Andrianna Campbell

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  interviews February 2018

  1000 WORDS: HOWARDENA PINDELL

  DOTS, DOTS, and more dots: Punched-out paper circles accumulate in dense, nearly geologic thickets, or scatter into coruscating, anti-optical arrays on the surfaces of Howardena Pindell’s paintings. With these signature dots, the New York–based artist flouts the stringent orthodoxies of vanguard painting that dominated art schools when she was a student at Yale University in the late 1960s, opting instead for an unapologetically unconventional mode that also includes glam sprays of glitter, exuberant color, and labyrinthine passages of stitching. Abstraction, for Pindell, is a mode of contemplation,

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  picks January 25, 2018

  Andy Robert

  Andy Robert’s Smoking Gun (all works 2017) is a mass of speckled paint. The broken brushstrokes on the substrate dissolve and then corrugate in the manner of late Impressionism, Arte Povera, or even tachism. At times, pure, nonlocalized color abuts less welcoming mixtures that approach the hues of mud. From a distance, silvery tones, deeper beiges, and warm ivories read as only slight deviations from the canvas. Up close, at center, a body emerges, a black body. One wearing cutoff blue jeans, a hat, and carrying a firearm slung over one shoulder. The figure is based on a mass-produced image of

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  interviews July 20, 2017

  Trevor Paglen

  Trevor Paglen is the first artist-in-residence at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. The exhibition “The Eye and the Sky: Trevor Paglen in the Cantor Collection” places his photographic series of predator drones, “Time Study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV),” 2010, alongside photographs by artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Steichen, and Eve Sonneman from the Cantor’s permanent collection. Earlier this year, the Cantor also commissioned Paglen’s multimedia performance Sight Machine. Below, he discusses issues of surveillance in the show, which is on view through July 31, 2017,

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  interviews July 11, 2017

  Sam Gilliam

  Sam Gilliam is a Washington, DC–based artist whose vibrantly hued unstretched canvas Yves Klein Blue, 2017, will be draped across the entrance to the Giardini’s central pavilion at the Fifty-Seventh Venice Biennale until the show closes on November 26, 2017. Here, Gilliam speaks of his earlier participation in the Biennale, forty-five years ago, and his continued investigation into the expanded field of painting. His work is also featured in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which will be on view at Tate Modern from July 12 to October 22, 2017.

  IN VENICE, I’m showing Yves Klein

• previews January 2017

  “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85”

  The title “We Wanted a Revolution” might seem to imply a wistful retrospection on the two decades that witnessed the rise of second-wave feminism and the Black Power movement in the US. Yet the 130-some puissant artworks gathered for this show promise an incisive exploration of black female radicality in variegated forms—whether the mixed-media assemblages of Betye Saar or Faith Ringgold’s silk screens of the people’s flag or a costume from Lorraine O’Grady’s 1980 performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. The exhibition will offer a rare opportunity

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  interviews December 01, 2016

  Luchita Hurtado

  Luchita Hurtado has been making art for decades, though, despite her close friendship with many famous artists, she was reluctant to show her work until the 1970s, when the women’s liberation movement provided encouragement. A small survey show in Los Angeles gives insight into the wildly fluid forms and experimental techniques in her paintings and works on paper. “Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942–1952” is on view at the Park View Gallery through January 7, 2017.

  “PAINTING IS SUCH AN ESCAPING THING…almost like two lives coming together.” I found that line in one of my letters to my second

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  interviews November 26, 2016

  Lorna Simpson

  Lorna Simpson, best-known for her body of conceptual photography, has recently been exploring painting. On the occasion of her solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which runs through January 15, 2017, she reflects here on her experience of this medium, and how it relates to her practice of imagemaking in general.

  I APPROACHED PAINTING initially from a place of intimidation. I started my undergraduate studies as a painter, as perhaps all foundation studio students do, and yet when I proposed a series of paintings for the first time, for the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale in 2015,

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  interviews May 05, 2016

  teamLab

  On December 15, 2015, the Tokyo-based artist Takashi Kudo came to Silicon Valley to begin preparations for an installation at Pace Art + Technology, Pace Gallery’s new project space in Menlo Park. Kudo is one of three spokespeople representing the over four hundred collaborators in teamLab, an art collective that rethinks the idea of the art installation by allowing it to take numerous forms as evanescent, immersive digital environments, such as gardens, towns, aquariums, or even fields of fire. Here, Kudo discusses the collective’s new artwork/exhibition, “Living Digital Space and Future Parks,”

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  print April 2016

  Jonathan Lasker

  When visual invention becomes an afterthought in favor of ever-more-prolix theoretical justifications, even the most lauded examples of conceptual painting can eventually outlive their novelty, becoming at best inflexible demonstrations of a theme or motif. Not so for Jonathan Lasker’s work, which is always evolving. Indeed, in the past few years, he has introduced a new element to his work: the grid. This structure is the lodestar of the avant-garde and alternately its bête noire—Rosalind Krauss accused it of ghettoizing modern painting. In several paintings on view in this show, a

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  picks January 25, 2016

  “Of Echo Systems”

  An obstacle course provided by three floor-based works by K. r. m. Mooney makes traversing this show a tense endeavor. The delicacy and metallic hues of these mixed-media pieces—which often feature steel cables, wires, trays, and bars—ensure difficulty in trying to distinguish them from the concrete floor. This anxiety sets the tone for the austere exhibition “Of Echo Systems,” which augments a concern for viewing predicated on a heightened sensitivity of one’s bodily parameters. For instance, Will Rogan’s Adam 2, 2016, is a mahogany clock with a playful anthropomorphic, smiling face. It clearly

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  interviews November 30, 2015

  Nari Ward

  Nari Ward is a Jamaican-born artist who lives and works in New York City. Here he discusses the extensive survey of twenty years of his practice, “Sun Splashed,” which opened this month at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and is on view through February 21, 2016.

  SOUND IS LIKE A SPIRIT. It is in everything. When you write a rhythm you are acknowledging the sound that is already here and simply amplifying it. My work is visual; however, I also make sonic space, and even when there is no sound component the surrounding air has an aural quality. Happy Smilers, 1996, was an early artwork that that was

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  picks November 27, 2015

  Frank Stella

  In the late 1970s, Frank Stella’s foray into spectacular wall-mounted painted reliefs left many admirers at a loss. Thinking of his work from this period in what Robert Slifkin has termed a theory of “badness” in 1970s music and art is fruitful. There is a tackiness that is integral to the work, not merely as a rejection of aesthetic notions of composition but also as a renunciation of ties to minimal nuance. Yet, today, his tackiness also seems to predate the Photoshop aesthetic that is regaled in work by artists such as Trudy Benson and Keltie Ferris. We assume digital mediation to be