The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is slated to begin demolition on its $750 million dollar construction product and redesign in early April. On Wednesday, April 1, the museum announced a new aspect of its relaunch: a partnership with the beloved Instagram-friendly destination, the Museum of Ice Cream (MOIC). LACMA and MOIC will collaborate on an immersive Los Angeles-focused ice cream exhibition that will be housed in one of the wings of the new Peter Zumthor-designed main building, titled LICKMA. As museums are being prompted to include more experiential and family-friendly exhibitions, thanks to the popularity of immersive art spaces like Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf, LACMA is following suit. The Museum of Ice Cream, which currently has locations in New York and San Francisco, is bringing that approachable flair to the Los Angeles institution, which has been the subject of some controversy and criticism of late. “We are trying to adapt to the times and listen to our community,” a LACMA spokesperson told Hyperallergic. “LICKMA will be a playful, sensory experience that we hope will bring in more of the general public to visit the museum.” LICKMA will kick off with a competition, featuring some of Los Angeles’s favorite ice cream purveyors. Hollywood staple Mashti Malone’s, Silverlake’s Magpies Softserve, Atwater’s Wanderlust, and Santa Barbara-based McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams are all scheduled to compete. “We are hopeful that the coronavirus pandemic is under control by the time we are ready to open,” a MOIC representative told Hyperallergic. “LICKMA without the ‘lick’ is no fun at all.” Powered by WPeMatico The post The Scoop on LICKMA, a New LACMA and Museum of Ice Cream Collaboration appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/3bIXhUZ
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From Makeshift Studios to Webinars the Art World Reinvents Itself Under Quarantine ARTnews3/31/2020 Even though there will probably come a time when the coronavirus pandemic recedes into memory, the economic shutdown caused by it is likely to impact the art industry for years to come. Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment because of the pandemic. Thousands of those Americans work in the cultural sector for museums, galleries, art schools, and other cultural organizations. Even the wealthiest institutions are struggling to survive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has projected a $100 million loss in revenue. Last week, the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh said it expected deficits of $1.4 million per month of closure. The consortium consequently announced pay cuts as high as 30 percent for senior staff and a temporary furlough for around 550 employees—just over half its workforce—for the anticipated two-month shutdown. [Read a guide to the major U.S. art museums that have made layoffs and furloughed staff.] But most institutions operate on razor-thin budgets, and according to a 2018 survey by Southern Methodist University’s DataArts center, arts organizations have seen a decrease in working capital since 2013—meaning they lack the liquid assets necessary to cover operating costs. The precarity the industry faces is best exemplified by the people behind it. Last week, ARTnews spoke with displaced artists, laid-off workers, and museum executives making tough decisions about their futures. These are their stories. Alexandra Ivanova Two years ago, Alexandra Ivanova joined the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as a frontline ambassador. She enjoyed welcoming visitors into the building and assisting with public programs; it was a welcome distraction from her science classes at UCLA that would help pay for graduate school. In September, the 21-year-old student was promoted to museum experience lead. This March, Ivanova was laid off alongside nearly 150 other student employees. “It’s sad because we know that the museum has the money,” she said, “but for the administration, saving costs seems more important than worker lives.” Ivanova was especially worried about her immigrant colleagues who no longer have jobs and will not be able to access relief funds from the federal government because of their citizenship status. She estimates that about a third of her laid-off coworkers will be affected. “They don’t know what will happen, if they will be deported, or if they can find another source of income,” she added. As a graduating senior who is financially independent, Ivanova worries about how she is going to pay rent. She is immunocompromised, which limits her ability to work during coronavirus. She had recently decided to matriculate into a public health masters program at Yale University, but now she might defer because of the costs. “I want some acknowledgment from the museum of the fact that it’s going to hurt a lot of people,” she said. “You are subjecting people to huge hardships in the middle of a literal plague.” Michelle Moon Before the coronavirus outbreak, Michelle Moon was chief program officer at the Tenement Museum in Manhattan. She would wake up at 6:30 a.m. to prepare for her hour-long commute from New Jersey to the institution, and her high-velocity days there mostly consisted of meetings about how the museum could further develop and collaborate with other organizations. Now that she’s been laid off alongside 12 other employees at the museum, she’s trying to keep some semblance of the old routine. The mornings are spent surveying the latest news from other museums about closures and layoffs. She interacts with hundreds of her colleagues online, forming webinars and working groups about how the art industry might resurrect after the shutdown. “I think of the day in chunks and sign up for opportunities,” she said. “It helps to create some normalcy.” She tries to regiment her days of quarantine with workouts and meals. And she remains steadfastly optimistic. “Museum managers should see that this is an opportunity to rebuild healthier work structures and attempt to make jobs more supportive,” she explained. “Maybe there will be fewer jobs but better ones. More benefits and fuller employment. The pandemic will change the way we work inside our institutions.” Joseph Liatela Joseph Liatela could see