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
By Camila Maroja
Camila Maroja reviews the exhibition and catalogue, Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium
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
By Ryan Kuo
In “Building a Table,” artist and writer Ryan Kuo discusses his use of HTML to construct the data tables in his artist’s project, Tables of Content, and the profound implications that seemingly benign systems of ordering have on society. With an introduction by Art Journal Open’s former web editor, Gloria Sutton
By Ryan Kuo
Art Journal Open presents an interactive artist’s project by Ryan Kuo
By Charissa Terranova
Charissa Terranova discusses the exhibition and catalogue, Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979, which was on view at the Tate Britain from April 12–August 29, 2016
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
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
By Ace Lehner
Ace Lehner shares their reading list with Art Journal Open
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
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
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
