Kerry Doran

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  print September 2020

  “Hard Opening: Vigil for Black Death”

  HOUSING opened the doors to its new Lower East Side location as a sanctuary for protestors before its inaugural exhibition. Founder KJ Freeman secured the keys for the space in May 2020, in the midst of demonstrations against the senseless and ceaseless killing of Black people by the police. During all this, the gallery announced a vigil for “Black Death”—the preventable, premature loss of life caused by systemic racism. Mourners brought flowers and candles, which were placed by portraits of those who died at the hands of law enforcement, such as Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and

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  print March 2020

  Ad Minoliti

  Peluche is one of those Spanish words that can’t quite be translated. It holds many meanings: stuffed animal, cuddly toy, teddy bear; plushy, plush, or soft. The title of Ad Minoliti’s first major exhibition, “Museo peluche,” refers to all of these simultaneously. Its official translation, “Soft Museum,” would best convey the Argentinean artist’s intention if soft were made active, in the sense of softening the museum. Minoliti envisioned the hermetic and didactic white cube as a sala de juegos, or game room: They painted the walls and geometric shapes on them violet, green, orange, and brown

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  print February 2020

  Yeguas del Apocalipsis

  As night fell in the courtyard garden behind Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires last October, Francisco Casas Silva and Julio Urbina Rey dug a shallow hole in a small section of the lawn. Standing inside its cavity, they tenderly kissed and caressed. Silva disrobed, lowering to his knees. He sucked Urbina’s cock. Then he got down on all fours, positioning himself to receive anal sex. Someone turned off the lights in protest. But Silva, as if anticipating this reaction, turned on a flashlight, focusing illumination on their bodies. Queer intimacy had to be witnessed.

  This performance inaugurated the

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  slant December 30, 2019

  Feliz Año

  2019 ARRIVED LIKE A NEW YEAR. In the final days of 2018, Santiago Villanueva, an artist and art historian from Azul, Argentina, announced on his Instagram that he would open an exhibition space with fellow artists Rosario Zorraquín and Fernanda Laguna in Buenos Aires’s Villa Crespo neighborhood. The post looked like an informal invitation to a New Year’s Eve party: “Ya viene 2019 Spacio de Arte” (2019 Spacio de Arte is coming) outlined in bubble letters over an airbrushed blue and violet orb of lo-res glitter.

  For 2019, the three artists (who are also curators, writers, poets, and organizers)

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  print October 2019

  Marta Minujín

  After three years of working in Paris, the Argentinean artist Marta Minujín organized an exhibition of her sculptures, made with pillows and discarded mattresses on wooden structures, and invited other artists to “destroy” them by adding materials evocative of their own practices. She then burned everything. Her first “happening,” called La destrucción (The Destruction), 1963, stemmed from her belief that “art was a way of intensifying life, of having an impact on the viewer by shaking him up. . . . Why, then, was I going to keep my work? . . . So that it could die in cultural cemeteries, the

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  print September 2019

  “Tácticas luminosas”

  Pink is “the faggot color par excellence.” So Jorge Gumier Maier declared in the catalogue text for the 1997 group exhibition “El tao del arte” (The Tao of Art) at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires. It was the last one he curated while serving as the director of the Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where, less than a decade earlier, he had founded the dimly lit, hallway-like space as a gallery; the small yet transformative gesture would effect radical change in Argentinean art. Whereas previous art-historical shifts had been tied to explicit

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  diary April 25, 2019

  Mad Scramble

  CULTIVAR EL SUELO ES SERVIR A LA PATRIA. This phrase, meaning “to cultivate the soil is to serve the homeland,” is bannered between the stands of the belle epoque stadium of La Rural, built in the late nineteenth century for La Sociedad Rural Argentina’s annual trade shows, when livestock was one of the country’s most lucrative exports. For twenty years, La Rural has been the site of arteBA, Argentina’s largest art fair, which this year coincided with the first Semana del Arte, organized by the Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, and Art Basel’s third “activation” of its “Cities”

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  print April 2019

  Pablo Suárez

  In 1968, Pablo Suárez (1937–2006) wrote a letter to Jorge Romero Brest, director of the famed Visual Art Center at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, renouncing his association with the institute by refusing to participate in its imminent “Experiencias 68”––the same exhibition that was subsequently repudiated by many participating artists after the police censored an installation by Roberto Plate. Explicating his disillusionment with the institutionalization of avant-garde practices, which Di Tella symbolized, Suárez took to the streets, delivering multiple copies of his missive