Solitary/Solidary: Mario Merz’s Autonomous Artist

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.

Art-Science: An Annotated Bibliography

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.”

no water, Athens, Greece, 2015: Twenty-four hours with nothing to eat or drink, only smelling the jasmine

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.

Happyville in the Rearview: A Conversation between Joel Tauber and Pedro de Llano

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.

A New Configuration: Marco Breuer in Conversation with Vanessa Kauffman

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.

Humans Have Been Human for So Long: Shana Lutker and Mika Yoshitake in Conversation

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.

Space Travel: Trisha Brown’s Locus

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.