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.
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.”
By Penelope Vlassopoulou
Penelope Vlassopoulou began her Metamorphosis series in her home city of Athens. The series evolved in multidisciplinary dialogue with diverse urban environments including Berlin, Belgrade, and Chicago. In March 2015, Metamorphosis returned to its point of origin with no water tracing a link between Greece’s historical past and the country’s current predicament.
By Pedro de Llano
Curator and art historian Pedro de Llano speaks with artist Joel Tauber about Tauber’s The Sharing Project (2012–16), an installation and film project that looks at the socialist Jewish community of Happyville (1905–1908) in South Carolina as a way to consider complex questions about social, political, and economic issues in today’s world.
By Vanessa Kauffman
Artist Marco Breuer and Vanessa Kauffman, communications and outreach manager of Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California), discuss Breuer’s experiences as an artist-in-residence at Headlands and other residencies, and the way that the flexibility and differences in the studio set-up at each residency creates opportunities for new discoveries.
By Amy Cancelmo
Amy Cancelmo, art programs director at Root Division (San Francisco, California), speaks with artist Kija Lucas about her experiences as an artist-in-residence at Root Division and other residencies, and her cross-country travels to work on her projects In Search of Home and Objects to Remember You By: An Index of Sentiment .
By Charissa Terranova
Charissa Terranova reviews Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation, which was on view at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine, from February 6–May 7, 2016.
By Vanessa Kauffman
Vanessa Kauffman, communications and outreach manager for Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, California), speaks with artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo about her experiences as an artist-in-residence at Headlands and other residencies, and the importance that walking holds within her artistic practice.
By Gloria Sutton
Art Journal Open is pleased to introduce a new cluster of conversations focused on artist residencies.
By Mika Yoshitake
Curator Mika Yoshitake and artist Shana Lutker discuss Surrealist fightfights, making sense of the past through the lens of the contemporary, and the research process for Lutker’s exhibition Shana Lutker: Le “NEW” Monocle, Chapters 1–3 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (October 27, 2015–February 16, 2016), which was curated by Yoshitake.
By Amanda Jane Graham
In 1974 the choreographer Trisha Brown moved to 541 Broadway in SoHo, New York City. The cast-iron “nexus” for postmodern dance, commonly referred to as “the dance building,” had what the former Brown company dancer Elizabeth Garren describes as a “communal atmosphere.” Purchased and renovated by the Fluxus founder George Maciunas “with dancers in mind,” 541 was wider than the majority of the standard buildings in the neighborhood, and more important, it contained no interior pillars, making it an ideal choreographic work space.
By Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor reviews Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2015), written and directed by James Crump.
