Three decades into the long culture wars, how are artists, scholars, and cultural organizations navigating shifting political, community, and financial tides? Art Journal Open presents a collection of responses to this pressing question from twenty-three artists, curators, scholars, writers, and cultural workers, with an introduction from Sarah Kanouse
In a new essay, Winston Kyan considers the extensive body of work of artist Zhang Huan within the histories of Chinese Buddhism, the American art market, durational performance work, and “existence as suffering”
Art Journal Open presents Terra Forma, an immersive, interactive digital project and scholarly text by Andrew Yang. Following a 2017 trip to the Sanriku coast of Japan, Yang traces the area’s recovery and rebuilding efforts after the devastation of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Yang explores the terraforming of the coast, “a kind of garden-making on a planetary scale,” pressuring the categories of “natural” and “man-made” in our landscapes
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”
Walker Downey explores sound—and the various societal, artistic, and militaristic attempts to eliminate it—through the work of Doug Wheeler, in particular his 2017 exhibition PSAD Synthetic Desert III at the Guggenheim Museum
Dushko Petrovich leads a series of conversations about the tensions and processes of art publication, speaking to the parties involved with, and implicated by, Steven Nelson’s two-part Hyperallergic essay of June 2018
Dominic Johnson reviews Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Karen Gonzalez Rice
As the latest addition to the Afrotropes series, Krista Thompson reflects on the extensive photographic and cultural legacy of Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin and the circulation of images in Jamaica and beyond
Risham Majeed reflects on the current exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination at The Met Cloisters, looking at how the disjunctions of architecture, costumery, and religious iconography “join to create cohesive desires, unmoored from historical boundedness”
In a new essay, Melissa Warak reviews Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, an exhibition of the paintings of George W. Bush
Sarah Kanouse, Jeremy Liu, Catherine Morris, and Mimi Thi Nguyen seek 500-word responses from communities of art-making, scholarship, and exhibition practice regarding public funding for the arts in an environment of heightened scarcity and competitiveness
Scholar Suzaan Boettger traces the generative interplay between science-fiction author Brian Aldiss’s novel Earthworks and the Land art practice of Robert Smithson
