Art in America - Most Recent Conversations Posts

The Academic: Q+A With Greg Parma Smith

Brienne Walsh — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:00:00 +0100

In "Life Drawings, Poseurs, and ‘thirteen oil paintings on canvas,'" the ambitious solo debut by New York-based Greg Parma Smith at Balice Hertling & Lewis, the artist takes on the history of painting and the stratified social structures around it. Comprising oil paintings on canvas and mirror, wall appliqué and an illuminated manuscript of sorts, made of bound canvases covered in a text written in graffiti, the works explore art subcultures—academic figure painting and autobiographic zine comics—that fine art has yet to cannibalize.

Cartoon Studio: Q+A With Joyce Pensato

Faye Hirsch — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:00:00 +0100

Joyce Pensato's current show at Friedrich Petzel is titled "Batman Returns," but it might have been called "The Return of the Repressed." Along with a generous sampling of recent paintings and drawings of Batman and other cartoon character heads and masks in her signature style of aggressive strokes and drips, Pensato includes detritus from the Brooklyn studio she was forced to vacate last spring after 32 years of occupancy, allowing visitors to see the traces of her private creative process.

Matthew Marks on His New West Hollywood Outpost

Paul Soto — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:45:00 +0100

Matthew Marks opened the fifth location of his gallery (he has 4 in New York) last week on the east side of West Hollywood. Located just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, the building features a permanent architectural intervention by Ellsworth Kelly, who is also featured in the new space's inaugural show,. The 40-feet long rectangular black form, inspired by the artist's Study for Black on White Panels (1954) and Black Over White (1966), hovers in relief along the top of the facade's length, a minimal gesture that is both monumental and understated.

MFA Houston's Online Latin Art Archive Launches

David Ebony — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:00:00 +0100

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a longtime proponent of Latin American Art, recently made a new 10-year commitment to champion the cause. The museum, in collaboration with its research institute, the International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA), has earmarked $50 million for the endeavor, which includes a massive online archive assembled by hundreds of researchers in 16 cities in the U.S. and throughout Latin America. The debut installment, which launched last week, features more than 10,000 primary source materials gathered by hundreds of researchers in 16 cities throughout the Western Hemisphere. It is available worldwide and free of charge.

Docu-Matters: Q+A With Iconoclast Peter Fend

Cathy Lebowitz — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:30:00 +0100

Peter Fend is a hard-driving, opinionated environmental missionary who for several decades has challenged perceptions of what art can do. During the late '70s and early '80s in New York's East Village, Peter Fend collaborated with various artists (Paul Sharits, Wolfgang Staehle and Joan Waltemath, among others), buying satellite data for environmental and political hotspots, adding analysis and selling it to TV networks. His ecologically minded schemes involve collecting plants in still waters for biogas and building channels in desert areas to restore plant and animal habitats.

Keeping His Marbles: Q+A With Gian Enzo Sperone

Brienne Walsh — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:00:00 +0100

"Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week" and "Portraits/Self-Portraits from the 16th Century to the 21st Century," currently on view at Sperone Westwater, Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery with Angela Westwater on the Bowery, combine two of the 71-year-old dealer's passions: collecting and history. With 90% of the works coming from Sperone's private collection, the shows spread over four floors-the marble exhibition is on the ground floor and balcony; and the portraits are on the two floors above.

Audit the National Academy: Q+A With Marshall Price

Brian Boucher — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0100

The National Academy, a venerable art school and museum on New York's Upper East Side, opens its next Annual exhibition Jan. 25, and for the first time it will include non-member artists and architects invited by members of the academy. Featured artists and architects range from Joan Jonas and Lynda Benglis to Kate Gilmore, Rafael Viñoly and Robert A. M. Stern to Jeanne Gang.

Danger Within: Zak Kitnick Interviews Heather Rowe

Zak Kitnick — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:15:00 +0100

Heather Rowe's work inhabits the areas around sculpture, architecture and installation, without strictly adhering to any one method of working. Permutations of wood and Sheetrock suggest transitional spaces such as corridors, doorways and windows with insertions of decorative details. Upon approach, these seemingly spare objects reveal surprising narrative elements—glass sharpened like knives and angled mirrors reflect and threaten the body. For her recent, fourth exhibition at D'Amelio Terras in New York, the artist reduced her scale, changing the relationship of the work to space and the viewer.

Prescribed Acts: Q+A With Franziska Nori

Sheela Raman — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 12:00:00 +0100

As curator of the Center for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in Florence, Italy, Franziska Nori aims to reinvent the well-touristed city as a destination for contemporary art. At the Strozzina, Nori presents theme-based exhibitions often connected to political issues. "Declining Democracy," her current show [on view through Jan. 22], features works by 12 international artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn and Francis Alÿs.

Heading up the Biennial Department: Q+A With Terence Riley

Lilly Wei — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 09:00:00 +0100

Architect Terence Riley, formerly a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art and most recently director of the Miami Art Museum, is Shenzen's first non-Chinese appointee (Hong Kong's curators are Gene K King and Anderson Lee). He heads a team of 15 Chinese and American project curators. Riley's very broad theme, "architecture creates cities, cities create architecture," taps into current issues of urban planning and architecture as organic, interdependent and integrative, best exemplified by "6 under 60" and "And Then it Became a City," provocative critiques of the life and times of young cities.