the writing on the wall. He bought a one-way ticket home to San Francisco, leaving behind his studio at Columbia University in New York, where he is studying for his M.F.A. degree in visual art. He stuffed what he could into a luggage bag: silicones, metals, a sketchbook, molds, small sculptures, and other materials. “My main concern was to be with my family,” the 28-year-old artist explained. “I decided to leave a couple days before Columbia officially closed.” Back at his studio, Liatela would often spend all his time in the studio, typically arriving there around 9:30 a.m. He would work through the night, arriving back at his apartment usually around 2:30 in the morning. Now isolating on the West Coast, he has created a makeshift studio in his sister’s garage and used this time as an opportunity to work on less laborious projects like videos and research. Online classes for his semester start soon. “It’s been difficult getting resituated,” he said. “And part of this process is mourning. We need to mourn that this is not how things should be. People shouldn’t feel so much pressure to make, make, make.” Jessimi Jones When Jessimi Jones became executive director of the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio this past January, she never imagined that her first few months on the job would involve crisis management and a temporary shuttering of her workplace. Like the majority of museums in the United States, hers is a small operation. “Within the last two weeks, I sat with the board to identify a realistic timeline for the museum,” she explained. “We went line item by line item to see where we will realistically have a shortfall, what expenses we can save, and what the gaps are that we need to fill. Within a few days, our board has given generous donations, but we still have not yet filled all the gaps.” Her appointment at the museum was supposed to be something of a homecoming after working at the Philbrook Museum in Oklahoma for more than six years. Jones grew up in Bellefontaine, Ohio, about 40 minutes north of Springfield. She now finds herself quarantined at her parents’ house, sharing her childhood bedroom with her husband and daughter. Because the museum doesn’t have full-time security, she finds herself going into the empty museum regularly to check mail and survey the building. The Springfield Museum has eight part-time employees; Jones made the difficult decision of laying off three staff members at the front desk who each worked a few hours per week. “It’s been particularly challenging and stressful,” she said. “But I feel positive that we are going to use this time to have things ready for when we reopen our doors and welcome people back in.” Powered by WPeMatico The post From Makeshift Studios to Webinars, the Art World Reinvents Itself Under Quarantine – ARTnews appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/3ayPWHt As the coronavirus crisis continues to escalate across the United States, museums and art organizations have begun rallying to mitigate devastation in the cultural sector and beyond. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions have donated protective equipment to local hospitals, and the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) has been campaigning for financial relief for galleries. The latest art institution to join in the nationwide effort is the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), which has created an online marketplace through which artists based in the Detroit area can sell their work. The museum’s Emergency Rapid Response Fundraiser, for which the City Office of Arts, Culture and Entrepreneurship serves as a partner, was developed in response to the needs of artists’ whose livelihood is impacted by the outbreak. Related ArticlesSelected artists can sell a single piece of art on the platform and split the profits of the sale evenly with the museum. Buyers will be responsible for arranging shipments. Works by Nadia Alexis, Sofia Henriquez, Lucas Foglia, Jim Chatelain, and others are currently available. In an interview with ARTnews, MOCAD chief curator and executive director Elysia Borowy-Reeder said that the initiative came together in recent weeks when museum staffers were brainstorming solutions for artists with canceled exhibitions, talks, and other means of income. “Rent is due” became an often repeated refrain in those meetings among MOCAD workers from various departments, who believe that if artists can’t maintain their studios or continue to make work, “then the community loses its vibrancy,” Borowy-Reeder said. “We have all these great connections with artists, and we were watching our friends and our community get hit really hard,” Borowy-Reeder added of the impetus for the initiative. The new sales platform, which launched on March 27, will showcase works by local artists through April. Borowy-Reeder said that the initiative ” is going to be a sustained effort,” with pieces by artists living and working in other locations in the U.S. going on sale in May. Artists who wish to be included in the fundraiser should send one sample of their work to MOCAD membership manager Wayne Northcross. Powered by WPeMatico The post As Part of Coronavirus Relief Effort, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Gives Artists a New Platform to Sell Their Work – ARTnews appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/39vYugM To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. Social Media As museums look for different ways to engage the public, here’s the story of Adam Koszary, the social media editor for the Royal Academy of Art—”whose flippant, conversational approach to Twitter has gotten him so much attention over the past two years that one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies briefly lured him away.” [The New York Times] Kelly Crow has the story of a security guard at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City who became an internet star when the institution charged him with taking over its social-media feeds. “The museum said its Twitter following has grown 2,637%, to more than 268,000 followers.” [The Wall Street Journal] Museums While it remains closed, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has committed to paying all its employees until May 2 and is exploring ways to dip into its $3.6 