Alex Fialho

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  interviews June 22, 2018

  Viva Ruiz

  Artist and activist Viva Ruiz’s ongoing project  Thank God For Abortion, 2015–, celebrates agency in the pro-choice movement. Ruiz’s provocative exclamation “Thank God for abortion,” which is paired with a peaceful dove design, provides a message of joy and gratitude about the spiritual connection of choice to charged conversations around abortion rights. Here, Ruiz parses the relationship between abortion access and queer rights, highlighting the project’s latest and largest sculptural and performative iteration: A Thank God For Abortion parade float that will be featured in the New York City

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  interviews March 20, 2018

  Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel

  Tourmaline and Sasha Wortzel’s short film Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2018) is a moving celebration and evocation of trans activist and artist Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, set on the eve of the Stonewall riots in 1969. Tourmaline and Wortzel bring archival intimacies and a deep sense of care to the project of representing Johnson’s life and legacy, resulting in a remarkable fifteen-minute film that ranges in feeling from soaring uplift to deep loss. Created through extensive community collaboration, the film features lush cinematography by Arthur Jafa, an expressive score by Geo Wyeth, and star

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  interviews February 19, 2018

  Jayne County

  Considered the first openly transgender rock performer, Jayne County is revered for the in-your-face punk acts she performed at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City in the 1970s and at SqueezeBox! in the ’90s. Archival photographs from her historic five-decade-long career are being displayed at Participant Inc. in New York as part of “Paranoia Paradise,” the first retrospective of her visual art. This revelatory display of over seventy of County’s ravishing paintings from the ’80s to the present expands her artistry well beyond the performance histories for which she is widely known as a living legend.

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  interviews June 23, 2017

  FISCHERSPOONER

  FISCHERSPOONER is the dynamic duo Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner, who have been joined by many collaborators during their nearly two decades of creativity. Their latest output includes an upcoming album from Ultra Records, cowritten and coproduced by Michael Stipe with additional production by BOOTS on the lead single “Have Fun Tonight,” and released in time for New York City Pride; an exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna, on view from June 30 through October 29, 2017; and an artist’s book designed by Nicolas Santos—all titled SIR. Here, they discuss

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  diary June 15, 2017

  Five and Dime

  THE ART WORLD IS A TRIP. With the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Athens and Kassel, and Skulptur Projekte Münster all coinciding in one “süperkunstyear,” it’s hard for even the most veteran art traveler to keep up.

  Over the weekend, the venerable Skulptur Projekte Münster began to draw crowds from Documenta or those en route to Zurich and Basel for its fifth edition since its inception in 1977. Skulptur Projekte’s unique model—new sculptural commissions installed mostly in public spaces every ten years—makes for a provocative scavenger hunt of public art. The show is deeply

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  interviews May 22, 2017

  Martine Syms

  Martine Syms is a self-described “conceptual entrepreneur” based in Los Angeles. Her artistic practice spans publishing, performance, sculpture, photography, film, and more. Here Syms discusses the politics of migration, surveillance, and presentation as they appear in “Projects 106: Martine Syms,” her first solo museum exhibition in the US, which is organized by Jocelyn Miller and on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from May 27 through July 16, 2017.

  THE CENTERPIECE OF THIS SHOW is my first feature-length film, Incense Sweaters & Ice. The title refers to goods that were originally

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  interviews May 09, 2017

  Juliana Huxtable

  New York–based artist, writer, and performer Juliana Huxtable brings her trenchant voice and #shockvalue flair to two new publications out this year: Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a book of her musings copublished by Wonder and Capricious, and Life, an apocalyptic sci-fi narrative cowritten with Hannah Black and published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. Here, Huxtable discusses her writing style as well as her debut solo exhibition, “A Split During Laughter at the Rally,” which is on view at Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York through June 4, 2017.

  I AM FASCINATED with Emory Douglas, who

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  diary April 28, 2017

  Practice Makes Perfect

  WHAT IS YOUR REVOLUTION? The icebreaker question, raised by Field Foundation president Angelique Power during last week’s Practicing Utopia over Breakfast program, gets at the aim of this year’s art and social practice Open Engagement conference: critically examining and supporting social-justice-oriented artmaking and administration. The forward-thinking morning event took place at Tricia Van Eck’s 6018North, a dilapidated mansion brimming with art installations in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, just one of the more than twenty locations throughout Chicago—“our beautiful, scarred, complicated

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  diary March 01, 2017

  Resistance Is Fertile

  “I’VE READ MORE BOOKS THAN TRUMP,” claimed a silk screen at Karl LaRocca’s Kayrock Screenprinting booth at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair this weekend. “Not hard!” asserted an Angelino in a crop top amid the bustling throngs of bibliophiles. Tallies, texts, and the possibilities and pitfalls of democracy were clearly legible throughout the fifth annual LA iteration of Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair, exemplified by Mike Mills and Experimental Jetset’s mural-size poster towering over the crowd, reading “2,864,974”: an amplification of the margin of Hillary’s popular vote lead as of January 2017.

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  interviews February 07, 2017

  Raúl de Nieves and Colin Self

  Scored for a chorus and string ensemble, Raúl de Nieves and Colin Self’s chamber opera The Fool rises up with an ethos that feels equally majestic and DIY. After a 2014 premiere at ISSUE Project Room, The Fool returns with an elevated production at the Kitchen from February 9 through 11, 2017. Here, de Nieves and Self discuss the piece’s catharsis and community.

  IN EARLY IMAGININGS FOR THE FOOL, we both started identifying with the trickster archetype, a cultural figure that often uses magic or some kind of transformation to reveal or teach something. The trickster or jester is a character that

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  interviews December 27, 2016

  Nick Mauss

  Nick Mauss frequently stages and animates historical material in his works, which revel in unexpected juxtapositions and recontextualizations. It is fitting that he has envisioned the exhibition layout for “Design Dreams, A Celebration of Léon Bakst” at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco—one of several shows worldwide this year celebrating the 150th birthday of Bakst, the consummate set and costume designer of the Ballets Russes, among other creative roles. Here, Mauss describes the itinerary through the exhibition as well as Baskt’s enduring impact. The show is on view through January 15,

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  diary November 01, 2016

  Yet Again

  UNCERTAINTY IS IN THE AIR IN COLOMBIA. In early October, the Colombian people voted in a nationwide poll against a referendum that would have ended the country’s fifty-two-year civil war. Given this context, two of the leading events in the Colombian cultural calendar, ArtBO in Bogotá and the traveling triennial Salón Nacional de Artistas, this year located in Pereira, could have felt out of touch. What place do art-fair booths and free champagne have at such a crucial crossroads in a nation’s path toward peace? For the most part, ArtBO did feel like business as usual, with standard mantelpiece