Graham Sutherland's Unfinished World: Q+A with George Shaw

Rachel Flynn — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:00:00 +0100

As curated by 2011 Turner Prize Nominee George Shaw, "Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World" at Modern Art Oxford [through March 18] brings together over eighty rarely seen works on paper from collections across the UK. Shaw's own painting has been celebrated as a meditation on the nature of time, place and memory. His selection has resulted in a visually compelling exploration, revealing in Sutherland's works a dark, elusive and magical world between the real and imagined.

Between Frames: Q+A With Matt Saunders

Paul Soto — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0100

The title of Matt Saunders's current show, "China in Nixon" [through Dec. 22 at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles] turns the title of John Adams's 1972 opera into abstract absurdity. The title's inverted place and figure, references performers who are improbably filled, indeed enlivened, by space.

The Dealer and Her Fake Watermelons: Q+A With Margaret Lee

Nicholas Weist — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:00:00 +0100

Margaret Lee is an artist, curator and art dealer whose practice is shaped by collaboration and ideas of the readymade. In 2009 Lee founded the alternative space 179 Canal, which reopened last year down the street as a commercial gallery called 47 Canal. Some of the artists she shows are her collaborators as well, and her curatorial projects often include them or their joint projects.

Thinking Inside the Box: Q+A With Kaari Upson

Paul Soto — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0100

For her most recent exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles, Kaari Upson has created works in charcoal and smoke—materials with residue. Memory is the impetus for "The Larry Project" (2007–), an ongoing body of work for which Upson invents abandoned personal items of a fictional man she calls Larry.

Night Rider: Q+A With Byron Kim

Faye Hirsch — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0100

Byron Kim, the painter, often looks at the heavens above his Brooklyn home. For years he has been working on a series he calls his "Sunday Paintings" (begun 2001) in which he writes notes about his quotidian life on depictions of daytime skies. Currently he's showing a new series of nighttime skies at his new Chelsea gallery, James Cohan. Large, text-free and at first glance monochromatic, they are dark fields of purple or gray bounded on one or more of their edges by painted strips of a darker tone. Looking closer, you see subtle variations of color within the fields. Recalling paintings by midcentury modernists like Rothko and Reinhardt, they feel like pure abstraction, but as always with Kim, have profound ties to the world.

Finding His Frame: Q+A With Howard Hodgkin

David Ebony — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0100

The London-born painter Howard Hodgkin turns 80 next year, and in spite of rather delicate health continues to dazzle and provoke audiences in equal measure. A spirited and colorful mix of show-stoppers and head-scratchers fills his current exhibition of 21 recent paintings at Gagosian's Madison Avenue gallery in New York, through Dec. 23].

The Future of Free: Q+A With Cooper Union's Jamshed Bharucha

Brian Boucher — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0100

Amid public uproar about Cooper Union's finances, the school's new president, Jamshed Bharucha, invited A.i.A. to his office on Friday afternoon for an hourlong discussion. Over the last week and a half, students and alumni have reacted angrily to the possibility of an end to the school's century-plus policy of free tuition for all students, currently numbering about 900, which has long been funded principally by income from real estate holdings. Citing a worrisome 28% annual deficit, Bharucha, who took office in July, chronicles a growing financial crisis that has been kept under wraps for decades.

The Prospector: Q+A With Dan Cameron

Lilly Wei — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0100

Recently, A.i.A. met with veteran curator Dan Cameron, artistic director of Prospect New Orleans, at the newly restored 1200-room Hyatt Regency New Orleans to discuss Prospect.2, which opened October 22 and will be up through Jan. 29. This is the second edition of the multi-venue exhibition that Cameron, formerly a curator at New York's New Museum, tagged as the "largest biennial of international art in the U.S."

Uncertain Narrative: Q+A With Karen Heagle

Cassandra Neyenesch — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0100

In her third solo show at I-20 Gallery [through Oct. 29], "Let Nature Take Its Course And Hope It Passes," Karen Heagle skirts sophisticated taste with simple and muscular garage-art renderings that attain moments of rough expressionism. Weedburner (2011), a painting of branches on fire in a wheelbarrow set against a flat field and a pale pink sky, evokes the idea of memory, heat and smell; the painting works because it addresses the awkwardness with which we re-paint our own memories, the sense of creative—even artistic—participation involved in nostalgia and recall.

Literal Photography: Q+A With Uta Barth

Paul Soto — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0100

Uta Barth's recent works [on view through October 29 at 1301PE, Los Angeles; opening Oct. 27 at Tanya Bonakdar, New York] are photographs at their most literal: pictures of light. All the images in the series "...and to draw a bright white line with light" (all work 2011), wrapped along three walls of 1301PE's upstairs space, share the horizon of a windowsill, which is intersected periodically by the irregular curvature of light across a curtain.