Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson sketch the concept of the afrotrope, a term they have developed over the past decade to describe “those recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity”
Category: From Art Journal
Naturalcultural Wonders to Anthropocene Disasters: A Bibliography for Possibility Aesthetics
Andrew Yang shares a “transdisciplinary cluster” of works that engage the concept of the Anthropocene. When it comes to climate change, Yang asks, “Which we is responsible, or most at risk? What sorts of people, organisms, and entities does we invite or exclude?”
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
How to Organize Delirium?
By Camila Maroja
Camila Maroja reviews the exhibition and catalogue, Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium
2017: Indigenous Futures
By Kate Morris and Bill Anthes
On November 15, 2016, a “National Day of Action,” demonstrators in cities from Los Angeles to New York took to the streets in support of the efforts of the Standing Rock Sioux to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline (DAPL). According to tribal leaders, the presence of the pipeline constitutes a dire threat to the tribe’s water supply, and will desecrate scores of sacred, historical, and cultural sites along its intended 1,172-mile route
The Prehistory of Exhibition History
By grupa o.k. (Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska)
Art history has long included studies of exhibitions as episodes or turning points within more expansive narratives. Such moments have opened art histories based in the studio, or among the members of a small, bohemian circle, to a larger social field that includes politics, audience, and market, before returning to the private or small-group interactions that have equally served to drive art’s internal means
Introduction: The Politics of Legacy
By Rachel Middleman and Anne Monahan
In 1974 news that David Smith’s executors had stripped paint from some of his sculptures catalyzed a long-running public conversation about executors’ responsibilities to artists, artworks, and art history. Forty years later, news that the same estate’s administrators tried to stifle the exhibition and sale of Lauren Clay’s diminutive, painted-paper objects inspired by that earlier incident has yet to prompt a similar critical response
Art Embedded into Protest: Staging the Ukrainian Maidan
By Nazar Kozak
Around 9:00am on January 24, 2014, Maxym Vehera, an amateur artist, comes to Hrushevskyi Street in Kyiv, mounts his portable easel some one hundred yards from the riot police line, and spends five hours painting the scene of a street fight in progress. Black smoke from the burning barricade veils the sky, tear gas irritates the frosty air, a stun grenade explosion shuts all senses down. The canvas falls to the ground, into the mixture of snow and ashes. Vehera picks it up, wipes off the dirt, and continues to paint amid chaos
Candida Höfer’s Türken in Deutschland as “Counter-publicity”
By Amy A. DaPonte
Millions of Turkish immigrants settled in Germany after World War II to answer the call of politicians who needed to refresh the labor force after the war. Images of Turks at work or leisure in the parks, homes, markets, shops, and bars of 1970s West German cities populate Candida Höfer’s large, multiformat series entitled Türken in Deutschland (Turks in Germany, 1972–79).
Lee Miller, Challenging Convention
By Lauren Richman
Lauren Richman reviews Hilary Roberts, ed., Lee Miller: A Woman’s War, and the exhibition Lee Miller: A Woman’s War, and Walter Moser and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, eds., Lee Miller, and the exhibition Lee Miller, aka Lee Miller—Photographs and The Indestructible Lee Miller
Solitary/Solidary: Mario Merz’s Autonomous Artist
By Elizabeth Mangini
In 1968, while demonstrating students occupied university buildings less than a mile away, the Italian artist Mario Merz hung a handful of neon lights bent into the numerals 1, 1, 2, 3, and 5 above the kitchen stove in his home on Via Santa Giulia in Turin. It wasn’t yet an artwork, just something to think about in the place where he and his wife, fellow artist Marisa Merz, gathered to talk with each other and with friends.
Art-Science: An Annotated Bibliography
By Roger F. Malina
We are witnessing a resurgence of creative and scholarly work that seeks to bridge science and engineering with the arts, design, and the humanities. These practices connect both the arts and sciences, hence the term art-science, and the arts and the engineering sciences and technology, hence the term “art and technology.”