Interviews

  • Cosey Fanni Tutti

    October 17, 2017 • Cosey Fanni Tutti talks about the origins of Throbbing Gristle

    In 1976, British performance artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti (Christine Newby) cofounded Throbbing Gristle from the art collective COUM Transmissions along with Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. As she details in her autobiography Art Sex Music (Faber & Faber, 2017), their debut gig occurred, rather appropriately, on the opening night of COUM Transmissions’ “Prostitution” show at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. On the occasions of the fortieth-anniversary reissue of Throbbing Gristle’s album The Second Annual Report (Mute, 2017) and the COUM

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  • Cauleen Smith

    October 10, 2017 • Cauleen Smith discusses her collaborative work at Gallery TPW in Toronto

    The artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, who recently relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles, rarely tethers her work to bare reality. Her latest film, Triangle Trade, 2017—made in collaboration with Canadian artists Jérôme Havre and Camille Turner—renders three new, fantastical realms, inhabited only by the puppet likenesses of the work’s three creators. Triangle Trade is on view at Gallery TPW in Toronto until November 11, 2017.

    TWO YEARS AGO, I visited Toronto to do a site visit at Gallery TPW, where I had been slated to have a solo exhibition. I wanted to make a film in the city for that show,

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  • Barbara Hammer

    October 03, 2017 • Barbara Hammer talks about her retrospective, films, and legacy

    Barbara Hammer, a beloved icon of lesbian and experimental filmmaking, has a very full season ahead of her: the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York is hosting “Evidentiary Bodies,” a retrospective spanning fifty years and featuring her never-before-seen artworks, which opens October 7, 2017 and runs until January 28, 2018; the New York Film Festival is screening five of Hammer’s 16-mm works, made between 1975 and 1989, on October 9, 2017; the gallery Company in New York is presenting an exhibition of her work, “Truant: Photographs, 1970–1979” from October 22, 2017 to November

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  • Julia Weist and Nestor Siré

    September 26, 2017 • Julia Weist and Nestor Siré discuss their project on El Paquete Semanal

    Julia Weist is a New York–based artist and 2016–17 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellow. For her fellowship exhibition, on view at the museum through February 18, 2018, Weist traveled to Cuba and collaborated with Cuban artist Nestor Siré on a project exploring El Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package), a hard drive loaded with a mix of media, including films, TV shows, games, and software. For most Cubans, the internet is only accessible via Wi-Fi hot spots, and content is censored by the government. The Paquete, circulated and sold extralegally each week, serves as a replacement for in-home

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  • Tabboo!

    September 21, 2017 • Tabboo!, aka Stephen Tashjian, talks about his life and art

    Painter, theatrical designer, and drag artist Tabboo!, also known as Stephen Tashjian, was an essential figure in New York’s early downtown art and club scene. “World of Tabboo! Early & Recent Work” will feature a new batch of his paintings in addition to a suite of pieces he made when he first moved to New York and was living with his friend and collaborator Pat Hearn (who went on to open her own eponymous gallery in 1983). The show is on view at Gordon Robichaux in New York from September 24 to November 19, 2017. Additionally, a selection of Tabboo!’s works will be featured in “Club 57: Film,

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  • Tiona Nekkia McClodden

    September 19, 2017 • Tiona Nekkia McClodden on her work in “Speech/Acts”

    Based in Philadelphia, the artist and filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden often formulates her work in response to lesser-known creative predecessors, pulling up the deeper roots of black American art, literature, and identity. The ten-part VHS video The Brad Johnson Tape, 2017, is her latest project and pays homage to the poems, essays, and correspondence of the late writer, who died of AIDS-related complications in 2011. One segment of the work, On Subjugation, and another recent video, Essex + Audre, 2015, are on view in the group exhibition “Speech/Acts” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in

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  • Harry Gamboa Jr.

    September 12, 2017 • Harry Gamboa Jr. speaks about his recent work and the early days of Asco

    A native of Los Angeles, Harry Gamboa Jr. is a photographer, performance artist, writer, educator, and founding member of the Chicano collective Asco. He will be the subject of several shows this fall, including a comprehensive exhibition of his ongoing “Chicano Male Unbonded” series of portraits, opening at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles on September 16, 2017, and a retrospective of his Asco photographs, which is on view at Marlborough Contemporary in New York through October 7, 2017. Here, Gamboa discusses his recent projects and the evolving context of his practice.

    I

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  • Bosco Sodi

    September 05, 2017 • Bosco Sodi talks about Muro in New York

    On September 7, 2017, the Brooklyn-based Mexican artist Bosco Sodi will deliver on one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises: he will build a wall that was paid for by Mexicans. Beginning at 7 AM, Sodi and his crew will erect Muro, 2017, in Washington Square Park, with 1,600 clay bricks that were fired by hand at the artist’s studio in Mexico. Once his first New York public art installation is finished, Sodi will step back around 3 PM and watch as the community takes it apart.

    I DON’T MAKE POLITICAL ART. In the past, various artist friends and associations have invited me to work on political

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  • Alexandra Schwartz

    August 29, 2017 • Alexandra Schwartz discusses “As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings”

    Alexandra Schwartz is a New York–based independent curator and the author of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010). Her latest exhibition, “As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings,” is on view at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, through October 9, 2017. A related exhibition, “No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts,” curated by Jay A. Clark, is also on view at the institution through September 24, 2017.

    SINCE I STARTED WORKING on this exhibition, almost every time I mention it to a female painter, she responds with delight. Speaking enthusiastically about her admiration

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  • Suzanne McClelland

    August 24, 2017 • Suzanne McClelland on her exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

    Suzanne McClelland’s exhibition “Just Left Feel Right” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is a survey that includes some of the artist’s recent forays into unfamiliar territory. Here, she discusses her glass piece Runners Up, 2014–16, in the context of her twenty-five years of painting. The show is on view through September 4, 2017.

    EVERY TIME I plan a piece and, again, when I finish a piece I wonder if it needs to be in the world, and what might come after it, if anything. Does it need to take up space and time? I feel that the time that goes into something matters

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  • Tyree Guyton

    August 22, 2017 • Tyree Guyton discusses his monument The Times in Philadelphia

    What is a monument? The Detroit-based artist Tyree Guyton has long asked this question, beginning with his ongoing site-specific installation The Heidelberg Project, 1986–, which has entailed transforming his childhood neighborhood into a living museum. Now, for Philadelphia’s citywide public art and history project Monument Lab, Guyton is creating The Times, 2017, a massive mural of caricature-styled timepieces on a former factory in the city’s Kensington neighborhood. The work will be on view at the Impact Services building on A Street and East Indiana Avenue from September 16 through November

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  • Brendan Fernandes

    August 15, 2017 • Brendan Fernandes talks about his performances at Recess in New York

    Brendan Fernandes’s practice straddles the intersection of art and dance, addressing questions of labor, queerness, colonialism, and the formation of identity. For the New York nonprofit Recess, Fernandes has produced Steady Pulse, a project which comprises Minimalist-inspired sculptural elements and a series of events that call to mind the Pulse massacre in Orlando and the vitality of the body in times of political precarity. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 3 to 6 PM, through August 26, 2017, dancers will hold open rehearsals of the collaborative dance piece Hit Back. On August 19, 2017, from

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