Art historians Risham Majeed and Blake Bradford offer a proxy visit to three still-new sites dedicated to African American history
Category: Conversations
In Tehran: A Conversation with Iranian Gallerists
This roundtable conversation among Iranian gallerists, available in English and in Persian, explores the politics and particularities of gallery ownership in Tehran.
Exhibition Situations: Allyson Purpura in Conversation with Elizabeth Rodini
Elizabeth Rodini discusses World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts across the Indian Ocean with one of the exhibition’s curators, Allyson Purpura. The conversation focuses on object kinship and adjacency, a strategy that enables a resistance to “the stasis and fixity of exhibitions.”
Caitlin Masley-Charlet in Conversation with Elisabeth Smolarz
Caitlin Masley-Charlet sits down with artist Elisabeth Smolarz to discuss Smolarz’s recent residencies and projects, and the importance of failure, artistic community, and cross-pollination between practitioners.
Exchange: Geeta Kapur, Saloni Mathur, and Rachel Weiss
Geeta Kapur puts forth a thirteen-part text, “Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South,” with critical responses by Saloni Mathur and Rachel Weiss.
Exhibition Situations: Risham Majeed in Conversation with Elizabeth Rodini
By Risham Majeed and Elizabeth Rodini
Risham Majeed and Elizabeth Rodini discuss Majeed’s exhibition Made to Move: African Nomadic Design, the museological and curatorial challenges posed by the exhibition’s material, and the possibility of a decolonized museum space.
Scripting A Smeary Spot
By A.K. Burns and Melissa Ragain
In this annotated commentary, artist A.K. Burns and art historian and critic Melissa Ragain explore the script, performances, and citations in Burn’s video installation A Smeary Spot (2015), which is the first episode in her five-part Negative Space film cycle.
Community and Creativity at Residencies Near and Far: Chad Stayrook in Conversation with Caitlin Masley-Charlet
By Caitlin Masley-Charlet
Caitlin Masley-Charlet speaks with artist Chad Stayrook about his experiences at artist residencies around the world, the effects that residencies have had his artistic practice, and the development of Present Company, the artist-run space in Brooklyn that he cofounded.
In Conversation with Marie Watt: A New Coyote Tale
By Marie Watt
Marie Watt first encountered Joseph Beuys’s work as a college student studying abroad. While working on an MFA at Yale, she wrote a reflection on the artist’s I Like America and America Likes Me from the perspective of Coyote, for a course taught by the art historian Romy Golan.
Damon Davis’s Negrophilia: Encounters with Black Death
By Olubukola A. Gbadegesin
Olubukola A. Gbadegesin speaks with multidisciplinary artist Damon Davis about his mixed-media collage series, Negrophilia, and the importance of self-representation. “We’ve got to represent ourselves,” Davis says, “Because if we let others tell the story, important parts are going to be erased.
Restructuring Place in Hawaiʻi: Jaimey Hamilton Faris and Margo Machida in Conversation with Sean Connelly and Lynne Yamamoto
By Jaimey Hamilton Faris and Margo Machida
Jaimey Hamilton Faris and Margo Machida speak with Hawaiʻi-born artists Lynne Yamamoto and Sean Connelly to discuss their sculptural works for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial, Middle of Now|Here (March 8–May 8, 2017). Connelly’s Thatch Assembly with Rocks (2060s) (2017) and Yamamoto’s Borrowed Time (2017) recognize the significance of locality and place in illuminating the enduring impact of entwined histories and shifting alignments among the native, local, and global.
Playing by the Rules: Ericka Beckman in Conversation with Mary L. Coyne
By Mary L. Coyne
For the first conversation in Mary L. Coyne’s Playing by the Rules series, Coyne speaks with filmmaker Ericka Beckman about the framework of games and performance in Beckman’s films You The Better and Cinderella.