billion endowment in the future. [The New York Times] In an open letter addressed to James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, art writer Jori Finkel wonders “why the Getty has not stepped up” to support artists, art workers, and cultural institutions struggling for survival because of the coronavirus. “Where is the Getty’s sense of civic responsibility today during this unprecedented health and financial crisis?” [The Art Newspaper] The Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit put together a new platform through which artists can sell work to support themselves during the coronavirus crisis. [ARTnews] With expansion plans being hotly contested around the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Apollo magazine pits two authors—freelance writer Matt Stromberg and former LACMA curator J. Patrice Marandel—to consider the pros and cons of “either a disaster which will bankrupt one of LA’s most venerable cultural institutions or a fitting transformation that will further the city’s ascendance as a world-class art capital.” [Apollo] The Art Newspaper released its 2019 museum attendance survey, with an exhibition of work by Ai Weiwei at the top. [The Art Newspaper] Artists “From Martin Parr’s indoor photography challenge to Martin Creed’s guitar-playing tutorial, artists are showing how the coronavirus needn’t mean an end to creativity.” [The Guardian] Watch the first episode of “Artist’s Eye,” a new video series from Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac debuting with a first episode featuring Antony Gormley waxing poetic about a favorite belonging: “a smooth, calcified fossil made from ancient single-cell organisms.” [ARTnews] Misc. Albright-Knox Art Gallery curator Tina Rivers Ryan wrote about “Net art in the age of COVID-19.” [Artforum] Sharon Stern devoted herself to the study of the Japanese dance form of Butoh. But “did her mentor”—one of the foremost masters of the art—”lead her down a dangerous path?” [The New Yorker] Powered by WPeMatico The post Social Media Strategists Shine, Met to Pay Employees into May, and More: Morning Links from March 31, 2020 – ARTnews appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2Uwryk3 MIAMI — At a facility in West Palm Beach, Florida, a community activist and recreational therapist — known in other circles as DopexGold, but here as Mr. E — has founded the Youth Concept Gallery, transforming a dayroom and empty cell block into a veritable art gallery-slash-library with a corresponding art therapy curriculum. “How can we change the narrative of how people see incarcerated youth?” he asks. “They all deal with their vices, but here we identify the creative parts of their personalities, what we can push to grow. The heartbeat is behind the walls. While your body is trapped, I’m going to let your mind run free.” The Youth Concept Gallery intends to intercept Florida’s school-to-prison pipeline — Florida’s exclusionary, racially-biased disciplinary policies were once arguably the country’s worst — with a program based on talent development and intellectual growth. Being tried as a child (even if you are, indeed, a child) is a rarity in Palm Beach County, which is among the top 25% of Florida counties responsible for youth arrests. According to a 2017-18 ACLU document on Palm Beach’s school-to-prison pipeline, Black students, who only represent 28% of the county’s total student population, make up 65% of county children charged as adults. 61% of student arrests — and 73% of student arrests made solely on disorderly conduct — involved Black children. The document underscores that Palm Beach police, in the face of understaffed schools, are charged with behavioral management, resulting in arrests for school fights or other class disruptions. One arrest tends to increase the likelihood of more; a decades-long trend of decline in school-related arrests was recently reversed, with the 2017-18 school year seeing a 7% increase in Palm Beach alone. In South Florida, “you’ve got a lack of resources, a lack of support in our communities from local politicians and commissioners,” Mr. E discloses. “The system likes to put band-aids on gunshot wounds. “This is something I was thinking about often — the systemic offsets I was dealing with, already, as a Black man.” It’s worth noting that the Youth Concept Gallery’s goals extend beyond its own walls. Mr. E also oversees 436 Gallery, a historical home in Pleasant City — now more commonly known as Northwood — the oldest Black community in West Palm Beach. The home, gifted to Mr. E by West Palm Beach’s Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) — prompted by the popularity of Art in the Park, a monthly event which teamed up with the Trayvon Martin Foundation for Miami Art Week — is currently at risk of being bulldozed by the same agency. The CRA would like to replace it with a commercial development, though Mr. E says, calmly, “I told them they’d have to kill me first.” He’d encouraged local artists and kids, many formerly interned at the detention center, to paint and tag the building; such community engagement subsequently raised the home’s value. Currently, it’s an archive — community elders have contributed ephemera, such as magazines and framed “Whites Only” signs from an earlier Florida, when Negro League Baseball players practiced nearby — where Mr. E continues to host art workshops, yoga classes, and documentary screenings. At the time of this writing, Mr. E, after requesting extensions, has been ordered to vacate the premises by March 31, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mr. E, who I’m interviewing for a second time, has worked at the detention facility, located just north of 436 Gallery, for four years. Fashion and interior design are his first loves; in 2016, he was, he tells me, “knee-deep in art, fashion, and events. I was doing a concept pop-up shop, merchandising for major recording artists and pro athletes, a lot of freelance work. So I brought that here.” He and the kids cleaned and painted the empty cell block; on his days off, Mr. E would source books and thrift store furniture, and his artist friends would emblazon the walls with murals. It took just a few months to institute the educational curriculum; it moves, he explains, “with the kids,” who stay at the facility for 9-12 months and spend time at the gallery as part of their required recreational and therapeutic sessions. “The last group was more athletic; now, I have a more artistic group,” he explains. “If one youth is a great writer, I’ll ask, ‘Who else can write?’ Then I’ve got a group of strong writers.” Mr. E pays attention to how one teen might fold his clothes, how another communicates with friends. Everyone, he insists, has their own particular approach to the world, and each needs to be nurtured. “As an adult, I have to humble myself and become a guest in their world. That’s something I’d tell adults dealing with incarcerated or at-risk youth, or their own kids: humble yourself and listen. They’re the future. They’ll see things your eyes might not catch. They’ve got their own realm.” Last time we spoke, in 2016, the gallery was unfinished, decorated with work by two local muralists and a lot of anime. Today, it’s expansive. The dayroom has soft couches and a projector and stacked bookshelves; work by artists like Fary D Charles (known as Junkyard) and Von Davis (known as the Female Picasso) cover the walls, leaving nothing cold, stark, or untouched. Hitting the warmth of paint, the overhead lights lose their harsh glare. The cells, meanwhile, are miniature galleries of their own, each with a comprehensive visual theme: photography, fine art, Black history. “That’s literally turning something negative into something positive,” Mr. E notes. There are books on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angela Davis, and a speaker queued up to play J Dilla, Madlib, Miles Davis (“I make sure to put them onto jazz,” says Mr. E). For our conversation today, Mr. E has selected four youths to tell me about their experiences here, identifying them not simply by their names but by their budding skills and interests — a future radio program host, a writer, a rapper, a young entrepreneur who will soon act as gallery manager. “There’s a lot of negative energy around here,” one boy, who’s 15, tells me. “Being in this space changes my mood. We settle down, we write music, we paint — it changes our environment. By the time the day is over, I’m relaxed.” Another adds: “If I’m being honest, having an art gallery like this — it’s a place where you feel appreciated, especially coming from some environments where you’re not going to be appreciated for that type of stuff, like art.” A third boy tells me he was shy and timid before spending time in the gallery; now, he feels more confident. The kids have added to the murals themselves, often with collages — contraband like magazines is typically banned from such facilities, but Mr. E renders them acceptable materials for art therapy. “Instead of getting in a fight, you can work with this magazine — but can you be creative with it?” he asks me, rhetorically, as if he were speaking to the kids. “This is your portfolio. This is your gallery.” If he can’t find a loophole for a hobby, Mr. E will at least help cultivate its growth: Tattoos aren’t allowed under any circumstance, but he’s started sourcing literature and films to teach the kids eager to ink each other’s skin about the art’s history — and its viability as a career. In the same spirit, he helped the youths establish an official barbershop. They were already cutting each other’s hair. Why not make it a simulacrum of a future business? As a headquarters for community engagement, the Youth Concept Gallery is ultimately a platform, explains Mr. E, designed as much for the facility’s outside contributors as the kids interned within. Artists invited to make or hang work in the detention center’s gallery might also take part in Art in the Park or contribute an artwork to 436 Gallery; artists involved with all three projects become Youth Concept Gallery resident artists. “Another goal for the Youth Concept Gallery is to create a platform for emerging artists, because we might not have one to soar from,” says Mr. E, referring primarily, he explains, to both the exclusivity of the art world and the forms of gatekeeping that sequester Florida’s youths of color, especially Black youths, from programming to support their creative talents. In turn, resident artists set the example for the kids on the inside; the goals of the detention center’s gallery continue long after the kids leave. “It’s hard to change, in 9 months, how a kid has been living for 16 years, but we try,” says Mr. E. “[Outside of the facility,] a lot is happening with gentrification, and guys like me are rare. Who will a kid go to when he has a problem? He can’t go into a gallery, because people there might look at him funny. That’s why it’s important to create these platforms.” In addition to 436 Gallery, Art in the Park, and the Youth Concept Gallery, Mr. E is continually organizing various events, such as the Youth Concept Gallery Summer Camp Tour — a recent project sponsored by Cleopatra Bernard — in which kids from local neighborhoods were taken on a field trip to the Institute of Contemporary Art-Miami, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Apple, and Microsoft Wynwood. Bernard became involved with the organization after the death of her son, rapper XXXTentacion. The gallery’s educational curriculum will be instituted in various Florida youth detention centers over the next several years. Youth Concept Gallery is a model and a label, Mr. E explains, though one curated for local communities. It’s a cyclical exchange of growth between artists and youths, neighborhoods and their children; in the detention center, the project attempts to briefly interdict the machine of the prison industrial system that’d rather see such youths never make it out. It’s useful that the programming starts on the inside and then stretches out its arms to live, hopefully, forever. “With knowledge and resources,” says Mr. E, “we can build. We can do that behind the walls.” Children of a Lesser, a documentary filmed at the Youth Concept Gallery and detention center by Miami photographer and filmmaker Terence Price II, is currently in process and expected to be released in late 2020. You can donate to the Youth Concept Gallery and 436 Gallery on their official website here. Powered by WPeMatico The post A Miami Gallery and Youth Program Wants to Intercept the School-to-Prison Pipeline appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/3aJa6yg