbe employ the imagery and implications of technology with subtlety, never losing the imprint of the human body that makes their work so personal.
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By Mildred Howard
Artist Mildred Howard takes us to Sweet Adeline Bakeshop in Berkeley, CA to discuss the city's rich political history, how it affects her art practice, and why she continues to build community in the surrounding area.
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By Paul Maziar
Abigail DeVille’s immersive, monumental installation at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The American Future, invites visitors to consider the image of the United States through the lens of Black Americans.
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By Kelly Kirkland
With recent works at SOMArts and YBCA, Sofía Córdova interrogates the power and consequences of existing as a person of color in the increasingly commodified space of digital media.
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By tamara suarez porras
Cloaked in smoky haze, the surreal Californian landscapes of Young Suh's Wildfires are unsettling reminders of the urgency and proximity of climate change.
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By Gabrielle Gopinath
Iconography depicts the interpenetration of past and present in The People Are Coming, a mixed-media drawing on foil by the Karuk artist Brian D. Tripp.
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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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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.
PRNT SCRN is a podcast hosted by Dorothy R. Santos about bridging the gaps between analog, new media, and digital art practices.
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.
New Takes is a column written by emerging writers on emerging artists as part of the Art Practical Residency. 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 contributor and Art Practical resident is Maddie Klett.
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.
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.
This is part of X issue on X, edited by X.
“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.
