Painter, author and critic Mira Schor’s current show at Marvelli Gallery delves into the world of language. The show is titled Voice and Speech, but there’s an erie silence to these works.
Interviews
Neal Medlyn has been channeling pop stars in New York galleries and theaters since the early aughts, and has built a repertoire of performances that run heavy on exhibitionism and intellectualism. His most recent show, Wicked Clown Love, which premiered at The Kitchen in February, is based on a trip to the Gathering of the Juggalos, the annual hardcore rap festival organized by the group Insane Clown Posse. Medlyn and I met at a bar in Chelsea, where he told me about how he made Kanye West cry, among other juicy tales.
On a chilly march morning I took to the streets of Bedford in an attempt to get a sense of what people thought about Contemporary Art. Randomly I asked those walking up and down Bedford what they thought about the current state of contemporary art, who their favorite artists were and then took their picture.
We’ve all heard the complaints about income inequality. And although how to actually solve the economic crisis is up for debate, we all agree that it’s a hard time to make a living. This is true for everyone, not just artists, but perhaps artists can lead the way in offering real alternatives to our flawed economic system. Artists, as creative people already faced with an extremely competitive market where success is hard won, are in a unique position to confront the issues of income distribution.
Over the course of her 35-year career, Altoon Sultan has gone completely end-to-end across the landscape-abstraction continuum.
Artist Jesus Benavente has launched “Oh Hey. Whats Going On?” (2012) as an online ad, which is “about wanting to be something greater, but the realities of life preventing it from happening.”
CHICAGO — Wyl Villacres is a writer and book artist who, in 2011, took a class that I taught at Columbia College Chicago. At the end of last year, Wyl became involved with Occupy Chicago, an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York City in the fall of last year.
A week ago, on the night of Friday, February 17th, two incongruently mirrored exhibitions opened on either side of the East River: Charles Atlas’ The Illusion of Democracy at Luhring Augustine’s new Bushwick outpost; and What I Know, a large group show of Bushwick artists, curated by Jason Andrew, at the New York Center for Art & Media Studies (NYCAMS) in Chelsea.
Some time early last week, I began to notice the “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” graphics on my Facebook news feed. The first time I clicked on one, I had a quick laugh — I thought it was witty. A few days later it seemed like my news feed had been converted into a focused, peer-curated online gallery devoted to the latest, most clever “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” graphics.
Then my Mom started posting them too. The speed at which this new internet sensation spread grabbed my attention. A quick Google search led me to www.knowyourmeme.com. The website credited artist Garnet Hertz with starting the meme, so I emailed Hertz to see if I could get the scoop on his original graphic. Hertz was kind enough to give an interview about the history of the graphic he first posted on February 9th and the subsequent birth of a meme.
Walking through galleries filled with reproductions of posters, flyers, takeaways and other ephemera rather than torn and yellowed scraps of archival materials, I spoke with Gran Fury member and artist Marlene McCarty and 80 Washington Square East Gallery assistant director and curator Michael Cohen, who gave me an illuminating walk-through of the exhibition and answered my questions from the history of Gran Fury to its connection with subsequent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street to the importance of archiving the history of AIDS activism and AIDS losses.