Become a Hyperallergic Member – Join Us! It’s been 10 years since Hyperallergic first appeared on your screens. Can you believe it? What began as an indie blog/publishing experiment in a small Brooklyn office has flowered into an internationally read publication reaching over 140,000 email subscribers and more than a million visitors each month. Over the past 10 years, we’ve had the pleasure of publishing over 1,500 writers and 25,000 articles. Hyperallergic works because we care about our community. We cut through the daily noise in a field that often elevates the networked, pedigreed, and wealthy rather than the critical, scrappy, and fiercely independent. We publish more criticism than any other publication, often giving you a front seat to exhibitions, performances, guerrilla actions, and so much more. Our opinions are honest, unhindered by artspeak, and address all people who love art and are frustrated by the dominance of the 1% and those who cater to them. We remain fearless and undaunted in our reporting. In 2012, we called out institutions for having unpaid internships and have since covered the first of many protests against major museums and their questionable relationships with plutocrats and autocrats. We published Sarah Bond’s influential article on polychromy and we’ve waded into topics few others wanted to, including the 2017 Whitney Biennial (and the even more controversial iteration in 2019). 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Powered by WPeMatico The post Announcing Hyperallergic Membership, a New Way to Support Your Favorite Art Publication appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2wQfHUX Suellen Rocca Imaginative Artist Whose Influence Loomed Large on Chicago Scene Is Dead ARTnews3/30/2020 Suellen Rocca, whose figurative drawings, paintings, and sculptures exude a free-spirited creativity that has influenced many, has died. Her death was announced by the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois on Saturday. She was in her late seventies. A representative for New York and Los Angeles’s Matthew Marks Gallery, which represents her, did not immediately confirm her age or cause of death. Rocca is considered a legend within the Chicago scene. Having risen to fame during the 1960s for her work as part of the Hairy Who group, she is now widely known for her oeuvre that mashes together various cartoonish forms that, at the start of her career, drew on pop-cultural imagery, from the photographs she saw in jewelry catalogues to pictures found in workbooks for kindergarteners. The Hairy Who artists, who are also now known as the Chicago Imagists, banded together in 1966, and originally included Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Rocca. Shortly after its formation, Karl Wirsum joined the group, whose members all attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working in opposition to the haughty, theory-heavy Minimalist and Conceptual art coming out of New York at the time, the artists created figurative paintings and drawings that relied on a mélange of source material, from Oceanic art to comic books. At a 2015 talk held at Matthew Marks’s New York gallery, Falconer said that the Hairy Who artists’ work captured “the countercultural energy of the time.” As for Rocca herself, she told Garage magazine in 2018 that, at the time, “while New York was cool, Chicago was hot.” The liberated, somewhat jokey energy of the Hairy Who group infiltrated Rocca’s work as well. Her ’60s art is full of bizarre, idiosyncratic arrangements of forms that contain no narratives or overt symbolism. Silhouettes of nude women’s bodies intermingle with blobby hands; see-through handbags contain text that sounds like advertising slogans. Her works from this era—which are looser in style than the precise semi-abstractions of her colleagues, though no less intriguing—are nearly impossible to mine for meaning, but they are all the more fascinating because of it. The Hairy Who disbanded in 1969, just three years after its formation, but the group’s influence has been immense. A recent spate of young and mid-career figurative painters has drawn heavily on Chicago Imagist styles, and it is not difficult to imagine that artists such as Dana Schutz and Sue Williams may at some point have looked to Rocca’s work for inspiration. In spite of the Hairy Who’s stardom in the Chicago scene, the movement’s influence has historically largely been downplayed at some of America’s biggest institutions outside the Windy City. This has begun to change in recent years, thanks in part to the work of curator Dan Nadel, whose 2015 exhibition “What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to Present” ignited widespread interest in the group. (The exhibition was staged at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence and Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.) One year after that show appeared at Matthew Marks, Rocca had her first New York solo show at the gallery. A survey of her art is slated to open at the Secession museum in Vienna later this year. Suellen Krupp was born in 1943 in Chicago. She was raised by a middle-class Jewish family, and when she was 16 years old, she began attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was taught by Ray Yoshida, a figurative painter who encouraged his students to work according to their gut feelings. “Ray was interested in [students] finding their voice: ‘What is it you want to say? Forget about any of the other stuff,’” Rocca recalled in a 2015 oral history. In 1962, she married Dennis Rocca, whom she divorced in 1975. During the late ’60s, Rocca alternated between raising her two young children and making art, working on both activities simultaneously in her home. “My son would take a nap and I’d rush to my knotty pine studio and work on a painting,” she told Nadel in a 2015 interview. “Having a toddler and a baby, and all these exciting shows, it was wonderful. It was a happy time.” In the 1970s, while based in northern California, she stopped working entirely, and didn’t return to her art until 1981, when she moved back to Chicago. When she came back to making her paintings and drawings, her style had shifted dramatically—she was now working based on internal feelings rather than external ones, in ways that