Interviews

  • Harmony Hammond

    April 17, 2018 • Harmony Hammond talks about her show at Alexander Gray Associates in New York

    As a cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery in New York and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in the 1970s, Harmony Hammond was at the forefront of a feminist revolution in contemporary art. From her early sculptures that incorporate gendered notions of craft, such as her series of “Floorpieces” and hanging textile sculptures, to her book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000), to her more recent, almost monochromatic paintings, Hammond has expanded the possibilities of what might be considered queer art, often championing the idea that abstraction has the power to signify

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  • Elaine Reichek

    April 10, 2018 • Elaine Reichek talks about her show at the Secession in Vienna

    Everything old is new again, and vice versa. Elaine Reichek is a New York–born and –bred artist who has long engaged with some of the women of ancient Greek myths in her works, often via hand embroidery and digital sewing. Her latest exhibition, “Now If I Had Been Writing This Story,” which takes its title from a poem by Stevie Smith, features ten works from the past eleven years and is on view at the Secession in Vienna from April 13 to June 3, 2018.

    FOR THIS SHOW, I wanted to spotlight part of a long ongoing body of work. It consists of two series: “Ariadne’s Thread” and “Minoan Girls.” They’re

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  • Alice Maher

    April 03, 2018 • Alice Maher on her work and the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment

    The Irish artist Alice Maher’s work is, by turns, a powerful call to action and a persuasive invitation for reflection. Her solo exhibition “Vox Materia” at Source Arts Centre in Tipperary, Ireland, which she discusses below, is on view through May 5, 2018. Here, she also talks about her work in the next EVA International, which will run from April 14 through July 8, 2018. Additionally, Maher’s new film, The Sixth Skin (2018), made in collaboration with artist Aideen Barry, will premiere at the Cork Film Festival this fall.

    YOU MIGHT THINK WOMEN come out pretty negatively in myths and history,

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  • Wang Yin

    March 27, 2018 • Wang Yin talks about his show at Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens

    Wang Yin is a Beijing-based artist whose works carefully trace the aesthetic experience that informed the modernization of painting in China. Here, he discusses his latest exhibition, “Friendship,” at Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou, China, which features fourteen new works illuminated only by natural light. The show is on view until April 15, 2018.

    I DECIDED TO TITLE THIS SHOW “FRIENDSHIP” because I think we need to establish a more friendly relationship with the past and with the Other. Oil painting has always been an incomplete issue in East Asia. And I am willing to

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  • Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel

    March 20, 2018 • Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel talk about their film Happy Birthday, Marsha!

    Reina Gossett 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. Gossett 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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  • Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong

    March 16, 2018 • Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong on their work in “Being: New Photography 2018”

    Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương’s work The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility. The Opposite of Yellow is Not Gold, 2016, pairs vernacular photographs of the artists’ mothers with texts from 1970s-era US congressional hearings regarding Vietnamese refugees. It is featured in “Being: New Photography 2018,” which will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 18 to August 19, 2018. Here, the artists discuss the political and personal impetuses behind their approach and how race, gender, and labor are often made invisible in cultural narratives.

    VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY speaks to

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  • Catherine Christer Hennix

    March 14, 2018 • Catherine Christer Hennix discusses her retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum

    Polymath artist Catherine Christer Hennix is known for her groundbreaking compositions, including The Electric Harpsichord, 1976, and Central Palace Music, 1976. A retrospective of Hennix’s visual work at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, curated by the museum’s curator Karen Archey and Blank Forms artistic director Lawrence Kumpf, is also currently on view through May 27, 2018. Here, Hennix discusses the exhibition and a recent performance (on February 16 and 17, 2018) that melded her mathematical interests with traditional practices of sustained pitches in just intonation.

    FOR THE PERFORMANCE of

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  • Carissa Rodriguez

    March 08, 2018 • Carissa Rodriguez discusses her show at SculptureCenter in New York

    Titled after a 1913 Robert Walser short story in which a caregiver looks for her lost charge, Carissa Rodriguez’s The Maid, 2018, is a lusciously produced video and forms the centerpiece of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in New York. The work follows six iterations of Sherrie Levine’s 1993–94 sculpture Newborn, as found in their current homes. Here, Rodriguez discusses making the piece, which is on view at SculptureCenter until April 2, 2018.

    OVER THE YEARS, I kept returning to Sherrie Levine’s Newborn works. They first appeared in an exhibition in 1993 at the Philadelphia Museum of

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  • YINKA SHONIBARE MBE

    PRINT March 2018 • Talks About Wind Sculpture (SG) I, His Forthcoming Project With The Public Art Fund in New York

    IN A 2005 INTERVIEW, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE reflected on the questions around the fluid nature of identity—racial, national, cultural—that dominate his practice. “What I do is create a kind of mongrel,” he said. “In reality most people’s cultures have evolved out of this mongrelization, but people don’t acknowledge that.” The word may initially seem an inapt one for Shonibare’s sumptuous, baroquely elegant sculptures, videos, and installations, but it does conjure the fraught conditions of postcolonial identity, increasingly defined by discourses of globalization,

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  • Oliver Laric

    February 26, 2018 • Oliver Laric talks about his show at Metro Pictures in New York

    Oliver Laric is an Austrian artist based in Berlin. Questioning notions of ownership and originality, he uses 3-D scanning technologies to make historical artworks and other objects available to be copied on his website, threedscans.com. Laric’s own ghostly versions of classical and neoclassical statues were exhibited most recently at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin. From March 3 to April 14, 2018, he will show new works in the exhibition “Year of the Dog” at Metro Pictures in New York.

    I AM INTERESTED in moving towards uncertainty. My work offers attempts to reinscribe or open up the material

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  • Jayne County

    February 19, 2018 • Jayne County talks about her retrospective at Participant Inc. in New York

    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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  • Rita McBride

    February 13, 2018 • Rita McBride discusses her installation at Dia: Chelsea

    Since the 1980s, Rita McBride has examined the ramifications of modernism’s legacy for society, in everything from urban planning to the aesthetics of space. Her present project at Dia:Chelsea in New York, Particulates, 2017, involves a science fiction–inflected use of lasers to explore questions as wide-ranging as the proliferation of security barriers and the nuances of bodily experience in contemporary times. The installation is on view until June 2, 2018.

    I STARTED EXPLORING THE IDEAS in the installation at Dia:Chelsea while participating in the Liverpool Biennial in the summer of 2016.

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