Andrianna Campbell

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  picks November 13, 2015

  Ralph Lemon

  In Ralph Lemon’s performance How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, 2010, he whispered, “love without rage is powerless.” In the more current work Scaffold Room, 2014-2015, love and rage are interrogated via readings, sculptures, and a lecture/performance/musical. Through the performances—which ended as of November 10—we experience the fullness of Lemon’s vision, a place where a vast catalogue of legibly dramatized gestures interact with unintelligible and visceral sounds, found film, and an assortment of ostensibly uncalculated movements.

  For the exhibition period, Lemon

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  interviews November 12, 2015

  Andrea Geyer

  In 2012, the Museum of Modern Art invited New York–based artist Andrea Geyer to perform an Artist Research Residency in the museum’s archives. The residency was supported by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation. Two pieces from the resulting body of works are currently on view at the museum: The video Insistence, 2013, which is on view through November 15, 2015, and the mural Revolt, They Said, 2012–, which runs through November 29, 2015.

  A CURIOUS BLIND SPOT exists in MoMA’s archives when it comes to women and modernism. I was intrigued

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  picks November 08, 2015

  “Kill All Zombies”

  This playfully titled exhibition, “Kill All Zombies,” purports to take aim at the made-for-market abstract works that have recently infested the art world. The photographs in the show, for instance, could be discussed in terms of a new materiality; however, all three photographers depart from the sterile coolness of formal interrogations of medium to the weird and even biographical: In John Houck’s Decorated Shed, 2015, cheery yellow rubber duckies function metonymically for his youthful ambitions to be an architect, while referencing Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s demarcation between

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  interviews October 20, 2015

  Jack Whitten

  Jack Whitten is a painter who lives and works in New York. Here, he reflects on how he developed as an artist, his cross-generational exchanges, and three paintings from very different moments in his life, all on the occasion of his retrospective “Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting,” which was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and is currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis until January 24, 2016.

  SUN RA WAS RIGHT ON THE MONEY; humans came here from outer space as minerals and chemicals. During

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  interviews August 11, 2015

  Elaine Lustig Cohen

  Elaine Lustig Cohen is an artist, graphic designer, and AIGA medalist known for her spectacular book covers, exhibition catalogues, and collaborations with architects such as Philip Johnson and Richard Meier. Here, she talks about the intersection between design and architecture in her paintings on the occasion of a show of her early work that is on view at Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, through September 28, 2015.

  MY ABSTRACTION NEVER CAME FROM NARRATIVE; it came from architecture. Even though I had many friends who were writers, I was never particularly drawn to narrative.

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  interviews July 29, 2015

  Nick Cave

  Nick Cave’s solo exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum, “Here Hear,” highlights the range of his multidisciplinary practice, from his iconic Soundsuits to newer sculpture, and also marks the artist’s return to a city that fostered his early practice. Organized in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Detroit School of Arts, and other community-engaged programs at the Ruth Ellis Center and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, the exhibition is on view through October 11, 2015.

  DETROIT GAVE ME THE SOUL. It was a critical part of my education. When I was a graduate student

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  interviews July 14, 2015

  Stanley Whitney

  The New York–based artist Stanley Whitney’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, “Dance the Orange,” at the Studio Museum in Harlem will feature recent work made between 2008 and 2015. Here, he unpacks the formal and structural ramifications of the colors in his paintings. The show opens July 16 and will run through October 25, 2015.

  I ALWAYS HAD THE COLOR. I don’t know where it came from. My influences are many, from Titian to Edvard Munch to textiles, and the color comes from all kinds of places. Sometimes I go for a walk and I am looking for a yellow but I can’t find it in the world so

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  picks July 10, 2015

  Ruth Root

  Ruth Root’s Untitled, 2014–15, is a slightly larger-than-life, irregularly shaped canvas, which at seven feet high both relates to and dwarfs the average viewer. Big Top–like striped diagonals at the base and then flotsam and jetsam patternmaking at the top define its shape, which is primarily a parallelogram intersecting a rectangle. Suspended by grommets, the painting reveals sections of the gallery wall particularly when small textile rectangles nestle into a larger identical section of fabric. Never quite aligning, the collage of shapes affirms an intrinsic disjointed structure. Defying the

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  picks July 03, 2015

  “All Watched Over”

  Titled after Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” this exhibition draws on cybernetics in order to explore both utopic and dystopic systemic themes in art. Most acute, Brenna Murphy’s labyrinthine digital renderings of light and space seem to crystallize Brautigan’s vision of a “cybernetic meadow,” where idle humans are nurtured and sheltered in a technocratic paradise. The halcyon days of computer-science technologies that Brautigan envisions are difficult to imagine. Moreover, familiarity with his satiric writing leads one to believe that the poem is

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  interviews June 05, 2015

  Glenn Ligon

  Glenn Ligon is a New York–based artist whose work is currently on view in the Venice Biennale. His curatorial project “Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions,” which he discusses below, features his work alongside that of forty-five more contemporary artists, and runs from April 15 through June 14, 2015, at Nottingham Contemporary, and at the Tate Liverpool from June 30 through October 18, 2015.

  THIS EXHIBITION IS as much for a public as it is for me. Often my work has been critically framed around issues of race and identity. There was some opportunity here to reposition my own work, to communicate

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  interviews May 11, 2015

  Shirin Neshat

  Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist based in New York. Her upcoming survey “Shirin Neshat: Facing History” takes a sweeping look at her output and will present her iconic black-and-white photographic portraits—which she discusses below—as well as her nonnarrative videos and her recent forays into cinema. Incorporating archival material to contextualize her practice, the show confronts Neshat’s decades-long exile from her homeland. It is on view at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden from May 18 to September 20, 2015.

  I HAVE BEEN UNFAITHFUL to any one medium, and my work has

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  interviews March 11, 2015

  Laurie Simmons

  Laurie Simmons is a New York–based artist. The photographs in her upcoming exhibition “Laurie Simmons: How We See” signal a shift in her work—each depicts a female figure with painted eyelids that emulate open eyes, and frames her within the banality of conventional portraiture. Accentuating the gap between the real and the presented self in the age of social media, these images will be on view at the Jewish Museum in New York from March 13 through August 9, 2015.

  I’VE BEEN TRYING TO REJECT the notion of nostalgia in my work for a long time, but I feel I may’ve only gotten there recently.