recall Surrealist art’s emphasis on automatism. Gone were the influences from mass media. In their place appeared more expressionistic forms, a few of which were even borrowed from Rocca’s dreams. Rocca’s playfulness and emotional generosity is immediately apparent in her post-’80s works. For one 2012 piece called Teta, Rocca envisioned an animal-like figure in various guises—ensconced in what appears to be a clear flame, abstracted into the form of an X, laid on top of a checkerboard floor. The work is named after her grandson’s teddy bear, and it refers to the game of hide and seek that the two would play with the stuffed animal. In the later stages of her career, Rocca continued to be a force in the art scene of the Chicago metro area, working as an adjunct faculty member in the art department of Elmhurst College, just 18 miles outside the Windy City, and as the curator and director of exhibitions at the school’s art gallery, which houses a notable collection of Chicago Imagist pieces. She encouraged a sense of curiosity among her students. In her Garage interview, she said, “What I tell my older students now is you need to look, because after we think we’ve seen things we don’t look at them anymore.” Powered by WPeMatico The post Suellen Rocca, Imaginative Artist Whose Influence Loomed Large on Chicago Scene, Is Dead – ARTnews appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2xxRoLt To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. Coronavirus Fallout Here’s a guide to layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts at major U.S. museums. The Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles are among the institutions that have already announced layoffs. [ARTnews] “Arts funders, working together, can be strategic in defining and deploying the kinds of capital that will provide equitable relief and opportunity to the sector as a whole,” researcher Alan Brown argues in a piece about how the art industry might be saved in the wake of the pandemic. [Arts Professional] Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, is advocating for a major national program to support British art institutions during the outbreak. [The Guardian] Lives Artist Suellen Rocca, a prominent figure in the Chicago scene who created freewheeling figurative paintings, drawings, and sculptures, has died. [ARTnews] Online Initiatives David Zwirner has offered 12 New York galleries—including 47 Canal, Bridget Donahue, and Essex Street—an opportunity to exhibit work in its online viewing room as part of an initiative called “Platform: New York.” The Times reports that the gallery plans to expand the program for London-based enterprises. [The New York Times] Journalist Enid Tsui weighs the costs and benefits of viewing art on a screen in the time of the coronavirus, writing that two recent gallery shows in Hong Kong “were good examples of how certain artworks can’t be properly experienced online.” [South China Morning Post] The Market Sotheby’s online sale of 25 prints by Banksy totaled $1.38 million, exceeding its high estimate. The top lot was a version of the street artist’s Girl With Balloon, which sold for $464,000. [Bloomberg] Restitution & Repatriation After a lengthy dispute, the Kunstmuseum in Basel will pay an undisclosed amount to the heirs of Curt Glaser, a museum director and critic who sold his art collection when he fled persecution by the Nazis in Germany. The institution has 200 prints and drawings from Glaser’s collection in its holdings. [The New York Times] Steve Green, president of the company Hobby Lobby and chairman of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., said that he will return 11,500 objects and fragments to the Iraqi and Egyptian governments. [The Wall Street Journal] Museums & Galleries Despite the pandemic, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is moving ahead with its $750 million building project, with the demolition phase scheduled to begin in April. Meanwhile, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art have halted construction. [Los Angeles Times] Goodman Gallery, which maintains spaces in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and London, will sell limited-edition blankets designed by Nolan Oswald Dennis, Samson Kambalu, and other artists and direct proceeds to a health clinic in Johannesburg. [The Art Newspaper] Miscellaneous In an age of social distancing, the Guardian ponders what we can learn from Edward Hopper’s lonely, disconcerting scenes of American life. [The Guardian] Finally, critic Christopher Knight writes of how the Black Death altered art history and why we should once again expect changes in the arts “in ways we can only begin to guess.” [Los Angeles Times] Powered by WPeMatico The post David Zwirner Expands Online Programming, Sotheby’s Banksy Sale Exceeds High Estimate, and More: Morning Links from March 30, 2020 – ARTnews appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2UKYXGK To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. News Collector and investor Jeffrey Gundlach said he has received “panic offers” for works by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Prince, and other artists at discount prices amid the coronavirus crisis. [Bloomberg] The presentation of a sculpture by Heather Phillipson, which had been set to go on view on the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square on March 26, has been postponed. [The Art Newspaper] Restitution Per a request from the Arts Council England, the Institute of Art and Law will create new guidelines related to restitution for U.K. museums. The report is set to be published in the fall. [The Art Newspaper] Social Distancing Consult these reading and viewing recommendations from five curators—including the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Asma Naeem and LACMA’s Rita González—as you continue to spend time at home. [ARTnews] Here’s a list of 10 art-related podcasts that may come in handy in the weeks to come. [The New York Times] And here are exhibitions of work by Carmen Argote, Nicholas Galanin, Purvis Young, and others that you can experience online. [Hyperallergic] Artists Ai Weiwei answered questions about Brexit, the refugee crisis, his art practice, and more posed by Maria Balshaw, director of the Tate galleries, artists Julian Schnabel