Gail Hastings executes a close formal reading of Donald Judd’s sculpture Untitled (DSS 33), as well as the “unity that Judd’s space champions in us”
Crowdsourcing Knowledge: Cowriting, Coteaching, and Colearning
Ana María León inaugurates Art Journal Open‘s new Pedagogies series, presenting her findings in the communal production and dissemination of knowledge through reading groups and digitally crowdsourced syllabi and reading lists
Beyond Survival: Public Support of the Arts and Humanities
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
The Buddhist Resistance of Zhang Huan’s Pagoda
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”
Terra Forma: disaster, recovery, and aesthetics of a tsunami coast
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
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”
In the Free Field: Doug Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III and Anechoic Histories
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
Intimacy, Distance, and Disavowal in Art Publishing: Conversations with Dushko Petrovich
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
Chickens, Saints, and Corpses: Endurance Art in the United States
Dominic Johnson reviews Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Karen Gonzalez Rice
“I WAS HERE BUT I DISAPEAR”: Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin and Photographic Disappearance in Jamaica
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
Inhabited Divinity
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”
Warriors and Volunteers: A Review of George W. Bush, Portraits of Courage
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