Along with Carolina Miranda, Hrag Vartanian, Robert Bettmann, and others, I'll be talking about art journalism, intercultural interpretation, and supporting diverse voices in the arts as one of several keynote speakers at the five-day Crossing Borders conference. Keynotes take place the afternoon of Friday, September 25. Join the conference Facebook group or visit DayEight’s website for details and registration info.
Update: here’s video of the event; my talk begins at the 53:00 mark.
Sky Hopinka’s Visions of an Island, 2016. Photo courtesy Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection
Following the April 2018 launch of "The Centers of Somewhere," filmmaker Sky Hopinka's contribution to the Walker Art Center's Artist Op-Eds series, the museum has scheduled a special evening with the artist. Join me and assistant curator/archivist Ruth Hodgins on September 13, 2018 for a screening of Hopinka's short films, followed by a discussion with the artist. Pick up a free copy of the op-ed pamphlet, and join us all for a post-event reception at Minneapolis' Bockley Gallery.
Hopinka's op-ed is also reprinted in a beautiful new editioned book, Around the Edge of Encircling Lake, published by Milwaukee's Green Gallery Press. It includes several of Hopinka's essays, poetry, images from his experimental films, and links to a few of his moving image works.
I'll be speaking at the College Art Association (CAA) conference in Los Angeles on February 23 as part of a panel on publishing and socially engaged art history.
Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man, 2009
Roundtable: Digital Publishing, Dissent, and Socially Engaged Art History
Friday, February 23, 2018, 4:00–5:30 PM
501C, Los Angeles Convention Center
Description:
Two currents of contemporary culture seem to be emerging simultaneously: digital publishing and an increasing understanding that the scholarly work of art history can and ought to be socially engaged. Digital publishing has been a democratizing force in the exchange of information and ideas, radically transforming authorship and readership in the twenty-first century. As information is circulated and seen by more and ever-changing populations, the call for socially engaged art and art history has never been greater. Scholars and artists have seized this opportunity in myriad ways, often subverting the traditional, hierarchical structures that have driven academe and the art market for the past two centuries. This panel brings together scholars, artists, and editors who actively pursue digital publishing as a means of scholarly, artistic, or pedagogical dissent: Gelare Khoshgozaran, an independent artist who disseminates socially critical performance and video art via digital means; Paul Schmelzer of the Walker Art Center, an institution that uses their online presence to engage new audiences and re-envision the museum-going experience; pedagogical innovators Virginia B. Spivey and Michelle Millar Fisher of Art History Pedagogy and Practice and Art History Teaching Resources, who have made didactic materials and criticism available online; and Allison McCann and Nicole F. Scalissi, former editors-in-chief of Contemporaneity, a digital journal with a commitment to dissent and a critical reassessment of the field, using a digital platform to expand the critical voice of scholars and artists.
My presentation:
Art History in Real Time
History will look back on this time—the era of Trump, of “alternative facts” and “fake news”; Muslim bans and transgender bathroom bills; “antifa,” and “alt-right,” populism on the left and the right, and contested borders of all kinds. And so will art history. This kind of cultural chaos is prompting many institutions and artists to reconsider their work and their relationships with their publics. In this talk, I aim to look at how institutions are using digital publishing to chronicle artistic response to these issues. The Walker’s Artist Op-Eds series, in which artists like Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Dread Scott, and Postcommodity respond through writing to urgent issues in the news (including the EU refugee crisis, the police killing of Michael Brown, and the year 2043, when whites are projected to become a minority in the US), is but one example of a museum creating a platform for artists to weigh in on not just aesthetic issues but the interface of their work and personal lives with issues in the headlines, around the world, and in their communities. How are other cultural institutions using digital technology to facilitate, document, and amplify artistic responses to seismic shifts in western culture? How can such projects shape or inform dialogue today, and how will they be instructive to artists, art historians, and the public in decades to come?
Postcommodity, Repellent Fence, 2015
Before Postcommodity showed at documenta 14 and the 2017 Venice Biennale and before they won the $75K Ford Foundation Art of Change fellowship, I invited the indigenous art collective to pen an Artist Op-Ed, the eleventh in the Walker's ongoing series. Their powerful and poetic contribution: a mix of poetry, linguistic education, and history meditating on 2043, the year the US Census predicts whites will become a minority in the United States. Following the essay's online release, we celebrated the publication of their op-ed pamphlet at a well-received March 10 artist talk, which I moderated.
Following the artist talk, Anishinaabe novelist Louise Erdrich, in the audience that night, agreed to write for Walker Reader about Postcommodity's documenta installation, which used the LRAD acoustic weaponry used on protesters at Standing Rock for more healing ends. In October 2017, the collective iterated upon their Walker op-ed in the pages of Art in America.
The project marks a Walker Art Center first: it's the first time a publishing project has led to acquisition and exhibition of an artist's work—a balloon from the collective's Repellent Fence (2015) project is on view in the 2017–2018 exhibition, I am you, you are too.
Shortly after Barack Obama’s historic 2009 election to the US presidency, I was invited by Walker Art Center design director Andrew Blauvelt to moderate a discussion with Sol Sender and Scott Thomas, the minds behind Obama’s game-changing campaign graphics at an event in the Walker Cinema. But first, I was asked to offer an introduction on the history of political graphic design: the context for how radically their work for Obama changed the way political campaigns communicate. My intro grounded the discussion in the local context, from more expected designs for the campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale to more unorthodox approaches taken by the campaigns of Jesse Ventura and the late, great, green-bus-driving Paul Wellstone. It also contrasted Obama’s graphics with those of opponent John McCain, whose typeface choice—the same one used on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial—offered a more resolute and militaristic vibe than Obama’s optimistic and acccessible one. Marking my first public return to the Walker after leaving in 2007 to become editor of the Minnesota Independent, the evening still stands as a fond memory of how art and politics can co-exist in compelling and unexpected ways.
What can museums learn from news and media organizations in order to change and adapt their practices to work effectively in an increasingly online and social media context? The excellent Museopunks podcast welcomed me and Sree Sreenivasan, the Metropolitan Museum’s Chief Content Officer, to discuss digital publishing for innovative museums. Thanks to Jeffrey Inscho and Suse Cairns for the invitation.