and Wolfgang Tillmans, and other art world figures. [The Guardian] Collections The shoe designer Nicholas Kirkwood takes us inside his vast collection of glass vases by Ettore Sottsass. [The New York Times] Lives Photographer Boris Yaro, who captured iconic images for the Los Angeles Times, has died at age 81. [The New York Times] “Over the years, I have met several people, P-Orridge among them…who have given me things to think about for the rest of my life,” Alec Wilkinson writes of the musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who died earlier this month at age 70. [The New Yorker] Here are ten essential artworks by P-Orridge. [ARTnews] Powered by WPeMatico The post Coronavirus’s Toll on the Art Market, Restitution and U.K. Museums, and More: Morning Links from March 23, 2020 – ARTnews appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2UNwAYs Meet the Art Community of the US Southwest: Amy Jorgensen Wants to Democratize Art Criticism3/30/2020 This is the latest installment of the interview series Meet the Art Community of the US Southwest. Check out our past interviews here. Amy Jorgensen is cofounder of Granary Arts and is currently their Executive Director and Chief Curator. With the vision of supporting long-term engagement between artists and communities, she has curated over 50 exhibitions of artists working in contemporary art and produced companion exhibition catalogues. In addition to developing a spectrum of cultural and educational programming, she launched the Granary Arts Fellows program, Film Feast, and the initiative Critical Ground which explores the impact of art criticism hierarchies and the democratization of art critique. Dedicated to the arts as a maker, facilitator, and educator, Jorgensen was recently honored as one of Utah’s Most Influential Artists. In 2019 she spearheaded the publishing of the portfolio and exhibition of DE|MARCATION, the first comprehensive look at the state of contemporary photography in Utah. Jorgensen is also an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves creating conceptual, immersive works that blend photography, performance, and video. In the realization of her work, she mines historical and contemporary perspectives to explore alternate and intersecting narratives of the body, desire, violence, and power. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Art at Snow College where she is head of Photography and Media, a member of the Board of Directors for the Utah Arts Council, and a member of the Acquisition Committee for the State of Utah Allice Merrill Horne Art Collection. Born in Milan, Italy, she received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, and an MFA from the University of California San Diego. Jorgensen lives and works remotely in the high plains desert of Utah, and wholeheartedly embraces the practice of building the community you want to be a part of. *** How long have you been in Ephraim/Utah? I moved to Ephraim, Utah 15 years ago after an equal amount of time living in major metropolitan areas. It was an intentional move designed to cultivate a life with greater access to the wide open spaces of the West, and be in closer proximity to family. I finished high school in Utah, and placed some deep roots on this turf, the landscape holds formidable ground in my imagination. What is the first strong memory you have of art? My parents’ home was filled with art — every wall, table, surface, and stairwell covered. They had a deep appreciation for the relationships and attachments they made with artists and places, in many ways they were collectors of both memory and objects. My childhood friends jokingly referred to my house as the “museum.” So, I suppose I’ve been living and working in museums and galleries for a lifetime. They had a large-scale painting that hung over the dining table, my recollection is that it came from Germany or Poland. It was a heavy and dark scene of a nighttime forest in the depths of winter, and deeply marked with visible brush strokes, more like peaks and troughs. In the midst of this low-key sea of murkiness, there was one blob of creamy white paint. It was my favorite part of the painting, a kind of visual lifeboat in this emotionally hopeless image. This one, creamy, solitary mark on the surface of that canvas is my earliest and strongest memory of art. In retrospect, it’s such a powerful and visceral indicator of the connections we build to art, and the experiences of the artists who create it. What are you questioning through your practice right now? At the time of this interview, the world has been utterly upended by the coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, and most of the country is under some form of isolation or lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus. It’s difficult to think of anything else; this is a defining moment. I am questioning how this will change us. What are the long-term impacts going to be for artists and creative communities? And how will the arts speak to this moment from the perspective of the future? As Granary Arts transitions from a physical to a virtual space as part of this global response, we are collaborating with the PARC Collective as our next Granary Arts Fellow. They will be exploring the impact of incubation in communities through online content sharing. What challenges do you face as an artist in Ephraim/Utah? I’ll respond from two perspectives, first, as a curator. In the state of Utah, there are only a handful of museum-based curators dedicated to contemporary art, and they are all located in urban areas. I’m the curator at a non-profit contemporary art space located in rural central Utah in a county with a population of roughly 30,000. There are many challenges embedded in the above statistics — isolation, politics, resources, networks, poverty — all of which are amplified tenfold as a rurally-based curator. Yet, Granary Arts and our mission of supporting contemporary practice is thriving. Built into heart of our structure is the interchange between local and global — what has meaning and value to one is also relevant to the other. Responding as an artist, isolation is the most significant hurdle. In a rural area, there is no immediate access to the vast cultural network and resources found in urban centers, so you have to work much harder