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
By Ryan Kuo
“As platforms from Submittable to Snapchat streamline personal publishing into drag-and-drop gestures,” writes Ryan Kuo, “the work being submitted becomes not the work, but a signpost redirecting us to a semblance of the work, subject to Terms and Conditions.” “In Submission” is the first of a three-part series by writer and artist Ryan Kuo for Art Journal Open
By Michael Corris
A tribute to Dore Ashton, “one of the most energetic, widely published, and politicized American writers on art, and one of the chief proponents of the artists of the New York School (she decried the label Abstract Expressionism).” Michael Corris shares his remembrances of Dore Ashton as well as the audio and transcribed text from their 2011 conversation about Ashton’s experiences with the New York art world in the 19650s and 1960s. Alfredo Jaar’s film, Dore Ashton, you know (2015), and photographs by Madeline Djerejian and Polly Bradford-Corris are also presented here
An update from Temporary Collectives, a dynamic intercollegiate graduate project involving professors and students from six universities in North Texas
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
By Mary L. Coyne
An introduction to Playing by the Rules, a new conversation series by curator and writer Mary L. Coyne
An update from Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA) on the most recent issue of VoCA Journal
By Alexandra Nitschke
Alexandra Nitschke shares what she’s reading with Art Journal Open
By Anna Craycroft
In “To Record, to Interpret, to Comment,” Brookyn–based artist Anna Craycroft asks readers to reconsider how we come to know what we think we know about the history of modernist photography and the photographer Berenice Abbott, which draws from Craycroft’s extensive research into Abbott’s writings, photographs, letters, inventions, and other archival materials
By Gloria Sutton
Art Journal Open presents “To Record, to Interpret, to Comment” by Anna Craycroft
By Nick Herman
In Edges of Action (2016), Los Angeles–based artist Nick Herman finds a distinctive method of framing his practice, blending the studied delivery of a public artist’s talk with the conversational pace of an intimate studio visit. This is the first installment of a unique three-part artist’s project Herman has created for Art Journal Open.