to build those systems yourself. I recall when I first moved to Ephraim, the people taking my ticket at the local movie theatre were also the police chief and a city council member. It was fantastic, yet it was the moment I realized everyone in small towns wears multiple hats. The vision for cofounding Granary Arts with fellow artist and long-time friend Kelly Brooks emerged from a similar realization. We recognized that we wanted to live in a place with access to great contemporary art, and that meant engaging in the community, and making it happen. What is the most impactful or memorable art experience you’ve had in the last year? A project many years in the works, I was able to see the completion of DE|MARCATION: A Survey of Contemporary Photography In Utah, a limited edition portfolio co-curated by myself and Edward Bateman, and published by Red Butte Press. Originally inspired by a visit to the archives of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, I began to think about how the portfolio format, popular in the 1970s, could be used in contemporary practice. There were multiple goals: build the photographic community, provide a platform for Utah voices, support the working careers of artists, and place the work of Utah photographers, as a group, on the national radar. The project took three years, dozens of collaborators, and thousands of hours to create. The collection surveys the contemporary photographic landscape of creative practice by artists in the state of Utah as they navigate new territory in the global dialogue of imagemaking. The works delineate new boundaries and challenge the photographic traditions of the West as a hallowed land — the landscape as a rugged vista to be conquered and tamed under the banner of Manifest Destiny and the settling of Zion. Intended to serve as a record of a historical moment, the collection reflects the dynamics of shifting cultural narratives and our relationship to place in a richly interconnected world. When you are working a project do you have a specific audience in mind? In curating programming at Granary Arts, I map out an 18-24 month trajectory. Within that timeframe I create a narrative arc for exploring a cross-section of ideas, voices, and perspectives that will resonate with our audience. It’s a wholistic approach recognizing the spectrum of the art ecosystem, and the interesting challenge of building real connections with those who may have limited experience with contemporary art. What questions do you feel aren’t being asked of or by creative people in your community? How do we communicate the value of creative labor to audiences, and ultimately increase monetary compensation for creative work? Artists, writers, curators, and other creative collaborators contribute significant time and energy to cultural programming. Yet, most art labor is unrecognized, undervalued, and underpaid. As a small non-profit we feel this burden and would like to contribute to a change in the system. We’ve been collecting data to quantify the amount of work involved in our programming for many years, and recently have launched an internal initiative to map how we can share this data most effectively with the public, and then share the template with other arts organizations. Stay tuned… How do you engage with and consume culture? My remote location certainly dictates much of this. I stay engaged via the more traditional forms of publications, journals, and conferences. However, online formats are critical at this juncture, particularly as we are all now working from home, and in the era of coronavirus. Online content is my initial means of accessing exhibitions, artists, critical content, etc. I really love being able to follow artists’ work in progress on Instagram and Facebook. And of course, doing studio visits, visiting museums, galleries… the best part of my job is supporting and connecting creatives. There are so many ways in which we can engage with one another, and I approach it as participating in culture rather than consuming — active rather than passive. It’s a larger question of how do we support our community, and keep this art ecosystem alive, fed, and thriving. What are you currently working on? We recently launched Critical Ground, an initiative exploring how the dialogue of art critique might shift towards communities and artists working outside the frameworks of NYC and LA. It explores the impact of art criticism and the democratization of art critique through the sharing of ideas and experiences with the intention of mapping an alternate way forward that is more inclusive of the spectrum of work created across the country. In practice, it’s a series of conversations and brainstorms between visiting critics and artists, curators, writers, and other stakeholders from the region. The conversations are roving: they are studio visits, site visits, and formal and informal discussions. It is a space where strategic thinking meets creative action with the intention to shift the current framework of art critique hierarchy to highlight work outside metro-centered locales. An experimental venture, the intention is to create a platform and space for this conversation in Utah, and to serve as a model for other places in the country with like-minded vision. Who in your community of artists, curators, archivists, organizers, directors, etc. is inspiring you right now? I’m a huge fan of the ACME initiative at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. It’s a hybrid working model using Art, Community, Museum, and Education to explore themes and issues under the umbrella of activism and engagement. Where are the centers for creative community in your region? I live in a region called Sanpete Valley, defined by classic basin and range geography. Artists have been moving to this area for decades, as it’s a haven and home to several artist-run collectives and nonprofits. Casino Star Foundation, Spring City Arts, Hub City Gallery, Summer Snow, and The Fairview Museum all host exhibitions, open studios, festivals, workshops, lectures, and performances. Powered by WPeMatico The post Meet the Art Community of the US Southwest: Amy Jorgensen Wants to Democratize Art Criticism appeared first on OriginalArt. via OriginalArt https://ift.tt/2UKnCv6 |
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